Cristina M. Ortiz
We live in a racialized society where the social dimensions of race have real consequences. How children are racially socialized matters. Families, and specifically parents, are viewed as one of the most important socialization agents in children’s early development. Research that focuses on racial socialization in multiracial families has been extremely helpful in advancing the research on racial socialization, but there has been an overwhelming focus on the racial socialization of multiracial individuals with one White parent.1 In addition, the existing research frequently gathers data from the individual themselves highlighting the multiracial persons’ perspectives on their parents’ role in the racial socialization process rather than exploring parents’ process directly.2 Research has also overlooked how parents’ own racial socialization contributes to the strategies they use to teach their children about race.
While the field has made substantial strides, the understanding of the range of parental contributions to a multiracial child’s racial socialization remains limited. To address this limitation, this chapter presents a single case study that uses in-depth interviews to examine how the minority parents in this dual-minority multiracial family have navigated their own racial and ethnic differences and, in turn, taught their children about race. This chapter focuses on the first family to participate in this study. In doing so, it is able to provide an in-depth analysis of the range of factors that exist within a single family that influence how parents teach their children about race. Although the chapter focuses on this single family, it highlights how these factors were influential to the strategies used by other families in the larger study as well. This chapter represents a call for researchers to begin to attend to how parents’ own racial socialization and awareness of race has significant implications for how they teach their children about race. In shifting our lens to examine the valuable role that parents play in this process, we may also begin to see how individual racialized experiences, or lack thereof, contribute to the types of messages parents send their children about race.
A study conducted by the National Academy of Sciences predicted that by 2050 at least 20 percent of the country’s population will identify with more than one race.3 These predictions are well on their way to becoming true. In 2004, one in forty people identified with more than one race.4 Studies have estimated that this number could soar to one in five people by 2050, if not sooner.5 Of the 9 million people identifying in the 2010 US census with two or more races,6 over 75 percent of this population indicated that they have a White parent. The four largest multiracial combinations—White/Black (1.8 million), White/Some other race (1.7 million), White/Asian (1.6 million), and White/American Indian and Alaska Native (1.4 million)—accounted for 6.8 million of those reporting to be multiracial.7
Although the multiracial population has received significant attention from the media and researchers in recent years, the focus has typically been on families with one White parent. The prevalence of studies on families that are White/Black is understandable given that White/Black multiracials make up the largest percentage (20 percent) of multiracials,8 and given our society’s obsession with understanding how families function when the parents are from different racial groups that have been constructed as being in polar opposite positions on the racial hierarchy.9 By continuing to prioritize this group of multiracials in research, however, the opportunities to learn about and from other dual-heritage families are overlooked.
All multiracials, regardless of racial background, have the shared experience of being raised by parents who are unable to relate to being part of two different racial backgrounds; however, the White multiracial experience is much different from the dual-minority multiracial experience. Research suggests than some White multiracials who are not mixed with Black are racially designated as White by their parents, are able to identify as White, and are considered as sociologically White.10 Based on their closeness or integration into Whiteness, their day-to-day experiences will be much different than dual-minority multiracials, who will more often than not be identified as a minority. Based on these experiences, parents of dual-minority multiracial children have a different set of responsibilities for teaching these children about race in a society where they will be racialized much differently than their White multiracial counterparts.
The racial socialization process in multiracial families can be quite complex for the following two reasons: (1) children in multiracial families do not have a parent with whom they share a multiracial identity; and (2) parents do not share racial socialization experiences or identities with one another.11 These children learn about race from their monoracial parents, and often have distinct racial experiences even from their siblings.12 There is a great need for parents in multiracial families to be able to recognize and understand the types of race-specific life experiences that their children may have since these and other factors result in a racial socialization process that is distinct from that in monoracial families.13
The research on multiracial racial socialization addresses only some of the dimensions of the racial socialization process. By continuing to examine the racial identity and identification of multiracials, limited information exists on how racial identities are developed and the role that parents play in their child’s development of self-identification. While an emphasis on specific aspects of the racial socialization process has provided a significant amount of information, research has overlooked the relationships that parents have with their children during the process and the importance of this parent-child role, and has limited our understanding to a specific group of multiracial families.14 This is problematic, as it may signal to dual-minority multiracial families that their children’s racial socialization process isn’t of significant importance in comparison to families with a White parent.
There are 308.7 million people in the United States, and multiracials account for only 2.9 percent of the total population.15 The dual-minority multiracial population (which includes multiracial individuals whose parents are both racial minorities) consists of only 1.5 million people who report two races among ten different dual-minority racial combinations.16 This population accounts for only 16 percent of the entire multiracial population, making them a minority within a minority group. Few studies have examined the familial processes of racial socialization as they occur in these types of families. With its focus on dual-minority multiracial families, this study represents a shift away from previously held monocentric assumptions that all families share a single racial heritage, identity, and experience.
