Although Leena and I have articulated a similar set of questions as mothers, along with a shared connection about parenting biracial people, her experience is dramatically different than mine. She is an Indian-American mother of a biracial son, a product of her marriage to her white husband. Racially speaking, Leena and I are opposites. How would my children's racial identity develop? Is it even possible to identify fully as a mixed-race individual in today's America? Do mixed-race people face particular challenges, both individually and culturally and even medically? What should I teach them about racial and cultural identity-and, frankly, racism? Is this even an issue, a 50 years after mixed-race marriage was made possible by the Supreme Court?Įnter Leena Jayaswal, my brilliant colleague and friend-a documentary filmmaker, award-winning photographer and professor-who turned out to have the same set of questions at the same time. I feel self-conscious, despite the fact that I will soon have a conversation with my brown boy about how to comport himself around police, a sad rite of passage many parents of color know too well.Īnd so it came to be, through this new reality, that I admitted feeling pretty clueless about the whole thing. Despite the shifted reality, I've never felt I had the permission or language or confidence to fully engage in a discussion about race, even while I parent brown-skinned children in a decidedly non-post-racial America. I can't truly understand the experience of having brown skin in America, but in a small way, through the primal maternal connection to my children, I can empathize-not in a "race-is-the-‘it'-moment-social-issue, Facebook-meme-sharing" level, but at a gut level. Still, for the most part, life is good and still innocent for them.Įven through this very small portal, the eye-opening foray into "experiencing race"-not a vantage point from which even well-meaning white individuals can usually see-is something I see as a real gift, because now my lens is different. Others have shared a full spectrum of unsolicited, strongly held opinions about how my children should identify themselves racially, and how I, their white mother, should impose identities for them: The one-drop rule means they're black, or they don't look black enough, or being mixed implies that they will be racially self-hating, confused or the opposite of "pure." These micro-aggressions-actually not micro at all-have also blended with a steady stream of other moments that can be best explained as overt racism. But other moments have teeth: white parents and teachers who confuse my brown daughter with the one other girl of color in the ballet class endless discussions about how I am ill-equipped to care for my daughter's beautiful biracial curls and a pattern of events with my then-third-grade son that was impossible for me to understand until I finally picked up a book about unconscious bias that can plague boys of color in school. ![]() These are just a few of the remarks I've experienced in my decade-long journey as a white mother who gave birth to two brown children-alternatively called biracial, mixed, mulatto, swirls, black, depending on the perspective and region of the country. ![]() The comments-and the fetishizing perspectives-were naively unexpected: "What is he?" "Where is she from?" "Are they adopted?" "So exotic."
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