Clone of Multiracial families can enjoy life’s blessings while facing its challenges

LOUISVILLE — Two factors converged to make Nicole Doyley’s recent appearance on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” timely.

Her new book, “What About the Children? Five Values for Multiracial Families,” published by Westminster John Knox Press, is available beginning Tuesday.

And, with more specific questions being asked by the U.S. Census Bureau, the multiracial population demographic is the fastest growing among families.

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“I wrote the book because it’s a huge demographic, and there aren’t a lot of resources out there,” Doyley told podcast hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe. Doyley herself is the product of a Black father, now deceased, and a white mother. “The way your kids look — their color or other ethnic details — are not random; they are intentional. God intended them to look the way they do.”

The forebears on her father’s side were “of course, taken from Africa against their will. What they endured in the Middle Passage, on slave plantations and through Jim Crow, and the courage they had — they survived, or I wouldn’t be here. The courage they had despite all the hardship — Black people represent some of the most incredible minds on the planet.”

Doyley also pointed with pride to her mother’s heritage, including that her maternal grandfather was part of a labor union and “just what they went through during the Great Depression and World War II.” Doyley doesn’t “shy away from the white part of myself either,” but embraces both aspects of her heritage.

“I mentioned the Census finally catching up to the reality that mixed race is a thing and has been for a very long time. It’s very important,” she told the hosts. “To say to a kid you have to choose one — which is to choose what they look most like — means denying that I have a white mom.” Mixed-race children “struggle with anxiety more than monoracial kids … If they are not taught who they are, that can lead to a lot of confusion, anxiety — even depression.”

She quoted psychologist Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, who says that white supremacy and cultural racism “is like smog in the air. You breathe it in without even knowing it,” Doyley said. “So many things in our culture will lead you to believe that white is better.” Of her son, a high school senior, Doyley said she can count on one hand the number of books by nonwhite authors he’s been required to read during 12 years of formal schooling. “The books we read, the stories we know about — all of that can on a subconscious level lead you to believe that white people do the important things, write the important books and are more important and better.”

Doyley said she’s found in most mixed-race families, “usually one person in the marriage dominates in the dissemination of culture. Often that’s the wife, even if she works foll-time and has a full-blown career.”

“When kids are mixed race, both people have to intentionally teach culture and cultural values — the music, the food, the folklore and language, perhaps. … If one of the parents is passive, that child could grow up lopsided. … The child could grow up with brown skin but be white culturally on the inside, not understanding or feeling comfortable around brown people — even though they themselves are brown, and that’s kind of tragic.”

When Christmas was approaching, a white friend of Doyley whose sister had adopted two Black girls wanted to know what kind of gifts to buy the children. Doyley suggested Black dolls “and books about happy Black family life,” such as Crystal Swain-Bates’ “Big Hair, Don’t Care.”

“Your children are going to move through life different than you, and racism is still alive and well,” Doyley says to white parents adopting children of color. When such parents “take the colorblind approach, saying, ‘We’re not going to fixate on race and racism. We’re just going to love this child’ — that is fine for a time while the child is little.”

“But the time will come when that child will have a negative experience because of race — will experience racism or hear something ignorant or negative. If they weren’t taught to be proud of their Blackness or Asian-ness or whatever in the first place, the first realization will be a negative one: ‘Wait, I’m not white. I am Black or brown.’ Their first confrontation with their Blackness is in a negative context.”

A few years ago, Doyley’s family belonged to a diverse church with exclusively white leadership. “Every person of influence” in her children’s lives, including teachers and principals, was white, she said. The family made the decision to change membership to a diverse church with Black leadership. “As much as a diverse congregation is nice and important, being led by someone who’s not white is even better. … The culture of the church is infused with Black culture. A lot of times when churches are diverse and the leadership is white, it’s still culturally very white. When leadership is mixed, the culture is affected too.”

“Your kids need to see you enjoying and interacting with people of color and they need to be around positive people of color, because they are people of color,” Doyley said. “Our country is still so segregated, that’s not going to happen by default. That takes intentionality — moving, changing churches, putting your child in a different baseball league in a different part of town, changing up who we’re inviting to the annual Fourth of July barbecues. We need to have greater diversity in our lives, if only for the sake of our kids.”

Catoe wondered: What does that look like in faith communities?

Doyley referenced a line from “Hamilton”: Black and brown people need to be “in the room where it happens,” she said. “They need to be where decisions about money are made. That’s where values will be expressed.”

“In those considerations of ‘We really need to hire another pastor or another leader,’ look outside the four walls of whiteness,” she suggested. “Fish in a different pond.” The same is true for filling other “key positions,” including session members, deacons and small-group leaders, she said. “If all these leaders are white, multiracial families may not stay long.”

“It really comes down to that Scripture, ‘The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’” she said. “We need what each other brings to the table. It’s people groups. Different people groups bring different things to the table. They approach parenting differently.”

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One of Doyley’s closest friends is an immigrant from Nigeria who has five children. “I have gleaned so much wisdom from her in parenting,” Doyley said. “I totally need her in my life to help me think about parenting in a different way.” Just as we become anemic if we don’t eat different kinds of foods, “Emotionally, psychologically and spiritually, we become anemic if we are only around the same kinds of people.”

Doyley said she wrote the book in part because “I didn’t really learn to like the skin that I’m wrapped in until I was a young adult. Leading up to that, I had a lot of angst and heartache. You can’t be happy if you don’t like who you are.”

“My hope writing this book is to help parents help their kids to embrace themselves sooner than I did,” she said. “It’s obviously through my lens of being biracial and having mixed-race kids, but I think it’s also relevant to transracial adopted kids.” The five values she develops in the book — awareness, humility, diversity, honesty and exploration — “are germane to those parents also.”

Previous editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” are available here.