Racism Issues and Multiracial Families:
Attacking Racism Before It Defeats Your Child

by Jim Mahoney, MSW, CSW
1220 South Division, Spokane, WA 99202 (509) 838-2256

The purpose of this workshop is to point the way for parents, especially white parents, in attacking racism before it defeats their children of color. We will discuss ways to assist interracial families to successfully deal with racist attitudes and behaviors. This will enable their children to develop competence and pride in their culture of origin, as well as succeed at their chosen task in the larger culture.

Terms

Cultural paranoia:  is a sociological and anthropological concept described by Dickens and Dickens. It refers to a person's expectations of mistreatment. This cultural phenomenon has evolved as a group coping mechanism to respond to the consequences of racism. Cultural paranoia does not refer to the psychological concept referring to a mental disorder. This is a healthy coping mechanism to the dangers of racism.

Protective hesitation:  is the behavior, described by Dickens and Dickens, associated with cultural paranoia. It involves hesitation by a person of color before interacting or preparing to interact with a white individual. Hesitation protects him or herself from possible psychological assault. It is a healthy coping mechanism to the dangers of racism.

PREJUDICE  Unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand without knowledge, thought or reason.

RACISM  "Any attitude, action or institutional structure which subordinates a person or group because of their color." (definition by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission) Racism is when you take racial prejudice and enforce it because you have the power through the group's institutions. Racism is not just a matter of attitudes: actions and institutional structures can also be a form of racism. Racism is different from racial prejudice, hatred, or discrimination. Racism involves having the power to carry out systematic discriminatory practices through the major institutions of our society.

INSTITUTIONS  are fairly stable social arrangements and practices through which collective actions are taken. Examples of institutions are government, business, union, schools, churches, courts and police.

INSTITUTIONAL RACISM  Institutions have great power to reward and punish. They reward by providing career opportunities for some people and preventing career opportunities for others. They reward as well by the way social goods are distributed and by deciding who will receive training, skills, medical care, formal education, political influence, moral support and self respect, productive employment, fair treatment by the law, decent housing, self-confidence, and the promise of a secure future for self and children.

Examples include: housing patterns, segregated schools, discriminatory employment and promotion policies, segregated churches, white control of newspapers, radio and TV routes and selection of expressways or freeways, and textbooks which ignore or distort the role of black people. IQ tests standardized on white children, diminished expectations of children of color by white teachers, curriculum materials written by whites with predominantly white viewpoints imposing a white cultural heritage upon children of color, school discipline procedures i.e., punishing physical assault more severely than verbal assault.

Six Tasks for Adoptive Parents of Children of Color

Management of racism:  This involves developing a group of behaviors to counteract and neutralize demeaning, and prejudicial behavior directed towards them by persons of another race or ethnic group. Success and survival depend upon management of racism. Considerable energy is invested in this skill.

Understand your child's behavior reflects on his or her group:  When a white person fails, the failure is a reflection of that individual. When a person of color fails, that person fails for the entire group. Failures by persons of color reinforce negative expectations of whites.

Make racist behavior work for you and your children by turning it around and making it work for you. Whites will allow other whites, but not persons of color, to be dysfunctional.

Successful persons of color use protective hesitation. Teach this to your children:  Persons of color are very careful with interaction with whites, and anyone they do not know intimately. They are careful about who they self-disclose with. They are careful in asking for help. While many whites will offer assistance gladly, others will use this a s a way of defeating their interests.

Teach your children, by modeling, to confront racist behavior by individuals in a way that leaves them with their dignity. If this is not done, racism will dominate white's thinking and behavior.

Teach your children, by modeling, to manage their emotions:  White individuals will negatively evaluate persons of color who display uncontrolled emotions, and cannot be expected to be empathic and support their interests.

Six Principles for Attacking Racism

There are six key principles that parents must model to manage racist behavior that interferes with the autonomy and growth of their children of color. These principles are adapted from The Black Manager: Making It in the Corporate World, Revised Edition, 1991, by Floyd Dickens, Jr. and Jacqueline B. Dickens.