All children will inevitably experience some type of racialization and will experience situations that contribute to their feeling negatively or positively about their racial heritage. Even persons with White heritage do not escape racialization. Scholars have long theorized how racialization positions Whiteness as a raceless social position with one’s ethnicity being optional.17 Opposition to the multiracial movement has often projected these understandings of Whiteness onto White multiracials, and has viewed the push for a multiracial identification as an attempt to escape out of minority racialization and into the racelessness of Whiteness.18 The case of non-White multiracials provides an opportunity to examine the racial socialization of a group of multiracials whose multiracial identities are not linked to the identity politics embedded within constructions of Whiteness. By focusing specifically on a non-White interracial couple, this study moves beyond the White/Black focus that dominates the multiracial research.
There are potentially unique factors that influence racial socialization within dual-minority multiracial families. These families include parents who, although coming from different racial backgrounds, have a shared experience of being non-White and a racial minority. In American society, people of color frequently share common experiences of discrimination, racialization, and otherness.19 This study focuses on dual-minority multiracial families, as opposed to monoracial or multiracial families with one White parent, because this population deals with racism and discrimination in distinct ways from their single-race and White multiracial peers.
While White parents of multiracial children may place an emphasis on developing their child’s multiracial identity, findings from this study reveal that parents in dual-minority multiracial families are more attuned to developing their child’s racial awareness of their single-race minority background rather than their multiracial identity. Given the absence of a White parent in these families, these families’ approaches to racial socialization will be noticeably different from those of multiracial families with one White parent given their inability, as well as their multiracial child’s inability, to pass as White in American society. In addition, the experience, or lack thereof, that each of the minority parents has had with racialized prejudice or discrimination may contribute greatly to their ideas about where they fall in the racial hierarchy,20 and where their multiracial child may fall within it as well.
Parents in a dual-minority multiracial family share a common bond as racially stigmatized people, in that they are unable to negotiate Whiteness and the privileges that come along with being part of this racial group.21 However, their individual experiences with regard to race, and how they teach their children about their own race, will not necessarily mirror one another. Research that focuses on dual-minority families can draw attention to the range of lived experiences that exist for minorities within American society. It can also demonstrate how the racialized experiences of each minority parent in a multiracial family, or the lack thereof, can contribute to how they teach, or are unable to teach, their child to understand each of their racial-minority backgrounds, and/or their multiracial background.
Minority parents in multiracial and/or multiethnic families may find themselves teaching their children what they know about being a minority and leave the children to figure out how they will navigate their own multiraciality. Findings from this study indicate that these parents may use a range of strategies to teach their children about their background, such as (1) drawing on their own experiences to teach their multiracial child about their background, (2) having a limited amount of racialized experiences and choosing not to teach their child about their background, and (3) immersing themselves in information about their spouse’s background and aiming to teach their child about both backgrounds.
Research suggests that by age three children are able to identify racial differences and engage in racial discrimination.22 This period in children’s lives is crucial since stressors, such as being the subject of racial discrimination, can affect their long-term well-being, as well as brain development.23 Parental racial socialization is critical to teaching children how to effectively navigate a racialized and racially biased society and has been identified as essential for well-being and health among racial-ethnic minorities across their life course.24 While racial socialization has been identified as being important for teaching monoracial minority children how to cope with racism and for instilling beliefs that counter racial stereotypes, little is known about how parents in multiracial families, especially dual-minority families, go about teaching their children about their different racial-minority backgrounds.
Children of color, both monoracial and multiracial, will inevitably experience some type of racialization. Racial socialization is a central process to the development of minority children, who have an inherently different racial experience than White children in America.25 Although many scholars have written about racial socialization, there is no single or commonly accepted definition. Racial socialization has been conceptualized in a range of ways: as a protective process,26 as a provision of tools for coping with racism and prejudice,27 and as an instructive internalization process for countering racial stereotypes that exist within mainstream US society concerning a child’s racial group(s).
Most of the research on parental racial socialization refers to the socialization process as it occurs within monoracial families. The general assumption is that same-race couples tend to share childhood racial-ethnic socialization experiences, and that they may also share racialized experiences and beliefs about how to socialize their children.28 Parents and children in these families will likely share similar racial experiences, although gender plays a complicating role in their respective socialization experiences.
Researchers have suggested that the multiracial identity movement has been largely driven by multiracial families who are seeking to claim their Whiteness as opposed to their Blackness.29 The racial hierarchy has real implications for life outcomes,30 and White parents of Black/White multiracial children may not feel comfortable having their child positioned at the bottom of this hierarchy.31 One can assume that the drive behind the development of a multiracial category was a result of White parents hoping to shift their child’s position in the racial hierarchy, dispel the one-drop rule,32 and at the same time feel included in their child’s experience and identity. The development may also have occurred as a result of White parents not feeling like it is politically correct to teach their children about White pride, nor could they contribute anything culturally specific to their children, as a result of having divorced themselves from an ethnic-specific group.33 The ability to have an optional ethnic identity may unintentionally teach White multiracials about White privilege and how they have the ability to pick and choose what they want to racially and ethnically identify with.
