Mixed Race Studies

Lessons to my child

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
May 2012
98 pages
DOI: 10.7282/T3GB221X

Ayanna S. Boyd

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, interracial marriages have continued to increase with 8.4 million people in mixed marriages in 2005. With the increasing number of interracial marriages, there has been a surge of multiracial children who do not fit neatly into our society’s longstanding classification system. As research has consistently validated the realm of racial choices that are now available to biracial children, the parent’s role becomes more important to consider (Rockquemore & Brunsma, 2002). This exploratory study was designed to understand how Black/White interracial parents perceive their children’s identity and how they negotiate identity with their children. Furthermore, the goal of this study is to uncover some of the strategies and lessons they transmit to their biracial children in order to shape their racial identity. This study involved 8 White/Black interracial couples raising biracial children. The children’s ages ranges from 4 to 24. Each couple was interviewed using an audio recorder, and their information was analyzed qualitatively using the grounded theory approach (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). This study revealed major themes connected to interracial couples and their racial perceptions and strategies for their biracial children. These themes included 1) the importance of humanity over race, 2) supportive families, 3) purposeful and deliberate racial strategies (both proactive and reactive) including open dialogue, dolls, books, events and experiences, 4) society’s Hispanic view of their children, and 5) hair issues with biracial girls. Limitations and recommendations for future research are discussed.

Read the entire dissertation here.

A comparative study of familial racial socialization and its impact on black/white biracial siblings

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
May 2014
134 pages
DOI: 10.7282/T33N21PQ

Monique Anne Porow

A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Sociology

This dissertation examines the nature of racial socialization within the families of biracial people. Unlike previous studies of racial socialization of children with one Black and one White parent, this project broadens the scope of influential agents of racial socialization. Utilizing an inclusive approach, I examine the role that parents, extended family members, and siblings play in the process of shaping the racial identity development of biracial people. Through the use of a grounded theory approach, I draw upon data from 22 qualitative, semi-structured interviews with people who have one Black and one White parent. I utilize their responses to questions regarding the nature of their relationship with various family members, and the impact of those experiences.

The 22 respondents included in this study composed 10 sibling sets: 8 dyads and 2 triads. This comparative sibling design provides a context ripe with information about the family inaccessible through other study designs. Employing this sibling study, I elucidate the nature of messages conveyed regarding race, from various members of the family, and I theorize these complex and overlooked processes of racial socialization. I outline agent-specific mechanisms of racial socialization within the family illustrating that parents are not the only influential agents as extant literature would suggest. I argue that all members of the family can be influential agents when engaging agent-specific mechanisms of racial socialization. Those mechanisms include: parents acting as direct and strategic agents of racial socialization, extended family members acting as indirect cultivators of group-belonging or exclusion, and sibling ancillary support to biracial people negotiating and developing their racial identities.

There is an interconnectedness of influence that results from these various approaches to racial socialization. I conceptualize these complex and agent-specific mechanisms, through a figure called the Family Nexus of Racial Socialization. This concept enhances our present understanding of how various family members engage in racial socialization, and the interconnectedness of their influence.

Read the entire dissertation here.

4 Ways Parents Can Support Their Mixed Race Children

Everyday Feminism
2016-01-05

Jennifer Loubriel

According to my mom, when my brother was around four or five, my Black (African-American) paternal grandfather put a plate of rice and beans in front of him.

My brother immediately burst into tears and asked, “Why do the beans look like that?” and then refused to eat. My brother’s problem was that my grandfather hadn’t given him traditional Puerto Rican arroz con gandules, but rather white rice and black-eyed peas.

My mom always says that my brother continued to cry and ask, “Why are the beans looking at me?”

The story goes that my grandfather got upset and said, “This is Black food! You’re Black! This is our people’s food!” My brother continued to cry, saying over and over again that he was Puerto Rican, and he wanted real rice and beans. Although I don’t personally remember this happening, I think about this story a lot…

Read the entire article here.

Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The Life and Times of Henry Louis Rey

University Press of Mississippi
January 2017
208 pages
25 b&w illustrations, 1 map, chronology, bibliography, index
6 x 9 inches
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1496810083

Melissa Daggett

Modern American Spiritualism blossomed in the 1850s and continued as a viable faith into the 1870s. Because of its diversity and openness to new cultures and religions, New Orleans provided fertile ground to nurture Spiritualism, and many séance circles flourished in the Creole Faubourgs of Tremé and Marigny as well as the American sector of the city. Melissa Daggett focuses on Le Cercle Harmonique, the francophone séance circle of Henry Louis Rey (1831–1894), a Creole of color who was a key civil rights activist, author, and Civil War and Reconstruction leader. His life has so far remained largely in the shadows of New Orleans history, partly due to a language barrier.

Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans focuses on the turbulent years between the late antebellum period and the end of Reconstruction. Translating and interpreting numerous primary sources and one of the only surviving registers of séance proceedings, Daggett has opened a window into a fascinating life as well as a period of tumult and change. She provides unparalleled insights into the history of the Creoles of color and renders a better understanding of New Orleans’s complex history. The author weaves an intriguing tale of the supernatural, of chaotic post-bellum politics, of transatlantic linkages, and of the personal triumphs and tragedies of Rey as a notable citizen and medium. Wonderful illustrations, reproductions of the original spiritual communications, and photographs, many of which have never before appeared in published form, accompany this study of Rey and his world.

How My White Mother Helped Me Find My Blackness

The Establishment
2016-08-31

Ijeoma Oluo, Editor at Large

The author (left) with her sister, uncle, brother, and mother

“Hold still.”

“Mom, you’re hurting me!”

“I am not. Hold still or your headwrap won’t look right.”

“I don’t want to wear the headwrap. It looks weird. Everyone will laugh at me!”

“What kind of African are you??”

I looked up at my white mom as she tugged on the gele around my head, and tried very hard not to roll my eyes…

Read the entire article here.

‘Blind Spots’ and Other Problems in Globally Blended Families

The Wall Street Journal
2016-08-31

Tracy Slater

When the parents are in the majority and the kids are in the minority

Perhaps your child, like my two-year-old, and many other children in globally blended families, belongs to the world’s growing mixed-ethnicity population. The World Factbook finds a percentage of mixed-ethnicity people in almost a quarter of its 236 countries and territories. Among western nations, the U.K.’s and the U.S.’s mixed-race populations are increasing faster than any other minority group.

Mixed-ethnicity children often face very different experiences to their parents, a point stressed by many studies tracking this population’s growth, but within multinational families, there is another dimension: My daughter may be mixed, but she has two biological parents without much clue about what it feels like to be a minority as a kid. I’m a Jewish-American, raised with all the cultural privileges afforded to whites in the U.S., her father is native Japanese, and we live in Japan.

As a woman in a multicultural, multinational, and multiracial couple, I’ve sensed how some people assume I must be uniquely open to cultural differences, and thus uniquely equipped to raise a mixed child. But this assumption betrays a flawed logic. Globe-trotting parents in mixed marriages who grew up in the majority may be aware of racism and may even have faced it themselves, but most still lack a deeper understanding of racism during a child’s formative years…

Read the entire article here.

The JewAsian Phenomenon: Raising Jewish-Asian Families

JewishBoston: The Vibe of the Tribe
2016-08-10

Judy Bolton-Fasman, Culture Reporter

A new book, as well as a conversation with its authors, sheds light on a growing segment of the Jewish population—Jewish-Asian children who are raised as Jews.

Helen Kim and Noah Leavitt are the authors of “JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America’s Newest Jews,” the first book-length study of Jewish-Asian couples and their children. While the two sociologists, who are married and professors at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., have a personal stake in the subject, they have also observed that as a Jewish-Asian couple they are far from alone in raising their children as Jews. In the book, the couple’s research on Jewish-Asian families is encapsulated in interviews and extensive studies on the subject.

