Transracial Parenting: Finding Racial Mirrors

So I have been learning a lot from a facebook group I belong to.  I am embarrassed to admit that I did not consider the practical aspects of what it would take to successfully parent a non-white child. Since getting together with my Latino hubby, I knew any children we'd have would not be white. This was true when we tried to adopt, as well.  It just wouldn't have felt genuine for us, a mixed couple, to be raising a white child, especially a non-Polish white child.  We are both immigrants, outsiders to a degree, and I take great pride in that.  I can't imagine raising a child that wouldn't have a claim to that unique aspect of our background.

So when Natalia was born, it took me by surprise that there are things she will experience as a non-white person that I do not have first hand experiences with, and that as a good mother, I have to learn to anticipate what her struggles may be and try to prepare as best as I can to help her navigate through them.  I cannot just assume that I will fall back on my own experience.  And to be honest, this is a dose of reality that actually applies to ALL parents to some degree, but most don't give it a second thought.  Of course our children's experiences will be different from our own!  Not only are they living in a different generation, but they are unique individuals with their own personalities and experiences that are bound to shape how they see the world.  They have different likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, from those of their parents, even if their parents share genetics and race with their children.

But for those of us who are of a different race or ethnicity from our children, it becomes even more necessary to make up for the ways in which we're not just a senior version of our kids.

Take racial mirrors for example.  I had never heard of this concept, but now that I have, it makes total sense and I actually would say that it extends to ethnic mirrors and is something I grew up without and hence it affected my identity struggle. If I struggled for decades to figure out where I fit in (still haven't found the answer, by the way), and I grew up surrounded by "fellow white people" who "just" weren't Polish, I can only imagine how much more difficult it would be if my heritage were of a visible minority.  I am generally assumed to be a member of mainstream white America.  My struggle is mostly internal, in that I see how differently I grew up.  But if I were also a visible minority rather than just a white ethnic, I would also have those differences constantly pointed out to me, both explicitly and implicitly, by people in real life and messages in the media and the school system.  Not only that, but those differences would also be treated as making me less-than.  It wouldn't be, for example, that I have a different beauty from what's expected.  It'd be that I have different looks and they do not equal beauty, period.  Or it wouldn't be merely pointing out that I do something "differently" than the mainstream; it'd automatically be treated as me doing it "worse" than the mainstream.

It is very easy to take for granted the need for racial/ethnic mirrors for those of us who grew up surrounded by them.  We've never known a life where we didn't have people of our own race in day to day life to look up to.  For me in particular, my only daily female Polish mentor was my mother.  I only had long-distance contact with other female Polish relatives.  I grew up with no Polish peers.  I was expected to just automatically grow from a Polish girl into a Polish woman, because it seemed to happen naturally to Poles living in Poland.  No one could have anticipated that this is not how identity works.  I couldn't have become a strong Polish woman based on a single role model.  As great as my mom is, she is one person, plus we actually differ in a lot of our preferences and strengths.  It would be ridiculous to think that I would just grow up to be another version of my mom.

I only keep bringing myself up because it helps me to appreciate better the situation that my daughter is in. Luckily, her dad and his family are non-white, so she does have that built in.  But she is female, and even if she were a boy, just like with me, one person, even a parent, is insufficient to expose a child to the myriad ways of being a Person of Color.  My in-laws almost all live in another state, so we don't see them on a regular (say, weekly) basis.

And so enter the first part of intentional transracial parenting: finding sufficient and regular racial mirrors for our daughter.