In contrast, minority parents in dual-minority multiracial families cannot pick and choose what part of their racial and ethnic background they want to emphasize. Findings in this study indicate that these parents want their dual-minority multiracial children to be proud of their specific single-raced minority backgrounds. In teaching their children about each of their racial or ethnic backgrounds, they may actually be more at risk for socializing their children monoracially than multiracially. Consequently, racial socialization strategies of parents in dual-minority multiracial families tend to be more similar to those used by monoracial minority families and less like those used in multiracial White families. Further research can highlight how dual-minority parents place an emphasis on monoracially socializing their children, whereas White multiracial families may be leaning more toward racially socializing to multiraciality.
The overall goal of this study was to understand how parents in dual-minority multiracial families racially socialize their children. In order to accomplish this goal, I chose a qualitative research design. Qualitative researchers are known for studying phenomena in their natural setting.34 They are also known for building a complex and holistic picture of what they are studying, and reporting the detailed views of their informants.35 The research design consisted of process-oriented interview questions, which were helpful for obtaining information about the racial socialization behaviors of study participants. Although there was some preplanned structuring of questions, the questions were exploratory and open, providing the parents with opportunities to share in detail information about their past, present, and future—all of which have implications for how they racially socialize their children. Descriptive questions were also used to gain an understanding of participants’ past and current experiences and their day-to-day environment. The incorporation of all of these various types of questions was important in determining parents’ existing methods of racial socialization, as well as understanding their past experiences and how those experiences currently influence and potentially will influence their future racial socialization practices.
I used a constructivist grounded theory approach in order to gain an alternative understanding of the process of parental racial socialization. This method provides useful strategies for studying the experience of parents in dual-minority multiracial families by aiding in the discovery and understanding of study participants’ meaning-making processes, as well as their social processes.36 The goal of constructivist grounded theorists is to construct theory from data on the lived experiences of study participants to see how they construct their world. These lived experiences shape how the researcher approaches the analysis.37
For the constructivist grounded theorist, the process of coding goes beyond merely describing the topic.38 I began by identifying and coding processes, actions, and assumptions line by line on a PDF document in order to identify emerging ideas. By pulling apart the data and framing analytic questions about it, I was able to eliminate any preconceived assumptions I had about the data by examining only the data I had collected.
Purposive sampling was used to recruit non-adoptive families who self-identified as dual-minority multiracial families.39 Families who have a White parent were excluded from the study. I sought out families with children of all ages and conducted in-depth interviews with parents and children over the age of twelve. Interviews took place at the participants’ homes, their places of work, and a local coffee shop. Each interview lasted from one to two hours. Parent interviews focused on participants’ upbringing and experience with racial socialization and discrimination. The interviews also focused on their experiences as an interracial couple, their collective plan for teaching their children about race, and their individual parenting strategies for communicating to their children about race. The child interviews focused on the children’s understanding of race, their background, and how they have learned about race. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. I developed pseudonyms for all participants that were consistent with their real name. If names were ethnic toward a specific heritage, I went online and looked up names that were specific to that ethnic group and chose one of those.
This study focuses on the Thomas/Brown/Lewis family. This family was recruited through word of mouth and was the first family to participate in the study. The family is blended and consists of an Indian mother (Alina Thomas), Black father (Harold Brown), Guyanese/Black father (Lance Lewis), twelve-year-old son (Indra Thomas-Brown), and two-month-old daughter (Celeste Lewis). Indra is the biological son of Alina and Harold, and Celeste is the biological daughter of Alina and Lance. Alina and Harold have equal joint custody of Indra. Indra spends half of the week living with his mother, stepfather, and newborn sister, Celeste, and the other half of the week living with his father, Harold, and his wife and newborn daughter.
Each of the parents in the family has a unique upbringing. Lance and Alina have the shared experience of growing up in predominantly White areas, with Alina living in the suburbs of Detroit and Lance living in a small town in southern Maryland. Harold grew up in a neighborhood in west Michigan that had a balance of White and Black people. Today, most of Alina’s friends are Black and Lance’s are Indian.
The common parenting link that all of these parents share is their twelve-year-old son, Indra. All of them talked in depth about how they have, are, and plan on racially socializing Indra, who they all believe will be perceived as Black. Although they all have had discussions with Indra about his racial background, each of them is uncertain about whether or not he is “getting it” yet and concerned about his current ability to understand the impact that race will have on his life. While Alina and Harold both openly doubt whether or not they are adequately racially socializing Indra, their comments indicate they are teaching him more about his racial background than they are aware of. Because most of their strategies are focused on the development of his racial identity, less time has been spent on developing his Indian and multiracial background.
