Interracial Families Research Articles

Pearson v. Pearson: A Story of Slavery, Marriage, and the West, Told in Black and White

This Article is a narrative history of a relationship between a white man named Richard and a Black woman named Laura that started in slavery and ended twenty-seven years later in a trial over whether they were husband and wife. The story follows some of the usual plotlines. Richard purchased Laura at a slave sale and brought her to his home in Missouri; he then married a white woman and they had a daughter together. Within a few years, however, that marriage fell apart, and soon after, Richard allegedly freed Laura and the two of them went to California and built a life together. Twenty years later, after Richard died, Richard’s long-lost daughter brought suit in a California courtroom. She sought to eject Laura from the home she shared with Richard on the theory she, rather than Laura, was Richard’s sole surviving heir and entitled to his large estate. This Article recreates the story of Richard and Laura to offer an intimate glimpse into the complexities of interracial relationships during slavery and the decades that followed. It is built out of the trial transcripts—which until now have remained hidden for 150 years—and relies heavily on the actual words of the lawyers, witnesses, and litigants to shape the narrative. The uniqueness of this approach is also what provides its value. Relying on their words and voices, this Article shines a light on how the parties and the participants saw their world, not on how others saw it for them. Richard and Laura’s story is also noteworthy in that it spans several decades and unfolds over several milestones—slavery, the Gold Rush, and westward expansion—creating the opportunity to expand our understanding of the individual experiences of people involved in Black-white relationships beyond what is typically found in the literature. Hearing about their story, and about the courtroom battle over the legitimacy of their relationship, provides context for why interracial families, even today, continue to suffer from minor indignities and open hostilities simply because they broke the norm.

Constructing ambivalent masculinity and constant femininity in interracial families: Media representations of African-Chinese marriage on Xiaohongshu

Interracial marriage has increasingly gained visibility on Chinese social media platforms, especially African-Chinese marriage which has been popularly represented, sparking heated discussions publically. However, although several studies have touched upon interracial marriage with analyses through political and geographical lenses, few studies investigated the media representations and mediated comments towards African-Chinese marriage in China as it has become a hot topic on Chinese social media platforms recently. To fill this niche, this study explores how African-Chinese marriage is represented on Chinese social media through mediated public comments, and what ideological implication of represented subjectivity of male and female in African-Chinese marriage. Through feminist critical discourse analysis and intersectional perspective, it found that ambivalent masculinity and constant femininity are constructed in African-Chinese marriage through comments where Chinese males are predominantly represented as positive figures, while African men are greatly dehumanised and criticised. As for women, although public attitudes are distinctive towards Chinese and African women, they, sharing the collective identity of females, are restricted in the traditional conception of gender dichotomy. Finally, the social contextualisation of such representations and potential ideological implications will be generally discussed.

The Experiences of Asian Americans Who Intermarry in the United States: A Qualitative Study

Intermarriage is noted to be a difficult adjustment as culture, language, and family expectations can clash. Given the rising intermarried population and the challenges they may face, social workers need an up-to-date understanding of these couples’ experiences to better provide services. Surveys and interviews with 10 Asian women and 3 Asian men who intermarried were conducted from 2020 to 2021. Using grounded theory coding, each author on our biracial (Asian and white) team read interviews and identified themes. We identified five themes from the data: Societal Press, White Privilege, Family Relations, Communication, and Parental Responsibilities. Social work practitioners may employ these results in providing culturally sensitive strength-based services for interracial families.