1. Understand that, as parents, you must model for your children and other parents, how to manage the racist behavior of others. This is essential to enable your children to maintain a healthy sense of identity and pride. You must also learn to avoid white thinking, i.e., believing you have to do this alone. You must reach out. Reaching out is modeling.
2. Realize that, as single or two-parent families, you do not have to do this alone. You will find that other white and parents of color, who have biological, foster and adoptive children are willing to help you. They will assist you in developing ways of responding to dysfunctional racist behavior of others. Learn to reach out and ask other parents to share how they manage and model dealing with racist behavior.
3. Allow yourself and your children to recognize racist behavior in action. The first step toward managing racist behavior is allowing yourself to see that behavior for what it is. If you refuse to do so, your children will be handicapped in how to wrestle racism to the ground. You will not grow internally if you refuse to allow yourself to see racist behavior in your life and in the lives of family, friends, providers and school boards. If you refuse this opportunity you are signaling to your children and racist members of your community that you will passively accept racist behavior directed to your children.
   How do you recognize racist behavior? Watch the white members in your family, neighborhood, community, school, mental health center, agency, etc. Keep track of which of their behaviors are the same toward both persons of color and whites. Observe who's behavior is different. Teach yourself and your children to pay attention to their stomach. Physical discomfort can tip you off to subtle racist behavior.
4. As a parent, take a risk and confront dysfunctional racist behavior in yourself. Then try confronting racist behavior in your family, and with a friend. Learn to push back appropriately and with dignity when someone's racist behavior negatively affects you. Dickens & Dickens (1991) state in the corporate world, "You do not need to call attention to the behavior but should instead focus on eliminating the negative consequences of that behavior. You could say something as simple as, 'Before we move on, I would like to add to what has already been said; perhaps all of you did not hear me when I first spoke.' Dickens & dickens add, "Since not everything is worth fighting for and you don't need a reputation for argumentativeness, pick your battles judiciously."
5. Parents need to model and attach language to the dynamics that occur in black-white dynamics as well as between individuals and in groups. It is important to understand the negative attitudes persons of color and whites can have toward each other. Your children need to know about the differences in style between whites and different cultural groups. Point out to your children the negative attitudes i.e., majority to minority, as well as differences in style that may cause conflict and interfere with your child's successful autonomy.
   It is important for parents to learn and rely on and teach "other ways of knowing." Whites typically do not know any other language than the communication style of the dominant culture. This is generally formal, needs are stated, and compliance is generally expected. There is not, as often, a comparable need to read a situation from the other side. As a result, whites often know "one language." Persons of color and persons of difference need at least two languages. They learn to "read" the body cues and actions of whites or dominant culture individuals. Persons in a minority status hear with a third ear, and learn to intuit a situation and defuse a situation before whites often knew there was one. When conflict arises, persons of color and other minorities "...must reach back to their culture and use their 'reading' skills to understand how whites' negative attitudes get 'played out' via dysfunctional behavior. Once the black-white dynamics or dominant-minority dynamics of the interaction are understood, appropriate responses can be developed to get positive results."
6. Parents must learn to apply effective techniques for managing racist behavior. The following list, originally designed by Dickens & Dickens to assist black managers to make it in the corporate world, presents ways to manage racist behavior. Each strategy lists one or more specific techniques used by black managers to become successful in white organizations.

Manage Racist Behavior by Strategy

• Recognize racist behavior and implement a plan to neutralize it. Be proactive rather than reactive.
• Use effectively controlled anger as a tool for achieving you results.
• Sell only carefully thought out ideas that you have checked with trusted resources, to ensure that you have provided for contingencies and have not overlooked anything.
• Learn to approach people tactfully, sensitively, and in a way that avoids unnecessary conflict.
• When whites are illogically resistant, lay out relevant data and let them think they came up with the idea. If your idea is accepted, chances are you will eventually get credit for it, since you will be the one who knows how to develop and implement it.
• When appropriate, confront whites directly or imply that their behavior may be a part of the problem. This will force them to examine their dysfunctional behavior.
• Present your ideas in terms of whites' self-interest.
• When using whites as resources, show your appreciation by giving them a stroke or sharing useful information.

