The New York Times ran a new entry in its amazing mixed-race series yesterday that resonated with me. The article and its accompanying video pointed to some of the challenges parents of multiracial children face, such as the constant questions they get about why their children look different from them and how this makes them feel unaccepted.
It went even farther for one couple the Times interviewed.
People seem to notice nothing but race. Strangers gawk. Make rude and racist comments. Tell offensive jokes. Ask impolite questions….It is a life of small but relentless reminders that old tensions about race remain.
My experience has not been that negative. I haven’t gotten as many questions and comments about how my children look as some friends who are also parents of multiracial children. Amaya, my older daughter, has darker skin, hair and eyes than I do, but she has such similar facial features to mine that people figure out that she’s my biological daughter pretty quickly. She doesn’t look that different from me.
On the other hand, Selma, my younger daughter, is darker and resembles me less. When I am alone with her in public, I notice that I get more of the inappropriate, overly personal questions. I get more stares. An older gentleman recently asked me if she was adopted, and when I told her that she wasn’t and that she looked just like her dad, he mentioned that his grandson was adopted from Guatemala. Maybe he was just trying to connect with me.
It was harder to explain away a coworker’s comment that my kids look nothing like me, with their brown hair and dark eyes. What was she getting at? All I could think to say at the time was “that’s what happens when your husband is brown.”
I try not to get too upset by those encounters, since they are relatively infrequent for me. I generally blame them on Americans’ odd curiosity about race. But it’s annoying when people lack discretion, asking questions that are really none of their business, especially when those questions seem not to come from a place of acceptance. Plus, I think people should be more accustomed to encountering mixed-race kids. Since 2000, the multiracial population among American children has increased almost 50 percent, to 4.2 million.
There are times when I’ve had enough, when I am just waiting for someone to say the wrong thing so that I can react. A friend who adopted a multiracial son recently told me she feels constantly on guard, ready to pounce on the next person who dares stare at her son in an unkind way or make a comment she perceives as racist.
The New York Times article reminded me that can wear on a person. ”There is a lot of stress when people are looking at you and scrutinizing and judging. Even though you might not hear that, you feel it,” Edward Dragan, who with his wife adopted three biracial children years ago, told the paper. He and his wife are white.
The Dragans’ adoptive daughter, Heather Greenwood, who was featured in the Times story, is the child of a black man and white woman. Greenwood married a white man and is now enduring difficulties similar to what her parents experienced raising her. She gets berated by strangers who want to know how she could be related to her two lighter-skinned daughters.
“People would ask me if I’m their nanny.” she said; “Or, oh my gosh, where did she get the blonde hair? Where did their eyes come from? And then they’ll be like, eck, must be the dad, like I had nothing to do with it.”
It’s clear how much this hurts her. My eyes filled with tears when she told her story. I cringed when people asked her why she looks different from her kids.
How did you feel? Do parents of multiracial children have reason to feel hurt by the stares, insensitive comments and probing questions? Are we being oversensitive?
