Multiracial Parents

Mixed Families, Generational Change, and the Future of Race

Miri Song

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781479825905
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479865420
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

The views and experiences of multiracial people as parents

The world's multiracial population is considered to be one of the fastest growing of all ethnic groups. In the United States alone, it is estimated that over 20% of the population will be considered "mixed race" by 2050. Public figures—such as former President Barack Obama and Hollywood actress Ruth Negga—further highlight the highly diverse backgrounds of those classified under the umbrella term of "multiracial."

Multiracial Parents considers how mixed-race parents identify with and draw from their cultural backgrounds in raising and socializing their children. Miri Song presents a groundbreaking examination of how the meanings and practices surrounding multiracial identification are passed down through the generations.

A revealing portrait of how multiracial identity is and is not transmitted to children, Multiracial Parents focuses on couples comprised of one White and one non-white minority, who were mostly "first generation mixed," situating her findings in a trans-Atlantic framework.

By drawing on detailed narratives about the parents' children and family lives, this book explores what it means to be multiracial, and whether multiracial identity and status will matter for multiracial people's children. Many couples suggested that their very existence (and their children's) is a step toward breaking down boundaries about the meaning of race and that the idea of a mixed-race population is increasingly becoming normalized, despite existing concerns about racism and racial bias within and beyond various communities.

A critical perspective on contemporary multiracial families, Multiracial Parents raises fundamental questions about the future significance of racial boundaries and identities.

1

Multiracial People as Parents

An Overview of Research on Multiracial People

In 2001, David Parker and I observed that “the topic of ‘mixed race’ can bring out the worst in people.”1 What we meant by this tart remark was that the topic tended to elicit polarized views, so that while some regarded mixed people and “mixing” as hugely problematic, others saw it as the answer to many of our social ills. The current growth in academic writings and forms of popular culture concerning multiracial people demonstrate that we have reached a key juncture in how scholars and the wider society think about and represent multiracial people and their families. In fact, as Jayne Ifekwunigwe observes, we have witnessed three different “ages” of multiracial thinking and discourse, starting with the “Age of Pathology,” then going on to the “Age of Celebration,” and now to the “Age of Critique,” in which much of the recent scholarship in the twenty-first century has adopted a more critical and skeptical stance toward multiracial status, identifications, and experiences. 2

Earlier scholarship about multiracial people tended to depict such individuals as leading a difficult in-between, “marginal man” existence, marked by emotional and psychological insecurity.3 Through much of the early to middle twentieth century, anxieties about racial mixing sat uneasily with proclamations about racial equality and justice in the civil rights movement. This is evident in many cultural representations (both in literary and cinematic forms) of the tragic mulatto, who was typically portrayed as someone who suffered bodily disharmony and psychological instability.4 High rates in the dissolution of interracial unions, as well as the disproportionate numbers of mixed Black/White children in foster care, also comprised key parts of the negative discourse surrounding “mixing” and mixed people.5

Countering the pathologizing discourses about mixing, and growing out of the multiracial movement spearheaded by groups on American college campuses, a new generation of scholars, many multiracial themselves, adopted a more celebratory stance toward their multiracial backgrounds, though much of this literature also highlighted the personal difficulties and experiences associated with being mixed.6 Emblematic of this kind of defiant and celebratory stance are the volumes edited by Maria Root.7 Along with her theorizing on multiracial identity development, the pioneering work of historian Paul Spickard has been important in shaping much of subsequent work.8 Rather than elaborating a staged model of identity development in multiracial individuals,9 Root proposes that multiracial people can adopt four modes of “border crossing,” which have been subsequently adapted by many scholars. They are “having both feet in both groups”; “the shifting of foreground and background as one crosses between and among social contexts defined by race and ethnicity”; “one decisively sits on the border”; and “one creates a home in one ‘camp’ for an extended period of time and makes forays into other camps from time to time.”10 Furthermore, she outlines a “bill of rights for racially mixed people,” in which mixed individuals are urged to assert any identification they wish, regardless of other people’s challenges to such claims.11 As in other British research on mixedness and mixing, this book takes neither a negative nor celebratory stance toward interracial unions and multiracial people.12 In fact, various scholars have argued that normative stances on mixing are misplaced, as well as being a dead-end in terms of advancing our understanding of this growing phenomenon.13

One immediate challenge in any study of multiracial people is the huge diversity contained within such a category, even when we limit our focus to one specific country. Furthermore, where do we situate multiracial people in racially stratified societies, which are usually understood to be comprised of monoracial groups? Are multiracial people in majority White countries more like White people or more like minority people in terms of their social experiences? Interestingly, a recent Pew survey of multiracial Americans found that those with Black ancestry tend to have a set of experiences and social interactions that “are much more closely aligned with the black community,” while those with Asian ancestry “feel more closely connected to whites than to Asians.”14 Given the numerous studies of multiracial people in the United States—a country with a very distinctive racial history—it is imperative that the status and experiences of multiracial people in other countries, such as Britain, be explored.

