Maintaining Whiteness in a Superdiverse Context: White German Parents' Racial-Ethnic Socialization

Abstract

Objective: We aimed to explore the domains of white German parents’ racial-ethnic socialization (RES) in a superdiverse context.Background: White individuals are becoming numerical minorities in many Western European cities, despite persistent white supremacy. In this context, some white individuals embrace diversity, whereas others perceive it as a threat. Understanding white parents’ RES in diverse contexts is crucial, as parents play a pivotal role in shaping their children's beliefs and behaviors.Method: We conducted qualitative interviews with 12 white German parents of elementary school aged children and employed reflexive thematic analysis to analyze the data.Results: We identified four main themes: silence about race, adhering to white normativity, overtly reinforcing racism, and diversity socialization. Conclusion: RES among white parents is a mechanism that can uphold or resist white supremacy. All parents’ messaging included aspects of both, indicating an ongoing embrace of white normativity and supremacy in this superdiverse context, but also an emerging consciousness of own privileges.Implications: Fostering environments that reject white supremacy demands change at all systemic levels. Interventions to bridge the gap between emerging awareness and concrete actions, guiding parents in exploring and addressing racial-ethnic topics, are one vital puzzle piece to disrupt the intergenerational transmission of racism.

Ethnic-Racial Socialization Through the Lens of German Young Adults of Turkish, Kurdish, East and Southeast Asian Heritage

“…Ethnic-racial socialization (ERS) research emerged in the U.S in the 1980s, saw a boom in published papers since 2016, and overwhelmingly centered family settings and parents (mainly mothers) as sources of ERS (Hughes, 2023). Recently, few studies in the Netherlands and Germany targeted mothers of children racialized as white (de Bruijn et al, 2024;Kaiser et al, 2023Kaiser et al, , 2024Mesman et al, 2022) and mothers of racially marginalized children (Bostancı et al, 2022;Pektas et al, 2023;Yang et al, 2022) as sources of ERS. Nevertheless, with a growing diverse population and persisting racism, there is an increasing need to understand ERS of racially marginalized youth in Germany within and beyond family settings.…”