Biracial in America

Safara Fisher
Graduate - Teachers College, Columbia University
safaraf@hotmail.com

The combination of two educational experiences living abroad and coming to the United States for the first time has laid the foundation for my interests in studying issues of race in the American culture. By revealing the history of how I was introduced to my racial identity, I became interested how schools intend to approach diversity in education. I challenge the professionals within the field of education to extend the boundaries of our teaching practices to encompass a multiracial approach to child development.

My prior acculturation to multiracial issues made it more evident that race over culture would define my developmental process. Coming to America when I was 14, I discovered my racial identity, as a biracial child. It was an experience that opened my eyes to how people can see beyond culture and focus more on the color of one's skin. Until this point in my life I had not distinguished my race, biracial from my nationality as an American, Jamaican and Italian as well as my cultural identity adopted from my experiences abroad.

My Racial Identity Living Abroad

I did not self identify with my racial background or acknowledge the racial combination of my parents as a child. Neither my race nor my parents ever appeared strange or different from my community of racial and ethnic diversity. To me, I was born from parents of unique cultures and was living with people of various nationalities who together shared in the values and basic beliefs of my family. My parents maintained some common understandings of how to integrate this subject into my life as a biracial child. I grew up unaware of the significance my racial background would have in future processes of socialization.

I recall telling children from various cultures at the international schools I attended as a child, "My father is brown and my mother is pink." I grew up with children from all over the world, learning about their nationalities, heritage, religions, forms of spirituality, cultures and food. People from other cultures saw me as a child born from an American couple, an Italian American mother and native Jamaican father. As Americans living abroad, our racial identities were not the focal point for other cultures. We were different because we were Americans living among Moroccans, Filipinos, Brazilians, Haitians, Spaniards and many other cultures, which made us unique in a collective sense and not singled out for the color of our skin.

I attended an international school that engaged children in the process of self-identification by exploring how we related to one another through our cultural differences and similarities. During this period of maturation, there were no programs or classes addressing race as they related to our development. I had a curiosity about myself, as a child who was just beginning to learn about herself, relationships and the environment and how all three work together in society. In this process of self-development with my classmates, I do not recall ever thinking about my race or being aware of it as something about myself that was different or unusual. Race did not become a part of how I defined myself or how others were defined until I came to America.

Indeed, after some time in the states, I gained interest in the suburban area within which I lived on Long Island and I wanted to know about the children who grew up all their life in America. From these uncanny encounters, I questioned myself, my naiveté about my race, and thought about how I had been led to believe that my race would not be significant in my ability to become a part of any culture in the world. It became clear to me that my overseas experience had shaped my worldview through an environment without racial barriers. In short, my experience with race in America is how I first learned about my racial identity, biracial.

My Racial Identity as an American

I arrived in America, with a weird name and speaking two languages other than English. These characteristics were immediately different from the other children of the middle class, suburban public school I attended. My race as a biracial student would define and separate me from my fellow classmates farther than I had ever experienced overseas. I never fathomed such initial alienation or categorization of the pejorative meaning of being unique.

The district from which I first attended middle school was wealthy and with this advantage the public schools were able to function in many ways as private institutions. Teachers were recruited for their strong skills in their respective discipline, usually with advanced degrees from prominent institutions and extensive teaching experience. Though its reputation was well noted, the school had taken a limited approach to addressing race and culture as part of its efforts to educate students. These children had no foundation on how to look at skin color in a multiracial or multicultural perspective. I was labeled as a foreigner whose race was either black or white. This labeling effect had a direct influence on my educational experience. My racial composition was central to how I gained my academic knowledge, socialized with my peers and struggled to develop a positive sense of self.

Discussions about Race in Academia

Most of the discussions around race and children have focused on minorities and the oppressive conditions under which they continue to socialize into American society. To explain differences in the way children from various racial groups develop, educators, counselors and psychologists have researched the links between the self-development of children and race.

Discussions around identity and the "self" of minorities have focused on mono-racial children and have tended to exclude biracial children. Dr. Greene (1993) unravels America's history with the issue of self as it pertains to the categories developed in society. Specifically, she examines race, class and gender issues and the marginalization of minorities.

Another notion emerging from contemporary inquires and talk has to do with the self, the subject, so long thought susceptible to predetermination, to prediction, to framing. (Greene, 1993, p.213).

We live in a society in which the racial divide that exists between minorities and whites has equated with how knowledge is distributed in schools and the level of socio-economic status one can achieve. Evidence can be found in the American tracking system through a study by Jeannie Oakes (1985) which revealed that an incommensurate number of minority students who were poorer than the whites were placed in lower tracks:

From the information about these six schools it is clear that in our multiracial schools minority students were found in disproportionately small percentages in high-track classes and in disproportionately larger percentages in low-track classes (Oakes, 2000, p.227).

My own experience with tracking mimics these findings. I was placed in a lower-track for math in the 9^th grade of high school. The compositions of students in my math class were foreign students who were English as second language learners and minority students. As a result of being placed in a low-track for math, the academic level to which teachers in other disciplines held us was also lowered. The separations within our grade of those students in high and low tracks accentuated the disparate education of foreign and minority students from the community.