At the age of five, Indra’s mother taught him a unique way to embrace both sides of his heritage. She recalled this lesson vividly, stating, “he’s said before, ‘I am the Blindian King,’ like Black and Indian . . . we made up this song with his little djembe drum: ‘From India and Africa, India and Africa that’s where my family is from.’”40 The development of this song was a racial socialization technique used by Indra’s mother to help him grasp the concept of having two heritages. This technique contributed to Indra using the term “Blindian” in his younger years to identify himself. The endearing combination of a multiracial child’s heritage labels has become more popular with the rise of the multiracial population. Both multiracial individuals and scholars who study the multiracial population have developed identity labels such as Mexipino, Blaxican, Blasian, Chicanese, Korack, and Nigganese.41 Although the “Blindian” label developed for Indra was a fun way to incorporate both of his backgrounds, his mother wasn’t sure of what the label really meant to a five-year-old. The use of the label alone played a role in building his awareness of having two distinct backgrounds, but wasn’t able to provide him information about what it meant to be from each of these groups.
Indra is identified by each of his parents as Indian and Black. Indra also identifies himself as Indian and Black. Although his mother is Indian, she admits to not cooking Indian food often and questions the quality of her cooking. Her use of the Malayalam language with her son has been limited since she doesn’t have a Malayali community around her to practice the language and her husband has concerns about not being able to understand what they are saying. Indra’s exposure to the Indian community and culture has become more infrequent as he has gotten older, and his mother expressed doubt about how successful she has been at teaching her son about his Indian background. As a brown-skinned male living in two predominantly Black neighborhoods, his physical appearance has contributed to a shift between the way his parents identify him and the way they racially socialize him. The social perception of Indra as a Black male and the experiences they are anticipating him having have contributed to the parents’ prioritization of the need to prepare him for his Black experience rather than his Indian or multiracial experience.
The experience that Black people have in American society was the most frequently discussed topic across each of the interviews. While I conceptualized the “Black experience” to be broad and inclusive of both positive and negative experiences, participants’ discussions tended to focus on the negative aspects of the Black experience. The argument can be made that there are disproportionately more negative messages about Blackness than about any other minority group identity, contributing to the need to prepare these children for these types of messages.
Being unable to personally relate to the Black experience, Alina expressed her concern and worry for her son: “The concern, as for Indra, navigating the world as a Black male . . . with everything that’s been happening with Ferguson, the Trayvon Martin, all of this is sad and I have talked to Indra about that. . . . I am just like, ‘You have to be really careful because the way the world works—this is the unfortunate . . . reality for Black males in the United States.’ And it pains me to have a conversation like that with my son, but he also needs to be aware . . . there is unfortunately a lot of racism and prejudice and stereotypes that exist, but you can’t be defined by those stereotypes and you have to know how to operate with it.”42 Although Alina has not lived the Black experience herself, having a Black husband, a significant number of Black friends, teaching in a predominantly Black classroom, and raising a son who is racially perceived as Black provide her with a level of awareness that other Indians who are not in an interracial relationship with a Black partner may not have. Although she described on several occasions how she has talked to her son about race, how it will impact his life, and his need for caution, she still doubts whether what she has done is enough, or if she has really done anything to racially socialize her son.
In contrast, both Lance and Harold use their personal experiences to identify how they will go about teaching Indra about race. For these men, a large part of the Black experience is coming to terms with a set of unfortunate realities for Black males. These unfortunate realities include the need to accommodate non-Black people to make them less fearful, to wear clothes that don’t seem threatening (i.e., not wearing hooded sweaters with the hood over their head), and to be knowledgeable about appropriate ways to interact with police. Their own recollections of their earliest memories of racial awareness give them the impression that their awareness of being Black is inherent and part of their birthright responsibility. This sense of responsibility motivates them to teach Black youth, especially Black males, how to combat discrimination and to survive and navigate the world as a Black male in an oppressive society.
The existing research has introduced the notion that minority parents in interracial relationships will inevitably have different individual experiences, different beliefs, and different overall racial lenses. While the parents in this study have some commonalities (e.g., Alina and Lance are both the first generation in their families to be born in America, and both Lance and Harold have the common experience of growing up as Black males), their distinct individual upbringings contribute greatly to how all of them navigate their day-to-day life and incorporate their experience as a minority into their strategy for teaching their children about race.
Within the Thomas-Lewis household reside two parents who, although they have the similar life experience of growing up in predominantly White neighborhoods, have had distinctly different racialized experiences. For Alina, growing up in an Indian household, socialization messages about culture were transmitted more often than messages about race. On the rare occasions when race was discussed in her home, Alina recalls her father using her desire to self-identify as Indian American as a point of reference for how she would be racially perceived in American society.
