Family Racial/Ethnic Socialization Through the Lens of Multiracial Black Identity: A M(ai)cro Analysis of Meaning-Making

The role of family members in racial identity development is often constrained to conceptualizations of parental socialization, with a focus on socialization during childhood and adolescence. However, parents may continue to play a role in racial identity development as youth enter young adulthood and continue to explore who they are. Our study investigates how parents feature in the racial identity meaning-making of multiracial Black college students to understand the role that parents may continue to play for youth’s identities as they age. We invoke a critical m(ai)cro perspective to fully consider how parent influence necessarily intertwines with macrosystem dynamics of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and monoracism for multiracial Black youth’s identity meaning-making in the context of Black Lives Matter. Through inductive analysis of semi-structured interviews with 11 multiracial Black (“Black + ”) college students, we found that young adults mention parents or familial adults when discussing their racial identity to (1) recount parental guidance on racial identity, (2) illustrate the racial politics of multiracial identification, and (3) expose the nuances of navigating (un)shared identity spaces within the family. Our findings highlight the relevance of parental socialization in the adulthood years, and that parents are inextricably implicated in how youth are making sense of macrosystem dynamics of anti-Blackness and monoracism. We end with a discussion of takeaways for parents of multiracial youth.