“Unlawful Intimacy”: Mixed-Race Families, Miscegenation Law, and the Legal Culture of Progressive Era Mississippi

AbstractThis article examines the enforcement of anti-miscegenation law in Progressive Era Mississippi by focusing on a series of unlawful cohabitation prosecutions of interracial couples in Natchez. It situates efforts to police and punish mixed-race families within the broader legal culture of Jim Crow, as politicians, judges, and district attorneys sought stricter enforcement of morals laws, including those barring interracial cohabitation. This article argues that the historic prerogative of white men to choose their sexual and domestic partners undermined the illegality of interracial marriage. Lynching deterred Black men from cohabiting with white women, but prosecutions for “unlawful cohabitation” did not effectively punish white men and Black women who formed lasting partnerships. This article relies on extensive research in local court records that reveal that prosecutions of white men and Black women often resulted in fines and, in many cases, had little effect on these mixed-race families. In Natchez and elsewhere, eugenic ideologies of “white racial purity” were no match for a patriarchal legal culture that gave white men leeway to ignore the law when it suited them, even amid outward denunciations of miscegenation. In Mississippi, many white men did not view relationships between white men and Black women as a clear threat to white supremacy, creating space for some interracial families to survive into the twentieth century.

Mixing races, maintaining racism? Considering the connection between interracial families, social distance, and racial inequality

AbstractResearchers often assume that close interracial relationships, especially intermarriage, simultaneouslyreflectandcausea weakening of racial and ethnic boundaries and inequality between groups. In fact, interracial marriage is often used as a measure of social distance. We question those assumptions, noting the salient boundaries and durable inequalities that remain despite decades of increases in interracial relationships. We begin with historical examples, showing how, for much of US history, there was no expectation that interracial sexual encounters would reduce racial inequality or weaken boundaries. Incorporating critical race theory and intersectional perspectives, we describe how the impact of interracial intimate relationships is both gendered and classed. We argue that research on contemporary intimate interracial relationships (friendships, dating, and marriage) explains why such relationships may have little impact on attitudes, inequality, and the rigidity of boundaries and call for future research to consider dynamicswithinthe family as well.

"Nothing is ever going to change if we don't start advocating for our child.": Community-level disclosure and stigma management strategies among parents of internationally adopted children living with PHIV.

The number of internationally adopted children living with perinatally-acquired HIV (IACP) in the U.S. is increasing, yet little is known about their families' experiences navigating HIV disclosure within a community context. This paper examines the lived experiences of adoptive parents as they navigate HIV disclosure and manage stigma toward their adopted children within their broader communities. A purposive sample of parents of IACP was recruited at two pediatric infectious disease clinics and via closed Facebook groups. Parents completed two semi-structured interviews approximately one year apart. Interview questions included strategies parents used to reduce the impact of community level stigma that their child is likely to encounter as they mature. Interviews were analyzed using Sort and Sift, Think and Shift analytic approach. All parents (n = 24) identified as white and most (n = 17) had interracial families, with children adopted from 11 different countries (range: age at adoption 1-15 years; range: age at first interview 2-19 years). Analyses revealed that parents serve as advocates for their child by both supporting more public HIV disclosure at times, but also applying indirect strategies such as working to improve outdated sex education material. Knowledge of HIV disclosure laws empowered parents to make informed decisions about who, if anyone, in the community needed to know their child's HIV status. Families with IACP would benefit from HIV disclosure support/training and community-based HIV stigma reduction interventions.

Deep-Rooted Racism in Interracial Families from São Paulo

Resumo O racismo estrutural é uma realidade na sociedade brasileira e pode ser manifestado no interior de famílias inter-raciais. As crianças e as pessoas adultas que experienciam sentimentos de aceitação ou de rejeição nas dinâmicas familiares desenvolvem diferentes formas de ver a si mesmas, os outros e o mundo ao redor. Este estudo teve por objetivo avaliar as percepções de suporte emocional, rejeição parental na infância e discriminação cotidiana entre pessoas brancas, pardas e pretas. Participaram 175 pessoas, 80% do gênero feminino, com idade da amostra total variando de 18-39 anos (M = 24; DP = 5,11). Cento e três participantes se identificaram como branca/o, 42, como preta/o e 30, como parda/o. Todos responderam um formulário online composto pela Escala de Lembranças de Práticas Parentais, Escala de Discriminação Cotidiana e questões sociodemográficas. O resultado do teste Manova indicou que não houve diferença estatisticamente significativa entre as pessoas brancas, pardas e pretas em relação ao suporte emocional e à rejeição parental. Quanto à percepção de discriminação, houve diferença estatisticamente significativa nas subescalas de Tratamento Injusto [X²(2) = 17,360; p < 0,001] e Rejeição Pessoal [X²(2) = 27,970; p < 0,001], pessoas pretas apresentaram maiores médias que pardas e brancas, respectivamente. Discute-se a importância de falar sobre racismo nas relações familiares. Espera-se percepções de rejeição parental menor para pessoas brancas e de discriminação cotidiana maior para pardas e pretas.