Educational System: Systemic Inequities

Education has served to maintain society in a hierarchical structure, and it is from this structure that children have emerged feeling unworthy and undeserving of an equal opportunity to learn and to achieve. Jay MacLeod (1995) describes education as a paradigm that perpetuates the inequalities in society through an ethnographic study of working-class teenagers in America. Through this process of socialization, our children have developed a perspective of their race in relationship to other world cultures. The methods by which we educators have chosen to teach and learn about race in America have not been representative of our diversity and have led children to feel less secure in their race as Dr. Greene (1993) also concludes:

The categories of sex, gender, race, and class are often thought of in terms of narrative practices today. There are ways of using language that lead to the invention of ethnicities or to the identification of certain kinds of being as undesirable (Greene, 1993, p.216).

In my classroom experiences from middle to high school, I felt a loss with my biracial identity, and as Greene describes a feeling of being "undesirable" amongst students who were gaining an appreciation of themselves through various educational mediums. I felt no support from my school in my process of self-realization of my race. It was not until college that I was encouraged by professors and my peers to look at race more in depth.

It is within the narrow framework as outlined by Dr. Greene (1993) and exemplified by my own classroom experience that I argue educators have used to examine racial identity as it relates to child development, race as a multiracial perspective. From this, I question how race in a biracial context has shaped American culture today and in what direction educators intend to approach race in the future given the rapid rate in which we are diversifying. "We are likely to pose questions today that were unlikely before, simply because of the revising that has been going on" (Greene, 1993, p.217) How has the racial identification of biracial children in America been explored through research? What has been missing from our research in America about biracial identity? How does curriculum on race need to address biracial identity?

Research on Biracial Children and Identity: Some Limitations

Some of the research that began in the 1970's to look at biracial identity derived out of misconceptions about how race relates with a child's development. This was due in part to the misunderstanding and judgments about race that emerged from the civil rights movement of the 1960's, a time when society saw an increase in interracial marriages. Equally important, during this period, interracial families and multiracial people began to speak out on their rights and gain the attention of educators who sought to write articles that challenged the misinformation which labeled and segregated interracial families and biracial children. In 1978, Dr. Aldridge wrote an article for the Journal of Black Studies describing some of the prejudices that exist against interracial marriages in American society. "People who marry someone from another racial or ethnic group are perverted in some way; they marry to 'get back' at a racist society, for abnormal sexual desires, or to gain wealth and status." (Aldridge, 1978, p360). Other educators voiced concerns about biracial children, specifically how they have been deemed by society as needing more professional counseling for psychological and social problems than other children. Authors such as Brandell (1988) furthered questioned the validity of the finding on biracial children. In one of his articles on the psychotherapeutic treatment of biracial children, Brandell demonstrates that research has been limited about our nation's history with the American biracial population:

"Biracial identity is a complex and not well-understood phenomenon that has been implicated, though not always convincingly, in the social and psychological difficulties experienced by inter-racial children, according to researchers who have studied this population" (Brandell, 1988, p.185).

Recently, educators have further diversified their approach to data analysis on biracial identity. For example, in the 1993 study Racial Identity in Biracial Children, Kerwin, Ponterooto, Jackson, and Harris emphasize that their findings are useful in developing educators and counselors perceptions of race and culture and should not be used to further segregate biracial children. In the Limitations section of this study, Kerwin et al. (1993) draw a direct relationship between the acts of biases against biracial children and the results of their findings on parents' feelings about their child's developmental experience. They suggest that the highly positive sentiments by the parents could be explained in the following manner:

This tendency may have resulted from a desire to counteract the negative stereotypes and expectations society puts forth regarding persons who have more than one racial heritage (Kerwin, Ponterooto, Jackson, Harris 1993, p. 229).

This explanation of the high level of validation expressed by parents of biracial children in the study mirrors my own experience with my parents. Without my parents' consistent feedback and assurance of my racial identity as a teenager, I would not have successfully integrated myself into American culture. I experienced many acts of stereotyping and even discrimination from my peers throughout my educational experience in the public school. When I was in high school on a weekly basis I would get shoved into the bathroom, punched and threatened over my race. Black girls would say I was too white, question who I thought I was living in the white part of town. White girls would befriend me but with reservations, I was rarely invited to sleep over or to parties, and at times made fun of my "unruly hair". It therefore became necessary for my parents to foster in me a positive self-identification of my race to differ the feelings of isolation from my peers.

The research by Kerwin, Ponterooto, Jackson, and Harris (1983) also mention the effects stereotypes have had on biracial individuals. By concentrating on the issue of bias, the researchers have the opportunity to connect what these biases could reveal about how as educators we have failed to incorporate biracial or multicultural studies further in our studies on child development. One section, the researchers attempt to address this issue by hinting at how to look at other teaching or learning methods by which biracial identity may be used in context with minority development. They further introduce the idea of how biracial identity could be explored as a characteristic any child could begin to have of themselves to broaden their perspective of race. By allowing other children of different races to take a bicultural approach to their own race, all children can begin to become more tolerant of different races and less pressured to connect with one accepted race, which may exclude others. "They seemed to see themselves as in the middle on a continuum of color between Black and White but definitely connected to both ends" (Kerwin, Ponterooto, Jackson, Harris 1993, p. 229). By examining the data in a larger context of what it means to be biracial, the researchers have exemplified how to take a more in-depth approach to race and the developmental progression of all children.

