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Essay on Biracial Children
Throughout the history of the United States, children of black/white interracial couples have struggled with acceptance and racial group membership questions. Whites have discriminated against them because of their blackness and because they represent the violation of an emotion laden taboo against racial mixing. In turn, blacks envied them for the privileges they enjoyed in a white-dominated society, yet also resented them for their snobbish attitudes and treated them with suspicion in terms of racial group loyalties.
The negative impact of these attitudes was compounded by a peculiar system of racial classification. With such brief, marginally important exceptions as the small mulatto castes in some antebellum southern cities, anybody with black ancestry or visible signs of black roots was considered black in this country. Incorporating both blackness and whiteness in one body and one self, this mandate denied interracial people whiteness, rendered their racial existence invisible, and pressured them to restrict racial identification to their black parent. As a result, the integration of partial identifications into a unified identity configuration, which is the hallmark of healthy identity development, was undermined. Finally, surrendering whiteness in favor of blackness in a society where blackness is associated with negative stereotypes, discrimination, and oppression becomes extremely difficult.
Thus interracial children have to negotiate all the developmental challenges that confront uniracial children. In addition, they have to face a unique set of emotional hurdles. These stem from their mixed racial background, a world that has deprived them of the right to define themselves as who they are, and communities that may resent them for their blackness, interracialness, or whiteness.
Mental Health Community
In the advent of the interracial baby boom, several mental health professionals for the first time began to examine formally the psychosocial adjustment of interracial children and the effect of the negative stereotypes that had been held for most of America’s history......