I remember my dad made me write an essay about what it means to be Indian-American. . . . I grew up with this message of “You’re Indian American, but other people are going to see you as Indian. They’re not going to see you as American.” And I grew up with that message. And then I did not believe that—like really see how that manifested until post–September 11th. There was this incident . . . I was walking home from the train and there’s this group of—they were maybe older boys. . . . They were like, “You terrorist, you killed all those people.” And I was scared. . . . I’d never been so fearful. . . . When that happened I was like, “My dad was right. I am not American.” . . . And that was a like a turning point in my life I think.43
Alina’s recollection of this experience speaks to the fact that although one may receive racial socialization messages from one’s parents during one’s teenage years, it is possible that a significant amount of time can pass before one’s self-awareness of being a racialized minority in American society is developed. Although Alina didn’t speak about whether her father defined “American” as synonymous with “White,” his lesson about the perception of Indian people demonstrates the otherness that is experienced for those in American society who are perceived as immigrants or minorities, or whose identity is not clear-cut. Her father’s point of reference may have come from his own experience as an immigrant to the United States and being treated as less than American.
Both Alina and Lance were raised by parents who had immigrated to the United States as adults. Their parents held similar ideas about what their children needed to do to be successful in America. For both families, there was an ongoing concern about their child’s Americanness and how they would prepare their children for what that entailed. While Alina struggled with the idea of not being perceived as American by outsiders, Lance received specific messages from his family about making sure he didn’t do anything that might contribute to his being perceived as American. When asked about the point at which he became aware of his family’s Afro-Guyanese background, his response was as follows:
It was like from birth . . . literally. . . . It was very pervasive. . . . My parents had no qualms about telling me . . . that we were not expected to act like Americans. . . . “Your family is Guyanese and there are certain expectations associated with that.” My parents made that very clear . . . something else that they made very clear was the racial inequalities, the history of the United States. . . . Most kids learn to read on like Dick and Jane books. . . . When we were growing up, my mother would read my sister and I like “Native Son” and “Kaffir Boy” and the “Autobiography of Malcolm X.” . . . My parents made it very clear like from as early as possible that you are Black. Moreover you are Guyanese, and there are things that we expect from you and there are going to be expectations from outside that we don’t, that you are not allowed to meet those expectations. . . . [You are] not supposed to fit into any of these stereotypes that people will have of you.44
Lance’s recollection of his upbringing demonstrates how he, too, receivedmessages about his culture growing up. It also speaks to how his mother’s view of “American” was different from Alina’s father’s view. Lance’s mother used the term “American” term to refer to Black Americans, whom she perceived as lazy, disconnected from their history, and not understanding the need to excel. It can be assumed that being identified as American was a bigger identity threat to Lance than to his Indian wife, for whom identifying as American may have been beneficial.
Although Alina grew up in a predominantly White neighborhood, her family’s strong connection to the Indian Catholic community may have served as a source of insulation for her awareness of racialized experiences prior to her post–September 11 experience that occurred when she was twenty-three. Alternatively, her self-identification as Asian may have also contributed to her limited awareness of racialized experiences, given that the negative connotations and racialized ideas about who is Asian in American society may not have been inclusive of individuals with Indian heritage during her upbringing.
Lance’s discussion about the development of his racial awareness highlights the similar experience that he and Harold have had as Black males in American society. For each of them, there was no clear point in time when they learned about their racial background. Both men were immersed in environments where they were able to see firsthand the disparities within the Black community. Each of them learned about the complexities of the Black experience, and how the social environment shapes and contributes to it, through discussions about the inequalities that exist for Black people as well as through exposure to people who had life experiences of segregation in a pre–civil rights era. These experiences contrast with Alina’s. She didn’t recall any racial socialization messages about what it means to be Asian, and remembered her first racialized encounter as occurring when she was an adult. While Alina’s experience contributed to her ability to see more clearly how the society we live in is highly racialized, both Lance and Harold have had a lifetime of experiences that have prepared them for how to navigate being Black.
The findings of this study suggest that there are elements to the racial socialization process for dual-minority multiracial families that are both similar to and different from what research has implied to be specific to monoracial families or for families with one White parent. This study draws attention to three of these similarities and differences: (1) the racialization of minority children, (2) the process of overlooking the need to develop each of the child’s racial backgrounds, and (3) parents’ own racial socialization and the influence it has on the racial socialization strategies they employ with their children.
