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  • Multi-Racial Parents: Mixed Families, Generational Change, and the Future of Race by Miri Song
  • Wei Ming Dariotis (bio)
Multi-Racial Parents: Mixed Families, Generational Change, and the Future of Race, by Miri Song. New York: New York University Press, 2017. 192 pp. $27 paper. ISBN: 978-1-4798-2590-5.

Miri Song’s Multi-Racial Parents is a study of sixty-two people of mixed-heritage backgrounds who are parents in the United Kingdom. Although there have been several publications on parenting mixed-race children, starting with Maria P. P. Root and Matt Kelley’s Multiracial Child Resource Book: Living Complex Identities (2003) and notably Sharon Chang’s Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World (2016), Song’s is the first book-length study of mixed-race people who are parenting mixed-race children. Other publications on mixed-race families include Kimberly McClain DaCosta’s “Making Multiracial Families,” part of Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (2007); Wei Ming Dariotis and Grace J. Yoo’s “Obama Mamas and Mixed Race: Hoping for ‘a More Perfect Union,’” a chapter in Andrew J. Jolivette’s Obama and the Biracial Factor (2012); and short narratives in Kip Fulbeck’s Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids (2010).

Song conducted in-depth interviews with her subjects, who identified as black/white, South Asian/white, or East Asian/white. Like Cathy Tashiro, whose Standing on Both Feet: Voices of Older Mixed Race Americans (2012) also focuses on black/white and Asian/white people, Song notes the need for studies of multiple minority mixed-heritage people. However, the prevalence of the racial binary in her research privileges whiteness and focuses on those with one white parent, particularly because of “debates about whether some multiracial people would wish to claim a White identity for their children” (11). This allows Song to explore questions of cultural persistence versus “dilution” (122), through which she concludes that while some mixed-heritage people feel less connected to ethnic identities as they become generationally “removed” and increasingly “white” or “British” (in culture and in partner choice), others may reclaim ethnic identities both by choosing partners of color (not necessarily with whom they share ethnicity) and by choosing cultural immersion. [End Page 445]

These choices are often connected to how these people as parents envision their children’s futures, which some parents connect with the idea of cosmopolitanism. As explored in Camilla Fojas’s Cosmopolitanism in the Americas (2005), cosmopolitanism has been more often associated with urbanism and modernity. Yet, as one of Song’s respondents says, it is also a term that mixed people can associate with being “people of the world” (87). Song’s respondents demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is a complex notion that does not simply correspond to “post-racial” universalism––in fact, Song finds it expressed as solidarity with those who have racial, ethnic, religious, sexuality or “other” differences from normalized identities. However, claiming a cosmopolitan identity does not necessarily correspond to feeling kinship with other people of mixed heritage; only about half of Song’s respondents felt such a bond, in comparison to about one-third of respondents to a 2015 Pew study in the United States. One of Song’s respondents felt that making such connections with other mixed-heritage people constituted “a healing mission” (143).

One of Song’s most interesting and telling findings is that the way in which mixed-heritage parents raise their children is not highly correlated to how they identify their children on institutional forms. While 65 percent of her respondents chose to identify their children as “mixed” on official forms, nearly a quarter identified their children as “White,” and 12 percent either refused to categorize or selected “I don’t know” or “I can’t say.” None of them identified their children as belonging monoracially to a minority group, even when the child had one white grandparent and three black (or Asian) grandparents, for example. Many of those respondents who identified their children as multiracial also raised their children to have pride in and connection to their ethnic heritages. Many of those who chose to identify their children as white...

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