Manage Racist Behavior by Controlling the Behavior of Others

• Manage through others. This may enable you to accomplish a task more effectively, especially when dealing with whites who listen better to other whites or to a select few blacks with whom they are comfortable.
• To prevent dysfunctional behavior that results from insensitivity or ignorance, tell whites how you expect them to behave in a given situation.
• Manage racists with personal style and charisma, which will tend to calm them down and stop display of racist behavior.
• Be careful in using organizational resources, so they do not negatively evaluate you. When using whites as resources couch your need in organizational rather than personal term. Never approach a white resource by openly discussing your personal deficiencies.

Manage Racist Behavior by Using Organizational Norms and Values

• Ask for more work, which will cast you in a favorable light while shattering negative stereotypes about blacks.
• Put information in writing. This standard organizational practice allows you to share your experience and expertise with others and can thereby help defuse any negative input about you.
• When appropriate, ask key questions indirectly, to avoid giving racists a reason to react negatively to questions perceived as threatening or irrelevant.

Manage Racist Behavior by Using the Communication Network

• To ensure that you and your expertise are known by the right people, develop productive relationships with powerful people in your hierarchy.
• Eat lunch with whites to get information from their formal and informal communications networks and make personal contact.
• Eat lunch with blacks to share information, keep in touch with the grapevine, relax, and replenish your psychic energy.

Manage Racist Behavior by Using the Power of Your Boss

• In dealing with a potentially racist white, simply say that your boss instructed you to use him or her as a resource. The individual, knowing you will report any dysfunctional behavior to the boss, will tend to meet your needs.

Manage Racist Behavior by Using the Power of Your Organizational Position

• If your job carries some organizational power, use that power to get information from racist individuals. Even if you do not hold a higher position than the whites, they still have to acknowledge the power associated with your position and will respond according to your needs.

WHAT CAN PARENTS DO?

Hugh J. Scott, dean of education at Hunter college in New York City and a former superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C. stated the following:

For the individual, we can:

1. Strive, as a parents, to be a role model for your own and other children. Demonstrate in your own conduct and the way you talk that you oppose attitudes and behavior that debase, degrade, inflict injury on or promote animosity against individuals from minority or majority groups.
2. Get to know your school board members and, at election time, your school board candidates. Support those who show they care above all about equal educational opportunity, that they have integrity, that they can be objective and that they are smart.
3. With your school board in place, insist that it set high goals and expectations for all students, no matter what color they are, where they come from or how much money their parents make. The routine sorting of students on the "success pathway" or the "failure pathway" must stop.
4. Carefully examine the textbooks used at your child's school. See if they are realistic, democratic, and free of racial, ethnic and sexual biases. If they are not, demand instructional materials that are.
5. Insist that standardized achievement and other competency tests be reviewed for effectiveness. I believe that they reveal what children do not know, not what they can learn.
6. Volunteer as a tutor for a student or group of students or for other special help.
7. Talk with your children. Listen to them. Involve yourself in activities that build on their natural interests.
8. Visit your child's school Talk to teachers. Talk to counselors. If you are uncomfortable with something, let them know. In our schools, we get what we ask for, and if we ask for more, we can get it. Each of us must get involved now.

Jawanza Kunjufu (1985) states parents need to:

1. Learn about the fourth grade conspiracy against Black male children in which their thirst for learning decreases as the classroom changes from a warm teacher-child, interactive mode to a competitive student vs. student mode.
2. Monitor your child's classroom.
3. Utilize the extended family to increase male availability.
4. Provide literature about Black male accomplishments.
5. Reduce street time.
6. Program the peer group with constructive activities sponsored by community organizations.
7. Administrate household responsibilities.
8. Reduce television viewing and video games, and increase family communication and recreation.
9. Identify a church addressing the needs of youth.
10. Proper nutrition, both prenatal and postnatal.

