Exploring the association between parental ethnic–racial socialization and parental closeness on Black–White biracial adolescents’ choice of racial identification toward blackness.

Abstract

Objective: To explore the influences of Black–White biracial adolescents’ choice to racially identify with Blackness, parental ethnic–racial socialization (ERS) messages, parental race, and perceived parental closeness were examined. Specifically, this study investigated how messages that promote monoracial Black pride and messages that prepare youth for monoracial Black bias may be related to adolescents’ identification with Blackness, and whether parental race or parental closeness moderated these relationships. Method: Three hundred thirty Black–White biracial adolescents (Mage = 14.82) were recruited across the United States via social media. Participants completed the Racial Socialization Questionnaire for Biracial Adolescents and a demographic questionnaire to indicate how close they felt to each parent. The analytic sample (n = 280) included respondents who racially identified as exclusively Black, blended Black, or exclusively biracial. Results: Multinomial logistic regression analyses revealed significant differences in the association between ERS messages and adolescent racial identification based on the race of the parent socializer. Further moderation analyses indicated that parental closeness, particularly regarding fathers, amplifies these findings. Conclusion: Maternal and paternal ERS messages are differentially associated with biracial adolescents’ choice of racial identification toward Blackness. interestingly, ERS messages from White parents seem to significantly influence racial identification compared to Black parents. Parental closeness further elucidates these findings.

The Multiracial‐Black Socialization Model: Conceptualizing racial socialization in Multiracial‐Black families

“…Like the Hughes and Chen (1999) model, the MRB-SM assumes that racial socialization in Multiracial-Black families revolves around several multi-dimensional content domains, including (a) monoracial-Black experiences, (b) Multiracial experiences, and (c) color evasiveness. The first author identified these domains based on the findings from a national cross-sectional survey (Green et al, 2022;Winchester et al, 2023), a meta-ethnographic review (Green et al, 2021), and the growing body of research on racial socialization in…”

“…Future research should be careful to examine each meta-component of the MRB-SM and their sub-dimensions in tandem. Scholars can do so through numerous mechanisms, but one way is to (1) assess socialization that youth receive from each content domain, not just one or two, (2) assess socialization that youth receive from each biological parent, (3) assess how that socialization is conveyed, and (4) collect extensive demographic data (Green et al, 2022;Nishina & Witkow, 2019;Winchester et al, 2023). Gathering this information allows for a richer and more contextual analysis that can produce a more robust representation of racial socialization in Multiracial-Black families.…”