Family Race Socialization of Later-Generation Multiracials

• In Event: 40852 - Race and Ethnicity: Racialization, Socialization, and Identity

Abstract

Learning about race and racial identity is a complex process for multiracial people who grapple with multiple potential racial identity options. This process—race socialization—begins in families. Foundational research on race socialization focused on monoracial populations, where family members share the same racial categorization and parents socialize their children into their shared racial category. Research on the race socialization of multiracials focuses on individuals with parents of two different monoracial backgrounds (i.e., a Black mother and white father raising a multiracial child). These parents may attempt to socialize their children into a racial category with which they themselves do not identify. However, as the multiracial population grows naturally, multiracial children will increasingly grow up with at least one multiracial parent. This study examines how later-generation multiracials—multiracial people with multiracial parents—experience family race socialization and develop their racial identities. These multiracials hold complex racial identity options like first-generation multiracials (those with two monoracial parents) but also share a racial identity with their parent(s) like monoracials, and thus may experience a unique type of race socialization. Using qualitative data from interviews with 36 multiracial young adults, I aim to understand how later-generation multiracials experience family race socialization and develop their racial identities. I find that later-generation multiracials experience early race-consciousness, understanding that they are multiracial from an early age. Some attribute this to explicit socialization while others attribute it to observable differences in their families. This early knowledge of multiraciality leads to deeper understandings in adulthood compared to first-generation multiracials. Secondly, mothers tend to engage in more race socialization than fathers, with participants describing more explicit conversations about race and racial identities with their mothers regardless of the mother’s status as mono- or multi-racial. This suggests that race socialization is another example of unequal, gendered labor involved in parenting.

Author

• Deja Marie Goodwin, University of California-Los Angeles