10

Culture at Camp: White Parents’

Understanding of Race
Carla Goar

Introduction

Families are important conduits for learning about race. It is in families

that many of our early notions of race and racial differences are understood
(Hartigan, 1997). The literature suggests that parental transfer of racial
understanding and sharing of culture are tied to particular communities,
often as a response to systematic disadvantage. For example, Knight et al.’s
(1993) study of cooperative orientation among Mexican American families,
Dill’s (1998, 1994) study of preparatory and protective skills in African-
American families, and Chao’s (1994) study of high involvement and phys-
ical closeness in Chinese immigrant families illustrate adaptations to and
resistance against group disadvantage. This transmission process, referred
to as racial socialization, is a means by which parents communicate racial
knowledge in both subtle and deliberate ways (Hughes, 2003; Hughes et al.,
2006; Hughes and Chen, 1999). While thought to be especially relevant to
ethnic and racial minority parents (as structural discrimination and nega-
tive group stereotypes complicate child rearing), much less is known about
the racial practices of white parents.
Hamm (2001) suggests that parents’ socialization habits reflect their posi-
tions in the racial hierarchy. Since whites enjoy a privileged position on the
racial hierarchy, their racial socialization does not revolve around strategic
and protective measures designed to negotiate a racist system. As benefici-
aries of privileged racial status, it is not necessary for white parents to teach
their white children strategies for coping with systemic racism. Rather, white
socialization may involve learning a set of normative and deliberate prac-
tices that advances and promotes whites over other racial groups (Bonilla-
Silva et al., 2006; Feagin, 2010). This affects what white individuals perceive
as positive or problematic. For white parents of children of color, this may
be particularly troubling.
A recent study of white adoptive parents and adult black adoptees suggests
that parents often interpreted their children’s difficult racial episodes as

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V. B. Treitler (ed.), Race in Transnational and Transracial Adoption
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2014
 Culture at Camp 191

‘white racial innocence,’ where mistreatment by whites was excused as

ignorance or insensitivity (Smith et al., 2011). When their black children
encountered discriminatory behavior from white individuals, parents often
encouraged them to minimize conflict and give the offending party the
benefit of the doubt. Smith et al. suggest that, while parents did not intend
to diminish racial mistreatment, their racial privilege made it difficult to
problematize such interactions.
Many transracial adoptive families do not have ready access to agents of
socialization (Samuels, 2009). Where does this leave white parents who are
raising adopted children of color? How do they find information? What do
they find and from whom? These are important questions, as a key assump-
tion of socialization is that parents play a crucial role in the transfer of
knowledge. Additionally, focusing on white parents who elect to create
multi-racial families through adoption is important because these individ-
uals may be forced to engage and address issues of race and racism in ways
that few other white individuals find necessary (Bonilla-Silva et al., 2006).
This allows us to further understand intimate relationships between and
among those defined by race.
This chapter examines the ways that white parents of adopted children
of color understand and define race. It relies on interview data collected
at culture camps, organizations that provide resources for families that
often have little immersion in their adopted children’s birth culture (Song,
2004). The chapter focuses on parents’ answers to a single question: What
is race? I highlight this question because parents’ answers represent their
base conceptualization of race, forming the foundation for racial sociali-
zation (Hughes, 2003). Analyses indicate that parents explicitly described
race either as unimportant or as a central aspect of their child’s identity.
Surprisingly, these contradictory descriptions often came from the same
parent. To further explore this contradiction, I use the theoretical perspec-
tives of colorblindness and race consciousness.

Theoretical framework

Colorblind ideology
Colorblindness fails to acknowledge that race is a central organizing prin-
ciple in society and suggests that ‘if we were to make people aware of racial
differences, simply by noticing we would reintroduce the illusion of race
and thus inevitably polarize and divide, or perhaps even worse, stigmatize’
(Guiner and Torres, 2002, p. 3). Colorblindness has an impact on both insti-
tutions and individuals, in both practice and policy, by promoting the idea
that systematic dis/advantage is the result of merit and deservedness and
race and racism have no impact. (For a discussion of colorblindness, see
Bonilla-Silva, 2001, 2009; Bonilla-Silva and Forman, 2000; Lewis, 2003.)