The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking

8. “I PREFER TO SPEAK OF CULTURE”: WHITE MOTHERS OF MULTIRACIAL CHILDREN

EIGHT “I PREFER TO SPEAK OF CULTURE”: WHITE MOTHERS OF MULTIRACIAL CHILDREN TERRI A. KARIS IN THIS CHAPTER, I look at the racial discourse of white mothers of multiracial children and the social justice implications of their practices. In focusing on how white women think about, talk about, and construct race within multiracial families, I am following Hartigan’s lead: “In order to think differently about race we need to pay attention to the local settings in which racial identities are actually articulated, reproduced, and contested, resisting the urge to draw abstract conclusions about whiteness and blackness.”1 Hartigan draws attention to the family as “perhaps the most critical site for the generation and reproduction of racial formations” and as the location “that generates a great degree of variation in how racial categories gain and lose their significance.”2 He notes that the meanings given to race depend in large part on whether individual families reproduce heterogeneous or homogeneous racial categories, making multiracial families a rich site in which to explore how race is constructed , and how racial categories are inhabited and transformed. My chapter draws on a qualitative research study of seventeen white middle-class women who either are, or previously had been, in interracial relationships with black men, and who are the mothers of biracial children. The ways in which these women constructed race varied widely. Their stories reveal not only the heterogeneity within the category of white women in multiracial families, but also discontinuities within individual women’s 161 162 TERRI A. KARIS accounts. In their attempts to make sense of the differences and similarities that mattered in their lives, women’s racial constructions were fluid and unstable, shifting in response to different situations and relationships. While some of these women embraced their racial border crossing as a political opportunity to challenge racism and normative whiteness, they were not the norm among women in my study. More commonly, women claimed that there was nothing political about their interracial partnerships or their family lives, or offered complex and sometimes contradictory accounts in which they acknowledged awareness of the political implications of their own seemingly individual choices, yet backed away from linking that awareness to political commitments. I am particularly interested in exploring these contradictory accounts, as a means of understanding the obstacles that reduce the likelihood that women will translate knowledge into action. The very existence of multiracial families challenges practices of white racial bonding that prescribe white racial solidarity and loyalty, yet this social location may also impede women’s political action. Despite increased racial awareness, white women draw on the normative white practices of individualism and racial innocence, in part as a means of dissociating themselves and their family relationships from pathologizing stereotypes. Unfortunately, women’s efforts to distance from whiteness lead to color-blind approaches to race, and make it less likely that they will translate their personal experiences into political commitments and strategies that challenge racism. WHITE WOMEN IN MULTIRACIAL FAMILIES The social location of white women in multiracial families mediates the ways that white women construct race in general, and whiteness in particular. Frankenberg (1993) defines whiteness as having at least three dimensions: the structural advantage and privilege of whites; the “standpoint” of whiteness as a location from which to view oneself and others; and a set of taken for granted cultural practices, a white way of life that might often be considered “normal” or “American.”3 Whites are positioned to take their racialness for granted because whiteness is transparent as the universal norm, and issues of race often are not considered relevant to their day-to-day lives. Being in a racially mixed family means that whiteness loses some of its taken for granted status and privilege, and that white women face situations in which they no longer have the option to ignore race. For instance, when in public, a woman may be treated differently depending on whether she is alone or with her family.4 Experiencing this difference heightens a woman’s awareness of previously unnoticed racial privilege. At the same time, because of their relationships with black men, white women may be viewed by other whites as “less than white.” While these “I PREFER TO SPEAK OF CULTURE” 163 women still have white skin, the privilege and status of whiteness are mediated by racialized gender prescriptions. Moon argues that whiteness, like other identities, is developed through...