Generation Mixed Goes to School

Generation Mixed Goes to School radically listens to and weaves together stories of mixed-race children and youth, teachers, and caregivers with perspectives and research from social and developmental psychology, Critical Mixed Race Studies, and education. This book investigates how implicit bias affects multiracial kids in unforeseen ways, impacting those who are read as children of color as well as those who are not; how the silencing and invisibility of their experiences often create a barrier for mixed-race kids to engage in nuanced conversations about race and identity in the classroom; and how teachers are finding powerful ways to make meaningful connections with their mixed-race students. In addition, this book breaks out of the Black–White binary to include the perspectives of mixed-race children from Asian American, Latinx, and Native American backgrounds. It also diverges from scholarship on mixed-race youth by providing viewpoints from children who come from two or more communities of color, and not simply those who are from White–people of color backgrounds.

Book Features:

• Examination of the most contemporary issues that impact mixed-race children and youth, including the racialized violence with which our country is now reckoning.
• Guided exercises with relevant, action-oriented information for educators, parents, and caregivers in every chapter.
• Engaging storytelling that brings the school worlds of mixed-race children and youth to life.
• Interdisciplinary scholarship from social and developmental psychology, Critical Mixed Race Studies, and education.

Ralina Joseph is Presidential Term Professor of Communication, director of the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity, and associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Washington, Seattle. Allison Briscoe-Smith is a clinical psychologist and director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at The Wright Institute.

“Generation Mixed Goes to School is a remarkable and invaluable book for anyone looking to offer a richly nuanced, fluid, and positive model for identity development in school-aged children. It is a necessary and urgent antidote to the orthodoxy of research on mixed-race youth as only understandable through lenses of exceptionalism and suffering. Whereas previous research drew on them and their experiences as merely objects for study, Generation Mixed understands mixed-race children to be agentic subjects fully capable of using their experiences to guide the rest of us in the directions that offer them the support they need. Through the stories of the participants we hear a persistent refusal to accept the empirics of race as rational. This book is expansive in its reach, facilitative in its tone, and loving in its aim. Joseph and Briscoe-Smith offer generative ideas of radical listening and friction as a primer for the discomfort we should and will feel when engaging students and our families in race talk and encouragement to sit with that discomfort until we are ready to hear the children and act. In centering how the mixed-race voices of this generation have taken up the fight against inequalities and racial injustice the authors show how we—educators, administrators, family and community members—can amplify their words and actions and follow their lead to all of our benefits. While Generation Mixed works to instill in us the tools needed to affirm the identities of mixed-race youth, particularly as they may shift from context to context, it is incredibly useful for academics in any discipline studying children, race, identities, families, and/or socialization practices. This book is replete with important provocations that force us to contend with how our research on race needs to similarly adjust and shift from context to context. It is a field-defining book.”
—Myra Washington, assistant vice president for faculty equity and diversity and associate professor in ethnic studies, University of Utah

Contents

Series Foreword James A. Banks x

Preface xv

Introduction: “It’s hard speaking about race  .  .  .  especially when you’re mixed because there are so many sides!” 1
Radical Listening as Theory: Creating a Children-and-Youth-Based Frame 3
Radical Listening as Method and Intervention: Collecting and Sharing Stories 7
Who We Interviewed 10
Language, Terminology, and Radical Listening as Epistemology 13
Grounding Our Work in Critical Mixed Race Studies 15
We Hope You Will Listen to Our Book 20
Radical Listening with Your Critical Friend 23

1. From (G)race to Race: Racial Identity Development and Mixed-Race Kids 25
How Do You Understand Race? 26
Radical Listening Exercise: Remembering Race, Listening to Race 27
Seeing Difference/Hearing Difference 28
Difference as Bad Versus Difference as Special 30
Children’s Brains and Race 32
What About Your Friends? 35
What About Your Siblings? 38
Racial Socialization 40

2. Changing Team(s): Mixed Kids’ Agency in Choosing, Moving, and Sticking with Racialized Identities 44
But First, a Radical Listening Exercise in Salient Identities 46
Racial Identity Development Meets Mixed-Race Kids 47
The Psychology of Mixed-Race Kids and Racialized Choice 51
Supporting Mixed-Race Kids in Racial Identity Even When They Don’t “Make the Team” 56
Checking the Box 58
(Sometimes) Choosing Whiteness: White Adjacency 60
Radically Listening to Mixed-Race Identities 62
Listening to Racial Identity Development 64

3. “He Didn’t Even Know My Name”: Singling Out Mixed-Race Kids Through the Forces of Implicit Bias 66
Assessing Your Own Implicit Bias: A Radical Listening Exercise 69
Choking on the Smog of Implicit Bias 71
Media and the Smog 75
Smog Kills 77
Implicit Bias and Mixed-Race Kids 79
Perceptual Ambiguity, Cognitive Depletion, and Mixed-Race Kids 83
A Closing Dilemma, and a Caveat 86

4. “Relationship Is Key”: How Teachers Are Radically Listening to Mixed-Race Kids in Schools 89
School Climate 91
Affinity Groups: Forging Mixed-Race Kinship in School 92
Radical Listening Activity: Affinity Group Time 96
Centering Students’ Voices in the Classroom to Foster Positive Relationships 97
Deepening Relationships in the Classroom: Expectations and Accountability in Relationships 98
Wise Feedback 99
Empathy 101
Student Connectedness 103
An Example That Works: GREET-STOP-PROMPT 104
Sharing Who We Are with Our Students 106
Interrupting Racism for Positive Relationships 109
“Teachers, I Want You to Know . . . I Think It Starts with Education” 111

5. “We Were Taught”: Family Practices of Radical Listening, Positive Friction, and Talking Race 113
Friction Without Positivity: Refuting a Child’s Racialized Identity 115
Listen to Your Child Even When You Don’t Think They “Look” Like How They Identify 118
Performing Color Blindness: On Not Listening to Race Talk 122
Being Vulnerable with Your Children 125
Providing Role Models for Mixed-Race Children 126
The Work: Parents Bringing Radical Listening into School 128
Radical Listening Exercise: Race, Listening, and Family Mission Statements 131

Coda: “I Just Raise My Hand All the Time”: Keep Listening and Talking with and for Generation Mixed 134

Appendix A: Generation Mixed Dialogue Questions 139

Appendix B: Generation Mixed Participants 141

Appendix C: Sample Guide to Affinity Groups 143

Appendix D: Table Describing GREET-STOP-PROMPT Practices  146

References 148

Index 162

About the Authors 174