Examining interracial family narratives using critical multiracial theory

ABSTRACT

Our family stories shape us. Individual, layered, and metafamily narratives about race act as socializing agents that teach family members about race, family, and the entanglements of these two institutions. The purpose of this study is to highlight the use of critical multiracial theory to analyze interracial family stories. In-depth interviews with 21 multiracial adults revealed that monoracism, racism, and colorism are useful tenets for analyzing encounters of racism within the family; combatting ahistoricism is a useful tenet for analyzing antimiscegenation and political stratification experiences; and (challenging) a monoracial paradigm of race is a useful tenet for analyzing multiracial individuals’ experiences of feeling forced into one racial category by some family members but supported to express their multiple races freely by others.

KEYWORDS:

• critical multiracial theory (MultiCrit)
• interracial families
• family narratives
• colorism
• critical interpersonal and family communication

Notes

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4 Saulny, “Census Data Presents Rise in Multiracial Population of Youths.”

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6 Diane Hughes et al., “Parents’ Ethnic-Racial Socialization Practices: A Review of Research and Directions for Future Study,” Developmental Psychology 42, no. 5 (2006): 747–70.

7 Annabelle L. Atkin and Hyung Chol Yoo, “Familial Racial-Ethnic Socialization of Multiracial American Youth: A Systematic Review of the Literature with MultiCrit,” Developmental Review 53 (2019): 1–28, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2019.100869.

8 In this manuscript I use terms like people of color (POC), families of color, or minoritized individuals over terms like Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC) or racial minorities because (1) I want to move away from the assumption that nonwhite individuals are a minority in terms of world population and instead highlight that these racialized groups are minoritized by rhetoric, racism, practices of injustice, etc. that normalize whiteness; (2) it most closely matches language used by participants in the study; and (3) some participants identify as both POC and BIPOC.

9 Jordan Soliz and Christine E. Rittenour, “Family as an Intergroup Arena,” in The Handbook of Intergroup Communication, ed. Howard Giles (London: Routledge, 2012), 331–43.

10 Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

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24 Ibid.

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34 Atkin and Yoo, “Familial Racial-Ethnic Socialization of Multiracial American Youth,” 4.

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36 Waring, “Beyond ‘Code-Switching.’”

37 Abby L. Ferber, White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

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45 Crawford and Alaggia, “The Best of Both Worlds?”

46 O’Donoghue, “White Mothers Negotiating Race and Ethnicity.”

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48 Franco, Katz, Pickens, and Brunsma, “From My Own Flesh and Blood.”

49 Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, “From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally about Women, Race and Social Control,” UCLA Law Review 59 (2012): 1418–72, https://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/59-6-1.pdf.

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51 Moore and Manning, “What Counts as Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication Research?”

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54 Moore and Manning, “What Counts as Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication Research?”

55 Franco, Katz, Pickens, and Brunsma, “From My Own Flesh and Blood.”

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