For educators, Kunjufu states they need to:

1. Increase male exposure and class visitation in the primary division.
2. Increase teacher competency in the primary division.
3. Develop problem solving curriculum (education) versus memorizing and the maintenance of the status quo (training).
4. Emphasize academic over athletic achievement.
5. Provide literature about Black male accomplishments.

As a group, Hugh J. Scott states we need to:

1. Push state legislators and county and city officials to adopt budgets large enough to provide well-educated, adequately paid teachers and attractive schools.
2. We must also insist that our legislatures adopt laws that distinguish policy, which is set by the school board, from administration, which is performed by the superintendent and the principals, to put a stop to the turmoil and turnover that afflict the management of so many city school systems.
3. We must demand that contracts with teacher's unions be restructured to return fundamental questions of policy to the board room and off the bargaining table so that those who are elected are accountable to the people who pay and who vote.
4. We must urge school boards to establish contracts with licensed professionals which hold teachers, couselors and administrators accountable for competence.
5. They should also oversee the career-long development of the teacher. This would include publicly financed in-service training and higher pay for those who demonstrate excellence.

Meier and Stewart (1989) state corporal punishment should be banned. No evidence exists that corporal punishment is more effective than any other disciplinary measures. The deterrent impact of all forms of discipline, in fact, is questionable.

Schools need to review and restructure disciplinary processes; this review should focus on what offences require discipline and how discipline can be administered in a manner that enhances the potential for improved academic achievement.

ACTIVITIES FOR PARENTS, TEACHERS, THERAPISTS, SOCIAL WORKERS

Examine racial, gender, and alternative lifestyle values of your family, neighborhood, extended family, school and community. Scrutinize television programs, media personalities, comic strips, children's books, fairy tales, school lessons, as well as the speech and values of family members re: roles and expectations of women, men and children. Who cleans up the dishes after meals? Who mows the lawn, delivers newspapers, takes home economics in school? Are nurses always referred to in female pronouns and attorneys in male pronouns?

Evaluate for the following:

Bias, any attitudes, beliefs or feelings that result in justification or unfair treatment of individuals or groups.

Racism , bias backed up by institutional power, (some Mexican food products contain negative ethnic stereotypes)

Prejudice, attitudes, opinions or feelings that result in justification or unfair treatment of individuals or groups.

Gender discrimination or Sexism  Roles assigned to individuals because of their gender. While it may sound offensive, it is often helpful to reduce this situation to asking which jobs require the attachment of a penis or a vagina.

Homophobia  Negative references to Gays and Lesbians. All families have homosexual and lesbian relatives.

Handicapism  Attitudes, actions, or institutional practices which subordinate people because of their disabilities.

Encourage cultural diversity.
Participate in adoption cultural support groups and their activities. Remember, after you have adopted, you often have more in common with other adoptive families than with your own family of origin.

Avoid token diversity.  Do not have only one doll, book or picture of a particular group. When adopting children of color, find materials and visual representation that accurately reflect their in-country experiences.

Louise Derman-Sparks cautions against what she refers to as Tourist curriculum. Tourist curriculum includes:

Trivializing:  Organizing activities only around holidays or only around food.

Tokenism:  One black doll amidst many white dolls, only one book about any cultural group.

Disconnecting diversity from daily classroom life:  Reading books about children of color only on special occasions...and never seeing that culture again.

Stereotyping:  Only showing people from cultures outside the United States in traditional dress.

Misrepresenting American ethnic groups:  this includes pictures and books about Mexico to teach Mexican-Americans; of Japan to teach about Japanese-Americans; of Africa to teach African-Americans.

TEACHING ACTIVISM IN COUNSELING AND THERAPY FOR YOUNG CHILDREN

Be aware of unfair practices in your agency, practice, family or community that affect the lives of your clients. Discuss the problem and see what activities both they and you are comfortable with.

Address the lack of ethnic-sensitive toys, literature, and children's books at your local treatment agency, public or school library. Talk or write to the agencies or library, with a list of such books. See if they will purchase them or if you can create a campaign to fund the inclusion of such books.