Adverse Childhood Experiences in Latinx Families: A Comparison between Intraracial and Interracial Families

Racial/ethnic minorities are prone to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), posing a concern over social justice. However, the influence of interracial family structure has been rarely discussed. Considering that 26% of Hispanic individuals form interracial marriages in the U.S., we need to examine whether interracial family structure matters for ACEs disparities in Latinx families. We hypothesized that there were differences in ACEs between intraracial and interracial families in the Latinx population. A Latinx sample was collected from the Fragile Family and Child Well-being Studies with 1113 children of two Latinx parents and 397 children of interracial parents (e.g., White mother/Latinx father, Black mother/Latinx father, Latinx mother/White father, Latinx mother/Black father). Negative binomial models revealed a higher overall ACEs score among children in interracial families (β = 0.54, p < 0.05). Compared to children with two Latinx parents, children in each interracial family group were prone to higher risks of different ACEs. For example, children with Latinx mothers and Black fathers were more likely to experience parental separation (OR = 2.33), household material hardship (OR = 1.64), physical abuse (OR = 6.01), and psychological abuse (OR = 3.49) than children in intraracial Latinx families. Based on our findings, we call for culturally responsive ACEs prevention and intervention that consider the unique stressors of interracial families, to promote the health and well-being of racial/ethnic minorities.

The Weight of the Past: Mixed-Race Materiality in Post-Racial Asian American Literature

Abstract I examine the dematerialization of mixed-race characters in contemporary Asian American literature. Reading Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014) alongside Emily X. R. Pan’s The Astonishing Color of After (2018), I trace depictions of characters who momentarily imagine and are ultimately threatened by the disappearance of their bodies—a disappearance that echoes nineteenth- and early twentieth-century portrayals of mixed-race identity in passing narratives. During a time when mixed-race individuals are hypervisible in the United States, why are Asian mixed-race bodies dematerialized? Why do texts return to the narrative paths and tools of passing narratives? I argue that dematerialization is, unexpectedly, an enactment of post-racial discourse, which casts mixed-race individuals as harbingers of a raceless future, ignoring the lived experiences and histories of mixed-race people and interracial families. By recalling passing narratives, Ng and Pan highlight this failure to detect mixed-race realities—and the importance of recovering mixed-race pasts and presents. In the face of post-racial discourse, Everything I Never Told You and The Astonishing Color of After refuse to render mixed-race experiences immaterial. Rejecting co-opted futures and reclaiming forgotten pasts, these novels recast passing narratives to insist on the materiality of their mixed-race protagonists.

