By  Marion Kilson and Florence Ladd

The successful candidacy of Barack Obama, an African American of mixed ancestry, has provoked an explosion of interest in and comment about Americans who are first-generation children born to parents of different racial or ethnic groups. This is especially so when those children have one parent who is white and one who is black.

Overwhelmingly to this point, the discussion in the media has depended on observations and assertions that are largely first-person or anecdotal. Such is not the case with Marion Kilson, who is white, and Florence Ladd, who is African American, both esteemed scholars and mothers of biracial children.

Their book, Is That Your Child? Mothers Talk About Rearing Biracial Children (Lexington Books), published last month, took the question mothers of biracial children are often asked as the foundation for a searching exploration. TheDefendersOnline asked them to discuss what they learned.  — The Editors

Our new book, Is That Your Child?: Mothers Talk About Rearing Biracial Children, is based on interviews with black and white mothers of biracial children. The book opens with our interview with each other, charts the challenges and rewards of rearing biracial children, and profiles black and white mothers with distinctive biracial parenting experiences. It concludes with suggestions for positive parenting strategies, which are relevant to all varieties of biracial combinations.

Ladd and Kilson

The parenting experiences of our cohort of black and white middle-class mothers span nearly five decades. In exploring the perspectives and stories of rearing biracial children, we clustered the mothers into five groups according to their children’s ages and the extent to which race is salient in their parenting. We have found that black and white women whose children are grown and have left home for the world of work and the creation of their own families confronted somewhat different parenting issues than women whose children are young and still at home. For white mothers, high awareness of racial issues has been acquired through observation, empathy, and personal encounters. Family histories and lifelong racial vigilance heightened the awareness of most, but not all, black mothers. Our fifth category is comprised of mothers, black and white, who appear to avoid race as a significant consideration in nurturing their children toward adulthood.

In recalling their parenting experiences, the racially-aware black mothers of children who are grown and have left home emphasize major societal issues and remember significant incidents rather than daily challenges. They talk of their efforts to encourage black identities in their children and their regrets for belatedly hearing their children’s untold stories. Some spoke of being welcomed by their in-laws, others of having received lifelong rejection from them. They anticipate that their grandchildren will inhabit a more multicultural world than the one in which their children grew up.

Racially-aware white women with older children have had more eclectic experiences with race than their black counterparts. Some of them bore biracial children in the 1960s, some in the mid-1980s, and most in the 1970s. Some are no longer married to the fathers of their children. Some have had work that has taken them and their families across the United States and abroad; others have lived in isolated rural communities as well as inner cities; others have spent their adult lives in affluent suburban communities. The diversity of their children’s ages, of their residential experience, and of their work histories mirrors the eclectic nature of their biracial parenting experience

Most of the racially-aware white women with older children encountered strong opposition to their interracial marriages from their natal families and many perceive that some African Americans resented their marriages to black men. They, like other mothers of biracial children, recount experiencing painful challenges to their maternal relationship to their children from strangers. These mothers emphasize their endeavors to ensure their children’s development as self-assured cosmopolitan biracial people.

Black mothers who are actively parenting children include both stay-at-home moms and professional working mothers, both suburban and urban dwellers, and both mothers of teenagers and mothers of preschoolers. While their personal life stories are quite different and their perspectives on race also vary, all these women share the perception that race matters in their lives and in the lives of their children.

These black mothers make conscious choices to build positive racial identities in their children when they consider where to live, how to select appropriate schools for their children and opt for activities that enhance their children’s self-worth.  In conversations with their children, they describe people with reference to relevant racial and ethnic attributes. They attempt to create an environment in which their children feel free to express their experiences and feelings. In short, they consider the issues that all thoughtful parents consider but with particular attention to their racial salience.

Racially-aware black women with young children at home experience the challenges and rewards of rearing biracial children in their daily lives. They confront the challenges that white blindness, racial stereotypes, and racial discrimination create for them as black women and as parents of biracial children. They also experience the rewards of assisting their children to develop as self-confident biracial Americans in a society that increasingly acknowledges their existence.

The white mothers with whom we talked who are actively parenting children include mothers of primary school students and mothers of high school and college students. They include single mothers and mothers living with their husbands and children. All have given considerable thought to fostering their children’s identities as persons of color, though they acknowledge their naiveté about black cultural and social issues. They readily acknowledge that people whom they encounter are “always trying to figure out the mystery of biracial children.”

These racially-aware white mothers with young children at home confront many of the same challenges as their black counterparts and also some distinctive ones. They, too, have the challenge of fostering positive biracial identities and confronting strained relations across the color line. They have the additional challenge of coping with their own cultural naiveté about race in the United States. Having grown up as privileged white people in the United States, they have learned about and experienced aspects of racial realities as adults. Since they acknowledge their experiential naiveté about racial matters, they tend to defer to their spouses in interpreting and strategically responding to racial issues as they parent their children.

While most of the women with whom we talked consider that nurturing racial identity and promoting self-acceptance in their children are critical aspects of their mothering, several women avoid reference to race in preparing their children for adulthood. They are loving parents who care deeply about their children’s development, but as mothers they do not focus on racial matters.

Some of these woman are African American, often light-skinned, and some are European Americans. While they may be aware of racial issues, as mothers they are reactive rather than proactive with respect to race in the lives of their children.  Neither they nor their children stress racial identity. Insulated by their socioeconomic status from some racial concerns, these mothers are nevertheless aware of the potential importance of race matters in the lives of their children.

Common Parenting Themes

Irrespective of whether a woman considers that cultivating racial awareness is significant in parenting, her children are racially ambiguous in the world outside the home where her relationship to them is likely to be challenged at one time or another. Most but not all mothers with whom we talked believe that it is important to prepare their children proactively for the vicissitudes that they may encounter around race as they mature.

These women stress the importance of providing children with multicultural experiences and relationships. Although many mentioned the importance of living in a multicultural and multiracial neighborhood where families like theirs and people of color are more common, few do. Almost without exception, the mothers with whom we talked perceive that American society is becoming more racially diverse and that future biracial generations will find social acceptance more readily than earlier ones.

White women, whether mothers of young or adult children, discussed the opposition of their natal families to their interracial marriages more often than black women. Usually, but not always, white families eventually accepted the biracial family. Yet both black women with Jewish spouses and white Jewish women more frequently experienced protracted and unrelenting familial rejection than other women. Moreover, both black and white women of older children mentioned strained social relationships from both sides of the color line.

Mothers of older children recalled that as young parents, there was a dearth of information about biracial identity and issues available to new parents and fewer institutional supports for families like theirs than there are today. Citing the increased number of interracial marriages and biracial children, the women with whom we talked are optimistic about the social acceptance of children like theirs in the twenty-first century United States-perhaps accelerated by the President Obama’s diverse extended family.

Marion Kilson is a former dean of the Graduate School at Salem State College. She has written several books and many articles on African and African-American topics, including Claiming Place: Biracial Young Adults of the Post-Civil Rights Era. Florence Ladd is a former dean of Wellesley College and director of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. She is the author of a novel, Sarah’s Psalm, and her essays and poems have appeared widely.