While some may believe that multiracial individuals have transcended the color line and are representative of a postracial America, the experiences that many of them have as minorities challenge this assumption. This is especially the case for dual-minority multiracials. Although these individuals are part of two distinct racial groups, their physical appearance and societal perception can contribute to their parents socializing them to only one of their heritages. This is especially true for dual-minority multiracials who have a Black parent. For these multiracials, the one-drop rule—which was initially used to maintain White supremacy—impacts these families so much that they are more focused on preparing their child for how they will be perceived in society. Instead of being able to teach their child about each of the child’s backgrounds, their child’s Blackness is prioritized because it has a range of negative connotations attached to it. This contributes to the non-Black parent in dual-minority families being forced to teach his or her multiracial child about a racialized group that is different from the parent’s own.
The parents in this family were only three of numerous parents in this study who had been influenced by society’s racialized perception of their children. Society’s racialization of the children in this study contributed to many of the parents’ strategies for teaching their children about race. Although the children in this study are multiracial, like many of the families in this study, the Thomas/Brown/Lewis family’s approach to racially socializing Indra is similar to the strategies used in monoracial Black families. As his biological father states, “The reality is that although Indra is biracial, he will be perceived as a Black boy, and that is something that I am very aware of. . . . I’m not sure to what degree he thinks about it and understands it . . . it’s certainly something I know I need to talk with him more about, sort of the navigation and the survival skills, whether in Chicago or outside of Chicago.”45
The research on the racial socialization process as it occurs in monoracial Black families discusses in depth the range of messages that are geared toward preparing children for racial bias and for encounters with racial discrimination and prejudice, helping them to develop coping mechanisms, and fostering resilience for occasions when they will encounter negatives experiences as a result of discrimination and prejudice based on their appearance and status as a minority.46 Indra has the benefit of having two Black men with whom he can relate and from whom he can learn. Both of them were taught how to navigate the world as Black men and are able to draw upon these lessons, how these lessons were transmitted, and what they wished they had learned more of or sooner. Although Indra’s parents are taking proactive steps to prepare him for the experiences he will have as a Black male, they are hopeful that there will be a time in his life when he will be in an environment where he can get more connected to his Asian American and Indian background. His mom identified college as such an environment.
According to Diane Hughes and Lisa Chen, as a child’s age increases, so does the frequency of messages about preparation for bias. While the child’s age can serve as an antecedent for these types of messages, so can the parents’ own experience with racism.47 All of the parents talked briefly about what they have taught Indra thus far about his racial background, and talked more in depth about what they need or plan to teach him. While the parents’ experiences influence their view on the type of information that Indra will need in order to navigate a world where he is perceived as Black, his age and their uncertainty of whether or not he is able to comprehend what exactly all of this means right now have stalled their racial socialization process.
Research suggests that around the age of twelve, children are able to understand historical and geographical aspects of racial identity. However, knowledge and feelings about personal struggles against racism become more complex.48 At the age of twelve, Indra is uncertain about how his parents have taught him about race, but does recall conversations with his mother and paternal grandmother about the need for him to be careful given his skin color. His most recent memory of learning about race was a conversation that his mother had with him about the tragedy that occurred in Ferguson, where an unarmed eighteen-year-old Black male was fatally shot by a police officer.49 The takeaway that was easiest for him to recall from this conversation was the need to be careful with how he approaches and speaks to police officers.
The need for this family, and many of the families in this study, to prepare their child for being perceived as Black demonstrates how the racialization of minority children, regardless of if they are monoracial or multiracial, is real and ongoing. The way that these families prioritized the development of only one of their child’s racial backgrounds speaks to the abundance of negative stereotypes and perceptions that exist for Black people in American society. It can be argued that the need to prepare a child for adversity in our society can overshadow the need to teach the child about how to be proud and to embrace other aspects of his or her background. The segregation and racialized climate that Chicago is notorious for may also contribute to the need to prepare any child who may be perceived as Black for the negative experiences that he or she may have in society. In addition, there is a strong likelihood that the current climate of America in general has increased these parents’ already heightened levels of awareness of the perception of Black males.
Parents’ own experiences with racial socialization and racialization play a significant role in how they teach their child about race. Although the parents in Thomas/Brown/Lewis family have different upbringings, identities, and understandings of race, they all have a familiarity with the Black experience. Lance and Harold are living the Black experience and preparing to teach their son how to navigate American society as a Black man. It can be assumed that Alina’s disconnect from her Indian background and her experience of having a secondary connection to the Black experience, which includes living in a predominantly Black neighborhood, provide her with the ability to approach her racial socialization strategies in a distinct way from Harold and Lance. Although she claims to have had a limited amount of personal experience of discrimination, she has a heightened awareness of the types of experiences her son may have, and her fear and desire to communicate to him to be cautious guide her racial socialization techniques.
