Question

What does Tatum's review of the research on identity development for biracial children and youth show about the importance and the challenges of belonging . . . not just in the family, but in the broader social world?

Answer 1

Racial and ethnic group differences have a significant impact on children's social development, although the impact varies with age and specific ethnicity. The role of heritage in a child's development is affected by history, as well as by social context and immediate environment. Since having a multiple ethnic heritage has a different, perhaps more problematic, effect on a child's development (Herring, 1992), it is important to actively help multiracial children acquire a positive self-concept. They need exposure to models of all the ethnicities they embrace and to multiracial people generally. They need to understand what it means to be multiracial and to acquire culturally-linked coping skills that include ways to deal with racism and discrimination (Wardle, 1987). Because there are few integrated, stable, and tension-free racially mixed communities in the U.S. that can facilitate positive identity formation in interracial children (Miller & Rotheram-Borus, 1994), families and schools must work hard to provide a supportive community that affirms multiracialism.

Children did not generally perceive themselves as pressured by family members to emphasize one racial background over the other. Biracial children and adolescents tended to identify with the same-sex parent. Definite transitions associated with different ages were found which may depend on environmental circumstances. Younger children demonstrated bicultural competence in that they expressed awareness and comfort in the fact that people are different colours and races and that they can identify with more than one group. They viewed themselves as in the middle of a continuum of colour between Black and White but definitely connected to both ends. There was a marked tendency, however, for adolescents to report pressure from peers to "choose sides.

It is not surprising, then, for several alternative views regarding classification to exist within the multiracial community, for parents to choose different ways of identifying their children, and for youth themselves to spend a significant amount of time considering how they want to be identified. When children reach adolescence, many reconsider their identity. To avoid choosing between parents and peers, they may keep home separate from school. They may feel pressured by peers and teachers, the forms they must fill out, or even family, to choose a race. Frequently, they choose a single minority racial identification publicly, believing it is politically correct to do so, while privately still cherishing their multiracial heritage.

There are also individuals who consider themselves multiracial but do not identify themselves by every component of their heritage. They may not feel close to all or any part of their heritage, and they have not been exposed to one or all the components of it. Also, because their appearance in no way distinguishes them as a member of any of the individual groups they comprise, they may believe that they cannot claim identification with those groups (Stephan, cited Thornton, 1996). These people assert that the designation "multiracial" gives them membership in an entirely different community that is actually a new "race" or "ethnic group," and it is this group that evokes their feelings of solidarity (Weisman, 1996). The group's unique characteristic is that it is an amalgam of all the characteristics of other racial and ethnic groups, and its members are linked by the fact that each has multiple, albeit different, heritages. Concern has been raised that this approach to multiracialism cannot provide individuals with a sustained sense of community because the group's only commonality is the "ambiguous status" of its members, and such a tenuous connection is not enough to provide the emotional support that multiracial people need (Thornton, cited in Weisman, 1996, p. 157).

Nevertheless, the existence of such a group (perhaps eventually to be legitimized as a category on some census forms, as discussed below) may be the most practical way of helping individuals develop an identity in the future. If the rate of cross-ethnic and cross-race marriages continues to grow, as is projected, over generations the number of components of an individual's heritage will increase significantly, making racial distinctions less and less possible.

The identity development process for biracial youth is more complicated than for monoracial youth, both because there are so many possible choices and because families, peers, and society, in general, can exert strong and frequently contradictory--influences on youth who are already struggling with internal conflicts.

Given the existence of these prejudices in society generally, it is likely that educators and counsellors harbor some of them as well, even unconsciously. Inevitably, biracial students will perceive such attitudes, and internalize a negative image that compromises their sense of self and ability to succeed. Therefore, it is important for those working with biracial children to carefully consider their personal views, particularly in light of the significant worth that students place on their approval.

Sadly, the families of biracial children sometimes reject them, and their mothers may even have ambivalent feelings toward them. Indeed, some very young biracial children are given up by their parents who, feeling crushed by personal difficulties, become absolutely overwhelmed by the challenges of raising children who may have more than the usual complement of needs.

The process of developing an identity is particularly complex for biracial youth. Factors unique to their multiples heritages that influence the process include the need of biracial individuals to select a personal and family identity that represents their own attitudes about interracialism, their family's way of acknowledging the components of their culture, society's historical desire to keep people of different races separate, and racism that is both common and hierarchical.

In addition, as the number of biracial individuals increases, particularly over generations, so do the choices for classification; individuals may opt to embrace all the different ethnicities they embody, perhaps ultimately half a dozen or so; or they may seek to align themselves solely with a new group whose commonality is the multiple heritages of its members.

For educators, counselors, and other children's services professionals especially, learning about and respecting the beliefs, attitudes, and concerns of interracial families is crucial. Such knowledge will enable them to help biracial students to develop a positive self-concept and succeed in school, and to help all students understand how irrelevant racial differences really are.