ABSTRACT
“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” is the way people sometimes characterize some quirk of behavior shared by a child and his or her parents. The same might be said, or thought, of intrafamily attitudes about race. Presumably, however, some apples fall farther from the tree than others, and still others roll quite a way down the hill. The person sitting in the consulting room has been influenced by a wide variety of systems (e.g., social, cultural, and racial). The family is a fundamental system that both is influenced by other societal systems (see Szapocznik & Kurtines, 1993) and in turn mediates those systems to the individual. A person’s first socialization to race is imparted by his or her primary caregivers. Initially, one might expect to find perfect congruence between the racial identity attitudes of parents and their children. However, there may be profound differences between the racial identity attitudes of the two parents themselves; furthermore, either the parents’ and/or the children’s attitudes may change as they are exposed to influences outside the family system. As the apple begins to roll farther away, the family’s primordial harmony regarding racial identity attitudes can be replaced by periods of dissonance.
