CONTEXT:
This article, "4 Challenges of Raising Mixed-Race Children" was posted on WAHM.com, an online magazine for work-at-home moms (as stated on the banner on its homepage). The pink and green website is flanked with ads and seems to cover a variety of topics with articles ranging from "How to Avoid Job Scams" to "6 Kid-Friendly Thanksgiving Traditions to Start This Year." The article pictured above has no listed author, and outlines the 4 major challenges of raising interracial children. The goal of the article was stated in the introduction: "Knowing what these challenges will be can help you prepare to meet them so that both you and your children have an easier time coping."
Course REading:
Everybody learns some combination, some version, of the rules of racial classification, and of her own racial identity, often without obvious teaching or conscious inculcation. Thus we are inserted in a comprehensively racialized social structure. Race becomes "common sense"-- a way of comprehending, explaining, and acting in the world (Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 60).
Analysis:
Omi and Winant argue that race is a social construct, the rules of which we learn unconsciously without “obvious teaching.” Race then becomes “common sense” and allows each individual to understand the world and those who live in it. However, this “common sense” aspect of race begins to break down when talking about interracial people because their mixed race is not common or easily accepted, recognized, and understood. Through this, race slides between the White/People of Color binary, as it does not fit precisely into one category or the other. As noted in the article, children who are interracial can have trouble 1) feeling wanted, 2) constructing their self-identity, 3) dealing with hurtful comments, and 4) being polite in the face of adversity. While perhaps a helpful guide for parents, the language used in this article serves to reinforce and solidify the “racialized social structure” that Omi and Winant reference. The introduction, quoted in the contextualization above, refers to having, or being, a multi-racial child as a situation that requires “coping,” as if a race that did not fall cleanly into the binary was a disease to be lived with, the symptoms merely mitigated. The article suggests passivity when broached with racially focused questions, prompting the children to “hold their heads high,” “give short and polite answers,” and “don’t make a big deal about peoples’ questions.” Furthermore, the article implies that this passive approach is associated with “dignity and self-respect,” whereas responding in a more forward way would be rude, even if that tactic questions the hegemonic ideas surrounding race and America’s racialized social structure. In fact, allowing people to ask invasive questions that reinforce the race binary (“What are you?” or “Is that your real mother?” as cited by the article) only gives them consent to ask again, indicating that those questions are not harmful. Allowing these people to ask those types of questions invalidates the bodies of interracial people, signifying that their racial identity, and to a further extent their being as a whole, is in need of clarification and explanation.