Keren McGinity, director of Interfaith Families Jewish Engagement at Hebrew College, notes: “‘JewAsian’ is groundbreaking because it’s the first book to complicate the intermarriage narrative by looking at it through the trifold lens of ethnicity, race and religion. Kim and Leavitt’s work highlights important new ways of understanding Jewish-American, Asian-American and Jew-Asian identities, challenging dominant racial, ethnic and interfaith marriage discourses in the process. I am thrilled to have it on my syllabus for the course ‘Jewish Intermarriage in the Modern American Context’ at Hebrew College this fall.”

Kim and Leavitt recently talked to JewishBoston about their new book and their family life…

Read the entire interview here.

‘I Have a Black Son in Baltimore’: Anxious New Parents and an Era of Unease

The New York Times
2016-08-23

Rachel L. Swarns

Bill Janu, a Baltimore police detective, greeted Shanna Janu, his wife, and their son, Wesley, as he arrived home from work one day this month. Credit Lexey Swall for The New York Times

BALTIMORE — He assembled the crib and mounted the bookshelves. She unpacked the bedding and filled the closet with onesies and rompers. Then husband and wife stood in the nursery and worried. Bill Janu, a police officer, is white. Shanna Janu, a lawyer, is black. As they eagerly awaited their baby’s birth this spring, they felt increasingly anxious.

They had chosen not to find out their baby’s gender ahead of time. But their nearly two years of marriage had been punctuated by the killings of African-American men and boys in Ferguson, Mo.; Brooklyn; Cleveland; North Charleston, S.C.; and Baltimore, all at the hands of the police. Mr. Janu, who longed for a son, tried to reassure his wife. Mrs. Janu emailed him one article after another, warning of the perils that face black boys.

As the due date approached, Mr. Janu found himself praying for a girl.

In the delivery room at St. Agnes Hospital, after more than 20 hours of labor, the infant finally arrived, red-faced and wailing. The newborn had Mr. Janu’s blue eyes and Mrs. Janu’s full lips and nose. The new father exulted. Then he felt the weight of his new reality.

“Now, I have a black son in Baltimore,” the white police detective remembered thinking as he cradled his baby boy…

Read the entire article here.

Raising My Black Son

Brian, Child: the magazine for thinking mothers
2016-08-09

Suanne Schafer

Twenty years ago, I adopted an interracial child—I’ll call him M—thinking a mother’s love could overcome all barriers, even racial ones. Twenty years later, I’m not sure I did my son any favors. I’m a white mom trying to figure out how to raise a black child in a hostile—and potentially lethal—environment.

M came up for adoption during my fourth year of medical school, the unwanted love child of a sixteen-year-old white mother and a black seventeen-year-old father. Unable to take her mixed-race baby home to her blue-collar family, the young woman kept her pregnancy secret from everyone except her mother then gave the baby up for adoption.

My family was tickled to have a grandchild, whatever his color…

Read the entire article here.

How White Parents of Black and Multiracial Transracially Adopted Children Approach Racial Exposure and Neighborhood Choice

Sociology of Race & Ethnicity
Published online before print 2016-08-02
DOI: 10.1177/2332649216661851

Kathryn A. Sweeney, Associate Professor of Sociology
Purdue University Northwest, Hammond, Indiana

Although past research on racial socialization tends to concentrate on providing cultural knowledge and pride, this paper focuses on exposure to environments as a means of understanding preparation for racial discrimination, specifically in regard to transracial adoption. This article looks at how 19 white adoptive parents of black and multiracial adopted children perceive their neighborhood choice and decisions of where to send their kids to school and whom to befriend in order to understand how they approach racial socialization. Analysis of data from in-depth interviews illustrates how those who adopted transracially both domestically and internationally stressed that they did not want their children to be in environments where they would be the only person of color because they were concerned about their child experiencing racism and feeling isolated. Even so, they tended to live in white neighborhoods and send their children to predominantly white schools. Parents expressed being conflicted by what they saw as opposing measures and perceptions of school quality and racial-ethnic diversity. The parents in this study said that they sought out social support through organizations and friendships to expand their social networks for themselves and their children. Findings are not meant to challenge or support transracial adoption but rather to gain insight into perceptions of racial diversity, neighborhood and school choices, and friendship networks as a way to understand aspects of racial socialization associated with environmental exposure and preparation for racism.

Read or purchase the article here.