How Biracial and Bicultural Identity Can Impact Other Children

For myself, as a student preparing to teach about multiculturalism from a sociological context, the idea of every child having the ability to gain further insight into the complexities of racial identities through adopting a biracial identity is fascinating. It is significant to education, because it implies that the methods by which we teach youth about their race and class in a discussion of stratification within society, can directly influence their ability to understand themselves and relate to others.

Schools have served society as a means of legitimizing the inequities of our social system. It is essential for education to take the lead in challenging the messages we exchange about race, ethnicity and culture and go beyond the social structures by which we have learned to accept differences and similarities in people. Educators such as Francis Wardel have begun to explore how we can do this by examining biracial studies in a multicultural perspective on learning. Wardel (1992) in an article entitled Supporting Biracial Children in the School Setting, suggests that teachers should think about their approach to biracial students in the classroom and consider their own biases and ignorance about identity. In particular, he believes teachers have limited their understanding of children's development in the classroom from these misconceptions. He uses a quote in an article published by Derman-Sparks(1989) to explain what teachers should do:

Teachers must explore their feelings about biracial children; they must examine whether they believe the myths outlined in this article and, if so, whether they are open to changing those beliefs. (Derman-Sparks, 1989).

Wardel (1992) demonstrates an alternative approach to understanding the self from a racial perspective. Through the use of such research on child development we open up the context for a multiracial discussion on race.

In the book We Can't Teach What We Don't Know, Howard (1999) describes his journey as a white American in discovering his own "white" culture and how this has helped him as a teacher of multiculturalism. He emphasizes the need for white educators to embrace their racial identity and engage in a dialogue about perceptions of race with diverse groups of people. The book is an example of how educators can be challenged on how we study and teach about race. We need to question the limits we have placed on using the research found on racial identity, and figure out how we can broaden this scope as it relates to the study of child development and success for students of multiracial backgrounds.

Conclusion

When I first came up with the theme for this paper, it was biracial children and language development. I read plenty of material on identity development and biracial children, but I couldn't find literature that looked at how biracial children use the English language. For example, literature regarding the Ebonics debate on whether it is a language or dialect and how or if it should be used in the classroom is abundant. Why have not biracial children, as minorities been included in the debate? Do biracial students have the potential to code switch at various levels of their development due to their biracial identity and does this demonstrate a dual pedagogical process?

Through my own eyes as a biracial child, I see the potential for curriculum and research on racial identity and child development to expand and to include other means of looking at the self. It is by using this framework to educate our youth on race that can spread the message of tolerance we encourage in classroom practices.

References

Aldridge, D. (1978). Interracial marriage: Empirical and theoretical consequences. Journal of Black Studies, 8, 355-368.

Brandell, J. (1988). Treatment of Biracial Child: Theoretical and Clinical Issues. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 16, 176-187.

Derman-Sparks, L. (1989). Anti-bias curriculum: Tools for empowering young children. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Fordham, S (1999, September). Dissin "the standard": Ebonics as guerrilla warfare at Capital High". Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 30, 3, pp. 272-293.

Frontline: Biracial American Portraits, (1998) PBS and WGBH http://www.pbs.org/wg...line/shows/secret/portraits/3.html

Gibbs, J.T. (1987). Identity and Marginality: Issues in the treatment of biracial adolescents. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 57, 265-278.

Greene, M. (1993, Winter). Diversity and Inclusion: Toward a Curriculum for Human Beings. Teachers College Record, v.95 n.2 pp. 211-221.

Herring, R.D. (1992, December). Biracial children: An increasing concern for elementary and middle school counselors. Elementary School Guidance and Counseling, 27(2), 123-30. (EJ 455 462)

Howard, G. (1999). We Can't Teach What We Don't Know. New York: Teachers College Press.

Kerwin, C., Ponterooto, J.G., Jackson, N.L., & Harris, A. (1993, April). Racial identity in biracial children: A qualitative investigation. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 40 (2), 221-31. (EJ 463 631)

MacLeod, J. (1995). Ain't No Makin' It. Boulder: Westview Press.

Oakes, J. (1985). The Distribution of Knowledge. In R. Arum & I. Beattie The Structure of Schooling: Readings in the Sociology of Education (pp.224-234). California: Mayfield Publishing Co.

Poston, W.S.C. (1990, November-December). The biracial identity development model: A needed addition. Journal of Counseling and Development, 69 (2), 152-55. (EJ 424 084).

Root, M (1996). The Multiracial Experience: Racial Boarders as the New Frontier. CA.:Sage Publications, Inc.

Wardel, F. (1992, May). Supporting biracial children in the school setting. Education and Treatment of Children, 15 (2), 163-72. (EJ 454 421)

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