Mixed Race Studies

Claiming Place: Biracial Young Adults of the Post-Civil Rights Era

Praeger
2000-11-30
208 pages
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-89789-760-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-313-06507-1

Marion Kilson, Dean of the Graduate School
Salem State College, Massachusetts

Born in the 1960s, the middle-class Biracial Americans of this study are part of a transitional cohort between the hidden biracial generations of the past and the visible blended generations of the future. As individuals, they have variously dealt with their ambiguous status in American society; as a generation, they share common existential realities in relation to White culture.

During the last decade of the 20th century public awareness of mixed race Americans increased significantly, in no small part because there has been a substantial increase in interracial marriages and offspring since 1960. This study, based on ethnographic interviews, provides an historical overview of the study of Biracial Americans in the social sciences, a sociological profile of project participants, sociocultural discussions of family and race as well as racial identity choices, and examinations of racial realities in adult lives and of recurrent systemic and personal life themes. The textual part of the book demonstrates the diversity of perception and experience regarding race and identity of these biracial young adults. The Epilogue not only reviews major findings pertaining to this transitional generation of Biracial Americans but discusses biraciality and the deconstruction of race in contemporary American society. An extensive bibliography of popular and scholarly sources concludes the book.

Table of Contents:

Preface
Biracial American Experience in Post-Civil Rights Era
Biracial Americans
Biracial Americans and Their Families
Biracial American Identity Choices
Racial Realities in Adult Biracial American Lives
Biracial American Life Themes
Biracial American Voices
Development of Racial Identities
Childhood Memories of Race
Family Relationships Remembered
Assessments of Biracial American Experiences
Epilogue
Bibliography

Is That Your Child? Mothers Talk about Rearing Biracial Children

Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
October 2008
146 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7391-2763-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7391-2764-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-7391-3208-1

By Marion Kilson and Florence Ladd

“Is That Your Child?” is a question that countless mothers of biracial children encounter whether they are African American or European American, rearing children today or a generation ago, living in the city or in the suburbs, are upper middle class or lower middle class. Social scientists Marion Kilson and Florence Ladd probe mothers’ responses to this query and other challenges that mothers of biracial children encounter.

Organized into four chapters, the book begins with Kilson and Ladd’s initial interview of one another, continues with an overview of the challenges and rewards of raising biracial children gleaned from their interviews with other mothers, presents profiles of mothers highlighting distinctive individual experiences of biracial parenting, and concludes with suggestions of positive biracial parenting strategies.

This book makes a unique contribution to the growing body of literature by and about biracial Americans. Although in the past twenty years biracial Americans like Rebecca Walker, June Cross, and James McBride have written of their person experiences and scholars like Kathleen Korgen, Maria Root, and Ruth Frankenberg have explored aspects of the biracial experience, none has focused on the experiences of a heterogeneous set of black and white mothers of different generations and socioeconomic circumstances as Kilson and Ladd do.

About the Authors
Marion Kilson is an anthropologist and the author of Claiming Place: Biracial Young Adults of the Post-Civil Rights Era (Bergin & Garvey 2000). Florence Ladd is a psychologist and won the Black Caucus of the American Library Association award for her novel, Sarah’s Psalm (Scribner 1997).

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Chapter 1: The Back Story of Is That Your Child?
• Chapter 2: Challenges and Rewards for Mothers of Biracial Children
• Chapter 3: Profiles of Mothers of Biracial Children
• Chapter 4: Nurturing Biracial Children: Some Lessons Learned
• Appendix I: Interracial Marriages in the United States
• Appendix II: Some Sociological Attributes of Mothers
• Appendix III: Selected Multiracial Resources