The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America by Sarah Coleman

Reviewed by: The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America by Sarah Coleman Kathryn Schumaker (bio) The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America. By Sarah Coleman. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. $35.00 cloth; $35.00 ebook) Historians of immigration in the twentieth-century United States have long noted how restrictive policies created a class of unauthorized people who lived in the shadow of the law. At the same time, the 1960s spurred a revolution in individual rights, expanding the scope of claims all persons—including noncitizens—could make through the Fourteenth Amendment. Sarah Coleman's The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America examines the people caught in between these two important developments, exploring the battles over the rights of unauthorized immigrants. This well-written and thoroughly researched book tells an often-surprising story that reveals how the states—and not the federal government—were frequently the laboratories of restrictive immigration policies in the late twentieth century. Coleman begins with Plyler v. Doe (1982), a landmark United States Supreme Court case that questioned the constitutionality of a Texas state law that allowed school districts to charge tuition to students who could not prove their legal status. The Supreme Court had ruled a decade earlier that the Fourteenth Amendment did not include a constitutional right to education. Could Texas charge tuition to unauthorized families or exclude them from public schools entirely? The first two chapters examine how these questions vexed the Carter and Reagan administrations, where officials saw unauthorized children as sympathetic figures, but also recognized that immigration [End Page 449] was a hot-button issue with voters. Though unauthorized immigrants were a convenient political target for members of state legislatures—especially in their inability to respond at the ballot box—officials were wary of punishing children. The Supreme Court eventually ruled the law unconstitutional in 1982. But the concerns about childhood that restrained some policymakers and judges in Plyler did little to deter efforts by state legislatures to target adults. Amid press warnings that linked rising unemployment rates to unauthorized workers, states passed laws criminalizing the employers who hired them. The next two chapters examine how this issue scrambled traditional partisan divides. The Chamber of Commerce and many Republicans opposed a federal law because it targeted business owners. Latino advocacy groups recognized that the law risked the possibility that, fearful of prosecution, employers could refuse to hire any identifiably Latino person. Ultimately, these concerns contributed to the passage of the 1986 federal immigration law that included (largely unenforceable) sanctions for employers, but also prohibited discrimination on the basis of alienage and national origin in hiring. The final chapters focus on the 1990s, when both political parties lurched rightward on immigration. The fifth chapter examines how immigration again came to the fore amid an economic downturn, culminating in Clinton-era welfare reform that ended the ability of noncitizens to access public benefits, including cash assistance and food stamps, regardless of their legal status. The final chapter explains how states paved the way for new restrictive immigration policies, leading Congress to ultimately buttress the authority of state and local officials to carry out immigration enforcement in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The Walls Within is a story of lawyers, judges, policy advisers, senators, and other elites as they made immigration law and policy in courtrooms and offices. Unauthorized immigrants existed abstractly for these people, especially for politicians who sought to use [End Page 450] immigration policy to woo conservative white voters (in the case of Clinton) or appeal to Latino voters (as Reagan did). The book, therefore, has less to say about how these legal and policy changes affected immigrants' everyday lives. Nonetheless it offers a clear policy and legal history of the fraught issue of immigrants' rights in the modern United States, especially in its contributions to the growing scholarship on federalism and immigration. [End Page 451] Kathryn Schumaker KATHRYN SCHUMAKER is a historian at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Troublemakers: Students' Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s and is at work on a new book project about interracial families in...

Mothering ‘Outsider’ Children: White Women in Black/White Interracial Families in Ireland

The mixed-race family constellation has emerged as a regular feature of the Irish familial landscape. Such a demographic change invariably leads to the increased presence of white women who are mothering across racialised boundaries. Moreover, in the Irish context, the racial category of whiteness is privileged at a structural level and remains a central organising principle of Irishness as a mode of national belonging. This paper, therefore, sets out to address the specific gap in the literature related to the racialised experiences of the white mother of mixed-race (i.e., black African/white Irish) children in contemporary Ireland as these women are, in effect, mothering ‘outsider’ children in a context of white supremacy. More specifically, how does the positioning of these women’s mixed-race children impact their subjectivities as mothers categorised normatively as white and Irish? Framed by critical whiteness literature, this paper draws on in-depth interviews with twelve white Irish mothers. Data analysis broadly revealed three themes as relates to the women’s negotiations of the racialising discourses and practices which impact their family units. Findings suggest that these women no longer occupy the default position of whiteness as a category of racial privilege and a condition of ‘structured invisibility’. Perhaps, most significantly, the lived reality of these women disturbs the hegemonic conflation of the categories white and Irish. This paper, therefore, extends our theoretical understanding of both whiteness and mixed-race studies.