Interracial Couples and the Racial Identification of Multiracial Children

The contentious issue of how multiracial people are identified (vis-à-vis others in a racially stratified society), along with the social and political implications of such identifications, has constituted a key focus of research for many American scholars of interracial unions and multiracial people. A great deal of the US literature on multiracial people has looked at census data (or other large national surveys) and investigated how interracial couples—that is, those consisting of partners with different monoracial backgrounds—have racially identified their multiracial children.15 Generally speaking, these studies found that Black/White interracial couples in the United States were more likely to identify their children with their minority race (Black) than were Asian/White, Latino/White, and Native American/White couples, who racially classified their multiracial children in more varied ways.16

Now, however, some analysts in the United States have found that Black/White interracial couples are less constrained in classifying their multiracial children solely as “Black,” and conclude that there has been a gradual weakening of the “one drop rule” of hypodescent in the United States,17 though others report the continuing strength of the “one drop rule” for Black and part-Black people.18 In her study of intermarried Black and White couples and their racial identification of their children, Wendy Roth found that most of these couples rejected the “one drop rule,” and instead designated a multiracial category for their children.19 Roth argues that any divergence from the norm to classify multiracial Black/White children as Black is significant because of the historical strength of such a norm.20 Furthermore, Carolyn Liebler’s recent analysis of how the children of many types of interracial unions in the United States (between 1960 and 2010) are categorized points to the growing salience of both multiracial Asian and multiracial Black as categories that are used in mixed families and in the wider society.21

While they do not explicitly say so, many of these studies imply that there is likely to be a correspondence between how parents in interracial unions racially see their children (identification) with how these children will come to see themselves over time (identity). Parents are indisputably one of the most fundamental influences on how multiracial children will identify, racially and ethnically, but children’s sense of themselves cannot be automatically presumed or read off of how parents designate them on census or other large survey forms.22 As cogently articulated by Steven Holloway and his colleagues, “The racial claims of parents on behalf of their multiracial children . . . reflect, if only imperfectly, their understanding of who their children are racially, as well as who they may want their children to become racially.”23 The exploration of who multiracial people want their children to become is central to this book.

Many studies employing census data and other large data sets in the United States have also regarded the question of how parents identify their multiracial children as an important snapshot of the racial landscape and a revealing indicator of the continuing salience of racial boundaries and differential racial privileges. For instance, David Brunsma argues that there is emerging evidence of a “reverse hypodescent” process occurring in how multiracial children are being racially labelled—at least for some kinds of mixed households.24 Given the opportunity, some interracial couples engage in what Charles Gallagher has called “racial redistricting” in order both to distance their multiracial children from a stigmatized minority status and to reap the benefits of a closer proximity to Whiteness.25 Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Patricia Arend contend that the fact that some multiracial people in the United States are now identifying as White is evidence of “an expansion of the rules of whiteness that reduce the absolute need for ‘racial purity,’ and instead imply socioeconomic standards and cultural assimilation as the price of admission.”26 Furthermore, in a study linking changes in racial classification (by others) and racial identification with social stratification processes, Aliya Saperstein and Andrew Penner found that as individuals experienced forms of upward mobility, they were more likely to be “whitened” by others and to whiten their own identifications, and that as some experienced unemployment or were incarcerated, the opposite was true, and they were more likely to “darken” their identifications (or be seen as more Black by others).27

Despite the significant number of studies of how interracial couples racially identify their children, researchers have been able only to speculate about why parents identify their multiracial children in particular ways. As David Brunsma points out, “We need to know much more about what these identification processes mean for these parents of mixed-race children. It may be, as I suggest, that they are seeing the structure of resource distribution, the racialized and pigmentized racial hierarchy, and the link between the two, and beginning to distance their children from the bottom of that hierarchy.”28 While such motivations on the part of parents of multiracial children cannot be discounted, they may constitute only part of the explanation for how and why parents identify and socialize their children in particular ways. Some of these studies can adopt an overly narrow and instrumental understanding of how parents in interracial unions think about and weigh up choices about their children. A further difficulty with studies that focus on how parents racially identify their mixed children is that there is no information about who fills in the census forms or whether the racial designation of children is discussed or in any way negotiated among family members. Families that have members with attachments to multiple and different ethnic or racial groups may experience differences and even conflicts in relation to the identification and socialization of their children.29 While various US studies have documented the identification of multiracial children on official forms, we still know very little about how multiracial children are brought up in their families.

Raising Multiracial Children

While a number of studies of multiracial children have centered on parents’ ability to foster racial awareness, the vast majority of these studies have addressed the experiences of Black/White multiracial children.30 In Britain, a growing body of work has examined whether Whit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Mixed People and “Mixing” in Today’s Britain
• 1. Multiracial People as Parents
• 2. How Do Multiracial People Identify Their Children?
• 3. The Parenting Practices of Multiracial People
• 4. Multiracial People, Their Children, and Racism
• 5. The Future: “Dilution” and Social Change
• Conclusion: A Generational Tipping Point
• Appendix: Participants
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author