This can be done with toy stores re: the lack of a variety of non-white dolls, as well as the need for other toys, videos, tapes and books your children would like to be able to purchase, or, more, realistically have you purchase.

Write in your agency newsletter, school or Op-ed section of your community newspaper the government notion of creating a silver dollar with the likeness of Christopher Columbus upon it. Write about or discuss the resulting slavery and genocide of the Arawak Indians by Columbus shortly after he "discovered" them.

REFERENCES

Bell, P. (1981) Counseling the chemically dependent Black client. Paper presented at Central States Institute, Chicago, Ill. in "Rainbow Warriors: Reducing Institutional Racism in Mental Health", Victor De La Cancela and Gladys M. Sotomayor, Journal of Mental Health Counseling, Vol.15, Number 1, January 1993 pp. 55-71

Bush, Malcolm; Goldman, Harold. "the Psychological Parenting and permanency Principles in Child Welfare: A Reappraisal and Critique". American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. 52(2) April 1982.

Script of From Racism to Pluralism. Foundation for Change, Inc., 1841 Broadway, new York, NY 10023

Clark, Reginald M. Family Life and School Achievement Why Poor Black Children Succeed or Fail  , Reginald M. Clark. The University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. xi, xii, Forward, p. 1-4.

Clarke, A,M, and Clarke, A.D.B. (1976), Early Experience: Myth and Evidence (Open Books, London)

Cross, W.E. "Black identity: Rediscovering the distinctions between personal identity and reference group orientations." 1985 In M.B. Spencer, G.K. Brookins and W.R. Allen (Editors) Beginnings: The social and affective development of black children (pp. 155-172). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Derman-Sparks, Louise. Anti-Bias Curriculum: Tools for Empowering Young Children, National Association for the Education of Young Children, Washington, D.C.

Dickens, Floyd, Jr. and Jacqueline B. The Black Manager: Making It In the Corporate World, Revised Edition, 1991 AMACOM, A division of American Management Association, New York.

Goldstein, J., Freus, A., Solnit, A.J., Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, The Free Press, 1973.

Goode, William J., "A Theory of the Role Strain," American Sociological Review, 25, No. 4, 1960. (p.43) reviewed by H. David Kirk, Adoption Kinship: A Modern Institution in Need of Reform, 1981, Butterworth & Co. (Canada) Ltd. p.12.s

Jones, Charles E., Else, John F., "Racial and Cultural Issues in Adoption" Child Welfare Vol. LVII Number 6, June, 1979. p.377-378.

Kunjufu, Jawanza. Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys, African American Images, 1985, p.35.

Meier, Kenneth J.; Stewart, Joseph, Jr.; England, Robert E., Race, Class and Education: The Politics of Second-Generation Discrimination , the University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. p.5-7

Powell, Azizi. "Between Black and White," Post-Gazette, Wed., April 24, 1985, p.13

Schwartz, Joe; Exter, Thomas. All Our Children (Growth in the Number of Minority Children). v.11 American Demographics, May 1989, p.34 (4)

Scott, Hugh J., "How We Can Shape Up Our Schools" Parade Magazine, July 22, 1990 p.10.

Spencer, M.B.; Brookins, G.K.; Allen, W.R. Eds. Black Identity: Rediscovering the Distinctions Between Personal Identity and Reference Group Orientations. Beginnings: the social and affective development of Black children. pp. 155-172. Hillsdale, NJ. Erlbaum. Cross (1985)

Sue, D.W. (1981) Counseling the Culturally Different: Theory and Practice. New York: Wiley. in "Rainbow Warriors: Reducing Institutional Racism in Mental health, Victor De la Cancela and Gladys M. Sotomayor, Journal of Mental Health Counseling, vol. 15, Number 1, January 1993 pp. 55-71

Washington State Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) Academy Training

rev. 8/24/01

Back to NYS CCC Home Page   |  Back to Transracial Resource Page

For more information, contact:

NYS Citizens' Coalition for Children, Inc.
410 East Upland Road • Ithaca, NY 14850
(607) 272-0034
office@nysccc.org