Parenting as Racialized Educational Practice: Strategic Adaptation and Cultivation in an Asian American Community

• In Event: Parenting as Praxis: Families, Schooling, and the Quest for Racial, Linguistic, and Disability Justice

Abstract

This paper examines parenting as an educational practice in which parents strategically prepare and cultivate their children to enter racialized worlds. Drawing on 100 ethnographic interviews with first-generation Chinese immigrant parents from highly educated and middle-class backgrounds, this research analyzes the parenting practices of Asian immigrant families from a subject-centered perspective rather than from an essentialized cultural perspective in order to examine how parental understandings of the forces of racialization and racism around them shape their strategic practices related to the education of their children. The key finding is that this particular immigrant community’s parenting logic appropriates certain elements of white middle-class concerted cultivation but adds distinctive elements that reflect their position as racialized outsiders in the U.S.

Author

• Christopher Hu, University of Alabama