On the Margins: Triple Consciousness and Transracial adoptees’ Conceptualization of Racial Identity

• In Event: 30420 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 13: Multiracial, Transracial Spaces, and Navigations

Abstract

This article examines how Canadian transracial adoptees describe their lived experiences that shape their racial identity within white adopting families. Drawing on insights from double consciousness this article analyzes how transracial adoptees understand their positioning within their families, and how this process reveals the paradoxical expectations of individuals’ sense of racial identity. This article uses 43 semi structured interviews with transracial adoptees across Canada. Recent research has argued for a reimagining of DuBois’ scholarship in contemporary understandings of race (Itzigsohn & Brown 2020). This article builds on scholarship which focuses on theorization of racial identity and its socializing influences. Transracial adoptees in Canada articulate their racial identity through a third lens, influenced primarily by socializing forces of peers and parents. It leads to adoptees occupying a sense of triple consciousness due to feeling a sense of in-betweenness in their racial identity. They perceive themselves through a white lens, and a racialized lens, while reflexively viewing themselves as othered within these schemas. First, it describes the socializing factors that impact their experiences of racialization, which trace how parents lack of recognition of their race affects their subjectivity. Second, it describes how transracial adoptees experience racialization, and their reflections on how they belong. Third, it describes the modifications of double consciousness to triple, that applies specifically to transracial adoptees. Accounts from transracial adoptees’ advance literature on racial identity by showing how the dynamics of racial socialization between white and non-white subjects are central to parent-child relationships. These insights contribute to literature on how race is theorized and understood within a Canadian context. By theorizing from those on the margin, this paper will contribute nuance and complexity to scholarship on the conceptualizations and constructions of racial identity, and how central race is to parent-child relationships.

Author

• Jennifer Peruniak, University of Toronto