Crossing the color line: race, parenting, and culture

367 Pages·1994·0.83 MB·English

by  Maureen T. Reddy

Crossing the Color Line : Race, Parenting,
title:
and Culture
author: Reddy, Maureen T.
publisher: Rutgers University Press
isbn10 | asin: 081352105X
print isbn13: 9780813521053
ebook isbn13: 9780585002675
language: English
Racially mixed children--United States--
subject Case studies, Parent and child--United
States, Racism--United States.
publication date: 1994
lcc: HQ777.9.R43 1994eb
ddc: 305.8
Racially mixed children--United States--
subject: Case studies, Parent and child--United
States, Racism--United States.
Crossing the Color Line
RACE, PARENTING, AND CULTURE
Maureen T. Reddy
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS
New Brunswick, New Jersey
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reddy, Maureen T.
Crossing the color line : race, parenting, and culture / by
Maureen T. Reddy.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8135-2105-X
1. Children of interracial marriageUnited StatesCase studies.
2. Parent and childUnited States. 3. RacismUnited States.
I. Title.
HQ777.9.R43 1994
305.8dc20
94-535
CIP
British Cataloging-in-Publication information available
Copyright © 1994 by Maureen T. Reddy
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
For Doug, with love
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
1 On Lines and Bridges 1
2 Starting Out 19
3 "Why Do White People Have 41
Vaginas?"
4 "One Drop of Black Blood" 65
5 The Fourth R 105
6 Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Comrades 143
Notes 175
Bibliography 185
Index 191
Page ix
Preface
Imagine:
Your nine-year-old son likes to play hide-and-seek games around the
neighborhood with other children. One afternoon, you look out the
kitchen window and see him crouching behind a neighbor's hedge,
with his dark jacket pulled up over the back of his head for
camouflage. Suddenly realizing that your child is now tall enough to
be mistaken for a teenager, you call him into the house, away from the
game. He thinks his greatest danger is being found by the child who is
"It," but you know that he is at risk of being shot by someone who
sees not a child playing, but the urban predator of television-fueled
nightmares, ready to spring from the bushes.
You know that you have waited too long to warn him about this
danger, and about others that are real and present now that he
resembles an adolescent. He has to be told to keep his hands out of his
pockets when he is in stores, for instance, lest he be seen as a
shoplifter. He also must learn how to talk to the police who will surely
stop him when he is out riding his bike some day soon. You ask your
son to feed his pets and to make his bed, hoping the chores will give
you enough time to figure out how to explain these facts of life to him
without destroying his innocent sense of fun. You never faced such
dangers as a child, and so you have no model to follow.
Unless you are white and your family is black, you probably will
never confront exactly the dilemma I did early in 1992.1 If everyone
in your family is white, you would not have to teach your child to
protect himself from these particular dangers. If you are black, you
would have familial and personal experience

Page x
to draw upon in teaching your children how to negotiate the world
safely, with their self-esteem and sense of possibility protected. A
white person in a black family starts from scratch.
Many Americans of all races want to believe that raising children is
basically the same project, regardless of the children's and parents'
races, arguing that child-rearing issues lack racial inflections2 And
some aspects of parenting are indeed race-blind: toilet training, for
example, or treating common childhood illnesses. However, I have
learned as a white mother of black children that the race-blind issues
tend to be the easier issues, and that far more of the hard questions I
have about raising my children center on race. This should not be a
surprise in a society as racialized as the one in which we live. Pick up
a newspaper in any urban area in the United States on any day, and it
is virtually certain that you will find at least one major story on race,
with none of the news good: charges of racial discrimination in hiring
practices, debates about affirmative action, high unemployment
among so-called minority groups, racial violence, racial tensionsall
these are front-page staples. The grim statistics on black life chances
are familiar, at least in outline. Whereas blacks make up 12.1 percent
of the U.S. population, they earn only 7.2 percent of the aggregate
family income, and receive only 5.7 percent of all bachelor's degrees
and 3.5 percent of doctorates awarded by U.S. colleges and
universities.3 Blacks are overrepresented in prisons (45.3% of
inmates), as victims of crime (50.8 percent of murder victims, 33.2
percent of rape victims, and 30.8 percent of robbery victims were
black in 1989-90), and in ill-paid occupations (25 percent of hotel
maids are black, for example, but only 0.9 percent of architects are).4
In 1990, blacks were nearly three times as likely to be unemployed as
were whites and nearly four times as likely to live in poverty, earning
only approximately $580 for each $1,000 earned by white families.5
Blacks have a