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I'm white. My husband is black. Why can't our child be both?

Coming to grips with interracial families and multi-racial people

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A rare multiracial child in pop culture: In 2013, General Mills pulled a Cheerios commercial from YouTube in the wake of racist comments about the biracial family in the ad. But for the 2014 Super Bowl, General Mills brought the family back.
A rare multiracial child in pop culture: In 2013, General Mills pulled a Cheerios commercial from YouTube in the wake of racist comments about the biracial family in the ad. But for the 2014 Super Bowl, General Mills brought the family back.
Associated Press/General Mills

WHEN MY son was two years old, he had to have his adenoids removed. Prior to the procedure, a hospital staff member called to collect information about our family history. When asked about my son's race, I told her he is biracial — both black and white.

I was not prepared for the follow-up question. After a pause she said, "If you had to pick one?"

I told her he is both, so I didn't want to just pick one or the other. 

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"Unfortunately," she said, "I can only check one box."

I now know that the one-box problem is all too common — as is the dreaded "Other" category. When I registered my son for kindergarten, I clearly indicated both white and black as his heritage, but I later discovered that on official school documents, he is listed simply as white.

Although the U.S. Census has allowed identification of multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds since 2000, many organizations still identify people only by one race. According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, there is no national policy about hospitals' collection of race and ethnicity information.

The problem isn't just hurt feelings; it's unreliable data. If the purpose is to track disease trends and outcomes in different demographic groups, then it is of great concern that hospitals and schools use only monoracial categories. Data analysis derived from those records will be unreliable.

And that data will only grow ever less reliable, since a growing number of Americans are eligible to check more than one box. Current estimates indicate that 7 percent of adults are multiracial. According to Pew Research Center, 15.1 percent of new marriages are interracial; that means that children of those marriages would be multiracial. In addition, about 40 percent of adoptions are transracial: The child is of a different race than the parents.

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IT'S NOT just bureaucratic forms that make families like mine invisible. Multi-racial people and families are also surprisingly hard to find in pop culture. Yes, there's Kim Kardashian, Kanye West and baby North. But a family with a $20 million mansion and a reality-TV show isn't one that an average kid will identify with.

And yes, a few TV programs, such as Scandal and Grey's Anatomy, feature interracial couples. But those shows usually don't feature actual families with children, and most of them are not suitable for young audiences. NBC's Parenthood included a positive and realistic view of an interracial family, but after six seasons the show has ended. We need more.

I sometimes wonder whether mixed-race families' absence from pop culture is partly due to fear that such portrayals might anger and offend certain viewers. Famously, a few years ago, a Cheerios commercial showing a mixed-race family drew racist comments. And only this year, so did a real estate ad in Houstonia magazine.

Similarly, of the approximately 5,000 children's books published every year, finding one with an interracial family depicted is like looking for a needle in a haystack. With some careful searching I found a couple of nuggets published recently: Teddy O'Malley's Destiny and Faith's Summer Adventures and Marvin Simms' A Day at the Zoo with My Family.

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I only wish that we didn't have to search so hard.

 

THE EFFECT of our invisible status became obvious to me when my son started kindergarten. A couple of months into the school year, I noticed that he talked a lot about Amarean, a child from another class.

He would tell me where he had seen Amarean that day, what shoes Amarean was wearing, who Amarean was friends with. It was Amarean this and Amarean that — constantly.

One day I asked him to tell me more about this boy. The first thing he said was:

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"Well, he kinda looks like me."

I suddenly realized the importance of this new acquaintance. My son had finally met someone he could identify with: another biracial child with a family like ours.

My son was hungry for that. Invisibility can make anyone feel unrepresented or unimportant. Furthermore, it eliminates an important opportunity for others to recognize people like him — and to build familiarity, tolerance, and respect for them.

I hope that society will recognize this gap. I don't want my children to grow up invisible.

 

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Dr. Brigitte Vittrup is an associate professor of child development at Texas Woman's University and a Public Voices fellow with The OpEd Project. She holds a Ph.D. in developmental Psychology from The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on parent socialization practices and media influences on children.

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