Marginal Citizens: Interracial intimacies and the incarceration of Japanese Canadians, 1942–1949

AbstractFollowing Japan’s 1941 attacks on Hawai’i and Hong Kong, Canada relocated, detained, and exiled citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry. Many interracial families, however, were exempted from this racial project called the internment. The form of the exemption was an administrative permit granted to its holder on the basis of their marital or patrilineal proximity to whiteness. This article analyzes these permits relying on archival research and applying a critical race feminist lens to explore how law was constitutive of race at this moment in Canadian history. I argue that the permits recategorized interracial intimacies towards two racial ends: to differentiate the citizen from the “enemy alien”; and to regulate the interracial family according to patriarchal common law principles. This article nuances received narratives of law as an instrument of racial exclusion by documenting the way in which a new inclusive state measure sustained old exclusions.

Interracial Comparisons of Intimate Partner Violence Among Military Perpetrators.

Interracial violence is a high-profile issue in the United States; however, there is little empirical research on interracial intimate partner violence (IPV). Interracial relationships are becoming more common. However, interracial couples continue to face stressors (e.g., discrimination) that likely impact the relationship (e.g., IPV) than their monoracial counterparts. Research indicates that military populations more likely oppose interracial marriages than nonmilitary counterparts. Yet, no study to date has investigated IPV within military monoracial and interracial couples. To understand the intersecting effects of race/ethnicity among military couples, this study investigates male perpetrated IPV in interracial and monoracial relationships. Using structural equation modeling, this study sample contains information about 449 male veterans from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (1994-2008): Waves I and IV. Findings indicate that (a) White and Black veterans are more violent in monoracial relationships, meanwhile, Latino veterans have a higher IPV prevalence in interracial relationships; (b) Black and White veterans were more likely to use alcohol and other drugs (AOD) after IPV perpetration in interracial relationships, in contrast to Latino veterans' post IPV perpetrations AOD use in monoracial relationships; (c) veteran mental health status was affected after perpetration of IPV, similar to the effects experienced after combat. In an attempt to address the lack of research on the characteristics associated with interracial violence this study addresses the following questions: (a) Are veterans in interracial families more likely to commit IPV and use of alcohol and other drugs (AOD) than in monoracial families? (b) Among the military samples, is AOD a facilitator for IPV?

Relationships Between Parents-In-Law and Children-In-Law of Differing Racial and Ethnic Backgrounds

In-law relationships have drawn recent interest from family scholars. Historical trends demonstrate a significant rise in newlyweds marrying someone of a different race or ethnicity. Given this growing population of inter-racial marriage, the need to know more about these couples and their families is paramount. This article describes four themes that emerged from qualitative interviews with nine parents-in-law discussing their relationships with their child-in-law who is of a different race. The overarching themes identified for in-laws included: being initially hesitant based on race and/or culture; managing barriers pertaining to communication, language, and/or culture; differences that were enriching to the in-law relationship; and bonding related to shared minority status. Based on these findings, social workers may assume a supportive role for members of interracial families as they navigate not only social barriers but also their in-law relationships.

Regular White People Things: The Presence of White Fragility in Interracial Families

ObjectiveTo better understand how biracial/multiracial millennials make meaning of their multiple identities and racial socialization messages within their interracial families.BackgroundA small body of research suggests that the content of parents' race messages to their biracial/multiracial children may have profound social and psychological ramifications. Changing American demographics, including the growth of biracial/multiracial populations, have created a demand for careful examination of this group's racialized experiences.MethodTo examine the racial socialization experiences of biracial/multiracial participants (n = 30), this qualitative substudy used thematic analysis, an intersectional theoretical framework, and a phenomenological approach in analyzing open‐ended responses.ResultsWe found that interracial families employed a number of racial socialization messages, including those that extol mainstream cultural values as well as communications that fuel race‐related stress and identity politics.ConclusionFindings highlight the prevalence of dominant Western cultural values and racial silence in the socialization messages within interracial families and the reality of racism and racial awareness among individuals identifying as biracial/multiracial.ImplicationsThe findings in this study suggest a need to examine racial socialization as a function of parents' salient identities, including gender, race, and immigration status.

