TODAY IN MISSION YEARBOOK
Mission Yearbook: Multiracial families can enjoy life’s blessings while facing its challenges
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 in collaboration with the PC(USA)'s Around the Table initiative, is now available.
And, with more specific questions being asked by the U.S. Census Bureau, the multiracial population demographic is the fastest growing among families.
“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.
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.”
Before Christmas, 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.”
“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.
Previous editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” are available here.
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service, Interim Unified Agency (Click here to read original PNS story)
Let us join in prayer for:
Melanie Komp, Operations Manager, Compliance Services, Presbyterian Foundation
Luciano Kovacs, Coordinator, Middle East, Europe & Central Asia Office, Interim Unified Agency
Let us pray:
God, you connect us to you and to each other in so many ways. Help us to inspire as we are inspired to challenge as we are challenged to nurture as we have been nurtured, and to live in order to make Christ known in all the world. Amen.