Minority parents are assumed to inherently have a connection to their background and know how to teach their child about it. This study begins to challenge this assumption by drawing attention to the fact that minority parents have their own distinct experiences, which may or may not have been racialized. Even without such experiences, however, parents have the ability to be sensitive to someone else’s racial experience. Instead of assuming that minority parents know how to handle all matters of race that their child will encounter, we can begin to see that parents who may not have a significant amount of racial awareness may be learning about race at the same rate as their child. This influences how they racially socialize their children and whether their approach is proactive or reactive.
The role of parents in their child’s development of racial awareness is not something that is specific to or relevant only for dual-minority multiracial families. Parents in both monoracial and multiracial families contribute to their child’s understanding of race, or lack thereof. Parents with a limited awareness of race can’t be expected to teach their children something that they don’t know or don’t have any experience with.
To date, parental racial socialization research has provided us with insight into how researchers, parents, and children think of the racial socialization process. This study draws attention to additional dimensions of the racial socialization process that exist for dual-minority multiracial families and the challenges that these families have when trying to teach their children about their distinct racial-minority backgrounds. While this study has focused on dual-minority parents, it has revealed how the racial socialization strategies used for this population are similar to and distinct from those used in other populations.
1. Brett Coleman, “Being Mixed and Black: The Socialization of Mixed-Race Identity” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 2012); Nicolette De Smit, “Mothering Multiracial Children: Indicators of Effective Interracial Parenting” (PhD diss., McGill University, 1997); Iyabo A. Fatimilehin, “Of Jewel Heritage: Racial Socialization and Racial Identity Attitudes amongst Adolescents of Mixed African–Caribbean/White Parentage,” Journal of Adolescence 22.3 (1999): 303–318; Rebecca R. Hubbard, “Afro-German Biracial Identity Development” (PhD diss., Virginia Commonwealth University, 2010); Ja’Nitta Marbury, “Racial Socialization of Biracial Adolescents” (PhD diss., Kent State University, 2006).
2. Coleman, “Being Mixed”; Susan Crawford and Ramona Alaggia, “The Best of Both Worlds? Family Influences on Mixed Race Youth Identity Development,” Qualitative Social Work 7.1 (2008): 81–98; Rebecca Romo, “Blaxican Identity: An Exploratory Study of Blacks/Chicanas/os in California” (paper, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Annual Conference, San Jose, CA, 2008).
3. Reynolds Farley and John Haaga, eds., The American People: Census 2000 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005).
4. Elizabeth M. Grieco and Rachel C. Cassidy, “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin, 2000,” vol. 8 (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2001).
5. Farley and Haaga, American People; Barry Edmonston and James P. Smith, The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1997).
6. Nicholas A. Jones and Jungmiwha Bullock, “The Two or More Races Population: 2010” (C2010BR-13; Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, September 2012).
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Miri Song, “Introduction: Who’s at the Bottom? Examining Claims about Racial Hierarchy,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27.6 (2004): 859–877.
10. Pew Research Center, “Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers” (June 11, 2015), http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/06/11/multiracial-in-america/; David Brunsma, “Interracial Families and the Racial Identification of Mixed Race Children: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study,” Social Forces 84.2 (2005): 1131–1157. The racial identification and designation of those mixed with White is a particularly complicated process, and appearance and phenotype are critical components to this process. Although research may lead one to assume the process of passing or being identified as White is a simple one, several autobiographies have discussed the complexity of moving to Whiteness. See Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes, Lakota Woman (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990); Kip Fulbeck, Part Asian, 100% Hapa (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006); Kevin R. Johnson, How Did You Get to Be Mexican? A White/Brown Man’s Search for Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).
11. Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey A. Laszloffy, Raising Biracial Children (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2005).
12. Maria P. P. Root, “Experiences and Processes Affecting Racial Identity Development: Preliminary Results from the Biracial Sibling Project,” Cultural Diversity and Mental Health 4.3 (1998): 237–247.
13. Laurie McClurg, “Biracial Youth and Their Parents: Counseling Considerations for Family Therapists,” Family Journal 12.2 (2004): 170–173; Rockquemore and Laszloffy, Raising Biracial Children.
14. Chase L. Lesane-Brown, “A Review of Race Socialization within Black Families,” Developmental Review 26.4 (2006): 400–426.
15. US Census Bureau, “Population Estimates, American Community Survey, Census of Population and Housing, State and County Housing Unit Estimates, County Business Patterns, Nonemployer Statistics, Economic Census, Survey of Business Owners, Building Permits” (December 2, 2015), http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html.
16. Jones and Bullock, “Two or More Races Population.”
17. Mary Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
18. Rainier Spencer, Challenging Multiracial Identity (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006).
19. Marc Bendick et al., “Discrimination Against Latino Job Applicants: A Controlled Experiment,” Human Resource Management 30.4 (1991): 469–484; Major G. Coleman, “Job Skill and Black Male Wage Discrimination,” Social Science Quarterly 84.4 (2003): 892–906; Harriet Orcutt Duleep and Seth Sanders, “Discrimination at the Top: American-Born Asian and White Men,” Industrial Relations 31.3 (1992): 416–432.
