Tethered Tensions, Covert Bonds: Navigating Racial Socialization and AntiBlackness in Multiracial Families

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Black-white multiracial families navigate the complex terrain of racial socialization and antiBlackness, revealing how different approaches—some centering Black pride, others celebrating mixedness, and many negotiating both—shape how children understand race, selfhood, and power. Drawing on over sixteen months of intensive family observations and 92 semi-structured interviews with ten multiracial families, this study interrogates how racial messages—rooted in Black pride, mixedness, and whiteness—are transmitted, internalized, and negotiated within multiracial households. It argues that racial socialization in these families is marked by both resistance to and complicity in the reproduction of racial inequality.While Black-centered strategies often foster resilience and a politicized attachment to Blackness, they remain constrained by the continued dominance of whiteness—even within the family. Black mothers, in particular, bear the disproportionate burden of racial socialization, tasked with preparing their children for a racialized world while navigating their proximity to whiteness and racial ambiguity. In contrast, mixedness-centered approaches tend to emphasize individuality, pride in dual heritage, and racial harmony, but often fall into color-evasive frameworks that depoliticize race and obscure structural inequality. This dissertation argues that whiteness operates not as a neutral backdrop but as an active and pervasive force within multiracial families—shaping whose labor counts, whose experiences are centered, and how racial meaning is constructed and internalized. It reveals how gender, phenotype, and family power dynamics further shape racial identity development—especially the unequal distribution of racial socialization labor, typically shouldered by Black parents. Ultimately, this study challenges dominant narratives that frame multiracial identity as inherently transcendent or post-racial. Instead, it argues for an intersectional and structural approach to multiracial identity that foregrounds the enduring power of whiteness and anti-Blackness. By centering the operations of whiteness within family life, this dissertation moves beyond celebratory narratives of diversity to underscore the urgent need for racial socialization practices that resist, rather than reinforce, the hierarchies that continue to shape identity, belonging, and politics in a deeply unequal, racialized world.