ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how the participants have negotiated their identities within their childhood and adult families. Whilst much of the existing literature on mixed-race families documents the perspectives and experiences of white parents, and mothers in particular, in raising their children, this chapter centres Black mixed-race accounts of whiteness within their families. The chapter adds to the existing literature that documents the anti-racist practices of white parents but also examines how racial illiteracies can manifest within Black mixed-race families. Concepts such as the white gaze, white fragility, white complicity, and white privilege are used to showcase the multiple ways that white parents can deny, dodge, avoid, misunderstand, and even perpetuate racism. I also refer to the maternal weight of whiteness to identify the specific ways that whiteness is often bound together with motherhood and to showcase the complex layers of love, intimacy, race, and difference that can play out in familial settings. Reflecting on their adulthood families and children, the chapter ends by examining how ethnicity has shaped Black mixed-race choices about their potential partners and highlights how these decisions can become entangled with personal thoughts about family continuation and their children’s ethnic identities.