20. Song, “Introduction.”
21. Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” in Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, ed. Paula Rothenberg (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 188–192.
22. Joe Feagin and Debra Van Ausdale, The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
23. Margaret O’Brien Caughy, Patricia J. O’Campo, and Carles Muntaner, “Experiences of Racism among African American Parents and the Mental Health of Their Preschool-Aged Children,” American Journal of Public Health 94.12 (2004): 2118–2124.
24. Carolyn B. Murray, Julie E. Stokes, and Jean Peacock, “Racial Socialization of African American Children: A Review,” in African American Children, Youth and Parenting, ed. R. L. Jones (Hampton, VA: Cobb and Henry, 1999), 209–230.
25. Diane Hughes et al., “Parents’ Ethnic-Racial Socialization Practices: A Review of Research and Directions for Future Study,” Developmental Psychology 42.5 (2006): 747–770.
26. Diane Hughes, “Correlates of African American and Latino Parents’ Messages to Children about Ethnicity and Race: A Comparative Study of Racial Socialization,” American Journal of Community Psychology 31.1–2 (2003): 15–33; Howard Stevenson, “Validation of the Scale of Racial Socialization for African American Adolescents: Steps toward Multidimensionality,” Journal of Black Psychology 20.4 (1994): 445–468.
27. Tiffany Brown and Ambika Krishnakumar, “Development and Validation of the Adolescent Racial and Ethnic Socialization Scale (ARESS) in African American Families,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 36.8 (2007): 1072–1085; Lesane-Brown, “Review of Race Socialization”; A. Wade Boykin and Forrest D. Toms, “Black Child Socialization: A Conceptual Framework,” in Black Children: Social, Educational, and Parental Environments, ed. Harriette Pipes McAdoo and John Lewis McAdoo (Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage, 1985), 33–51; Murray, Stokes, and Peacock, “Racial Socialization of African American Children”; Anita Jones Thomas and Suzette L. Speight, “Racial Identity and Racial Socialization Attitudes of African American Parents,” Journal of Black Psychology 25.2 (1999): 152–170.
28. Cheryl Crippen and Leah Brew, “Intercultural Parenting and the Transcultural Family: A Literature Review,” Family Journal 15.2 (2007): 107–115.
29. Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999); Spencer, Challenging Multiracial Identity; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David Embrick, “Black, Honorary White, White: The Future of Race in the United States?,” in Mixed Messages: Multiracial Identities in the “Color-Blind” Era, ed. David Brunsma (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 33–48; George Yancey, “Racial Justice in a Black/Nonblack Society,” in Brunsma, Mixed Messages, 49–62.
30. Song, “Introduction.”
31. Wendy Roth, “The End of the One-Drop Rule? Labeling of Multiracial Children in Black Intermarriages” (paper, Sociological Forum, 2005).
32. Ibid.
33. Waters, Ethnic Options.
34. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, The Qualitative Inquiry Reader (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002).
35. John W. Creswell, Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing among Five Approaches (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012).
36. Kathy Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2014).
37. Kathy Charmaz, “‘Discovering’ Chronic Illness: Using Grounded Theory,” Social Science and Medicine 30.11 (1990): 1161–1172.
38. Ibid.
39. Jennifer Mason, Qualitative Researching (London: Sage, 2002).
40. Alina Thomas, interview by author, Chicago, September 8, 2014, tape recording.
41. Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Romo, “Blaxican Identity”; Donna M. Talbot, “Exploring the Experiences and Self-Labeling of Mixed-Race Individuals with Two Minority Parents,” New Directions for Student Services, no. 123 (2008): 23–31.
42. Thomas interview.
43. Ibid.
44. Lance Lewis, interview by author, Chicago, September 22, 2015, tape recording.
45. Harold Brown, interview by author, Chicago, September 2, 2014, tape recording.
46. Hughes et al., “Parents’ Ethnic-Racial Socialization Practices”; Diane Hughes and Lisa Chen, “The Nature of Parents’ Race-Related Communications to Children: A Developmental Perspective,” in Child Psychology: A Handbook of Contemporary Issues, ed. Lawrence Balter and Catherins S. Tamis-LeMonda (Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 1999), 467–490.
47. Diane Hughes and Lisa Chen, “When and What Parents Tell Children about Race: An Examination of Race-Related Socialization among African American Families,” Applied Developmental Science 1.4 (1997): 200–214.
48. Louise Derman-Sparks, Carol Tanaka Higa, and Bill Sparks, “Children, Race and Racism: How Race Awareness Develops,” Interracial Books for Children Bulletin 11.3–4 (1980): 3–15.
49. NBC News, “Michael Brown Shooting,” May 13, 2015, http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/michael-brown-shooting.