Colors of Love

By Francis Wardle
Issue 96, September/October 1999

It was twenty-two years ago that my first child was born. While the typical anxieties of a first-time father preoccupied me then, I later realized this was also the start of another, parallel adventure. When I walked into a card store after my child's birth and selected an appropriate announcement card, the store clerk commented, "I think you have the wrong one, sir."

"Why?" I reflexively responded.

"The baby on the card is brown," she answered, staring at my pallid, white English skin that had just survived a long Missouri winter.

The birth of my first child was the beginning of a journey to raise four beautiful children; it was also the beginning of a struggle to raise four proudly multiracial children in a society preoccupied with race, racial categories, and specific racial identities. Both of these journeys have, of course, intertwined and overlapped. My four children are now 22, 19, 16, and 14 years old. And, while most of the approaches to raising healthy multiracial children are the same as raising healthy children of any race, unfortunately that is not enough in today's America.

Since the 1960s--that radical time in US history when the civil rights laws were passed; colleges and universities were integrated; and old ideas on race, prejudice, and social values were challenged (anti-miscegenation laws were struck down in 1967)--there has been a steady growth of interracial relationships and, subsequently, multiracial and multiethnic children. (In this article, "multiracial" and "multiethnic" will be used to describe children whose parents come from different ethnic and/or racial backgrounds.)

How many? We don't know. We don't know because the US Census Bureau does not record multiracial children, and because there is no accepted definition of them. Most scholars put the population, birth through 18, at between 2 and 10 million. According to Maria Root, since 1970 the number of biracial babies has grown faster than monoracial babies. More than 1 million first-generation biracial infants (one black parent and one white parent) have been born since then.1

This increase is also true of multiethnic infants. Any casual observation of Head Start programs, schools, and community events substantiates these figures, and most of us have friends who belong to interracial or interethnic families.

In struggling to raise our multiracial children, my wife and I--as good academics--searched the libraries and bookstores, and sought the advice of other professionals. We wanted to know what our children's identity should be and how we should support it; how to help them respond to insensitive and racist comments; and how we could find positive role models and appropriate visual and educational materials. We found none, other than the occasional advice that "society sees them as black, so you must raise them as black."

Considering the number of children and the apparent acceptance of these new families by a large part of the American public, there is a surprising dearth of information about them for parents, educators, and psychologists. It would seem that a distinctively new population would generate a variety of self-help books, classes, and educational materials.

Over the past 15 years, there has been a proliferation of classes, books, and conferences on diversity. I teach a graduate class called "Diversity in the Classroom." The purpose of the class is to help teachers adapt their teaching styles, classroom approaches, and curricula content to effectively meet the needs of students from diverse populations: racial and ethnic diversity, exceptional students (those with special needs and those who are gifted), gender (girls), and children who don't speak English.

Of the ten books I use as resources for this class, only one even mentions children who are of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds. But this book still doesn't provide assistance for teachers in meeting the complex needs of these children and their families. Multiracial and multiethnic children are simply ignored in the current diversity movement.

This absence of information about what a colleague of mine calls the invisible population is a direct result of our country's preoccupation with and difficulties around the issues of race and ethnicity. Our current scholarly view of racial and ethnic diversity is based on the following popularly accepted models:

1) This country's population is divided into distinct racial and ethnic groups: African American, Asian/Pacific Island, Native American, Hispanic (Latino/a), and white--what I call census categories;
2) each of these categories constitutes a distinctly different, exclusive, homogeneous, and value-laden cultural group;