Effects of ethnic minority adolescents’ peer networks on academic achievement: the case of Damunhwa adolescents in South Korea

Adolescents’ peer networks are integral part of their lives in school. In South Korea, where the demographics of adolescent population is rapidly changing with a growing influx of immigrants, providing opportunities for quality education for adolescents from immigrant and/or interracial families (called damnuhwa families in South Korea) has been one of the major social challenges. We examine those adolescents’ school lives with a focus on their peer networks. Using peer network data from 4575 adolescents from 11 public secondary schools, we found that adolescents’ in-degree centrality in expressive and instrumental peer networks had a significant positive association with their academic achievement. Our multilevel modeling analysis further indicated that such association did not vary by student groups (i.e., damunhwa vs. non-damunhwa adolescents). This finding suggests that peer support is crucial for student learning regardless of student background. At the same time, however, we also found that damunhwa adolescents tended to have lower levels of in-degree centrality and reciprocity, suggesting that their access to social capital via peer networks is relatively limited, compared to non-damunhwa peers. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

RACISMOS E ANTIRRACISMOS NAS FAMÍLIAS INTER-RACIAIS

The book “Interracial families: tensions between color and love”by Lia Vainer Schucman, 2018, analyzes through interviews, five interracial families, seeking to understand how the issues of color, race and racism are lived and meant by different family members and transmitted between generations. It also deals with the intrapsychic and interpsychic dimensions of the experiences, to demonstrate that within these families it is possible to build strategies to face racism, and the embrace and elaboration of violence, but this is also the locus of legitimation and racist experience. At the end, he points out: i) the need to recognize the damages that cause inequality in the social experience of race and racialization of subjects; ii) racial literacy as the appropriation of a new way of being, acting and thinking to overcome whiteness.

A ‘class of no political weight’? Interracial Marriage, Mixed Race Children and Land Rights in Southern New Zealand, 1840s-1880s

ABSTRACTInterracial marriage was a defining feature of interaction between local Ngāi Tahu and newcomers in southern New Zealand from the early nineteenth century. Scholarship has explored the importance of such relationships to development of New Zealand’s early resource-based economies and to colonial assimilation policies. However, the experiences of cross-cultural households and families in colonial New Zealand are less well documented.Using a body of writing produced by fathers and their mixed-race children in response to land claims investigations in the mid-nineteenth century, this article explores the political, economic and social world of interracial families in southern New Zealand. The correspondence over land rights reveals the ongoing importance of kinship ties through generations as colonial expansion impinged on these communities. Through petitioning and letter writing, fathers and children contested what marriage and family meant and strategically asserted their individual and collective identity in the face of increasing land dispossession and economic hardship.

From my own flesh and blood: An exploratory examination of discrimination from family for Black/White Multiracial people

This qualitative study examined instances of racial discrimination from family members among 36 Black/White Multiracial individuals. Forms of discrimination included stereotyping, identity invalidation, racist comments, lack of acknowledgment, vicarious discrimination, and negativity. Participants responded to discrimination by distancing themselves from family members, resisting, and/or dismissing discrimination. Discriminatory experiences made race more salient for participants. Participants reported feeling hurt, alienated, and confused following discrimination. Implications of findings for social workers counseling Multiracial people and interracial families are discussed.

Minha mãe pintou meu pai de branco: afetos e negação da raça em famílias interraciais

Este artigo tem como objetivo central descrever as formas pelas quais o negro, a história negra e a ancestralidade negra têm sido negadas no discurso das famílias inter-raciais e suas dinâmicas de interação familiar. Para esta compreensão apresentamos o estudo de caso de duas famílias com o intuito de pensar qual o lugar da raça nestas dinâmicas. Os resultados obtidos nesta pesquisa apontaram que o mecanismo psicossocial de negação é uma das diversas formas de negociar os conflitos e tensões raciais que se enunciam no interior destas famílias.