The Meaning of Kamala Harris - for Our Kids and Ourselves

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: This webinar is entitled The Meaning of Kamala Harris - for Our Kids and Ourselves. We know that a presidential election is coming up in about a month. We know that there are some huge issues of policy: abortion, bodily autonomy, and the economy. There are all sorts of things that we collectively think is at stake here. And many, many people are invested. Those issues, crucial as they are, as strong as people's preferences may be, those issues are not the ones we're going to focus on today. Today we want to talk about Kamala Harris's identity as a multiracial woman, as the daughter of immigrants, and as someone who may well be the next President of the United States and the extent to which, and how, that matters to children in this country and to the parents, educators, and others who care for them.

We asked for your stories. We asked our EmbraceRace community members to share with us briefly their answers to that question. How does this matter? Does it matter? To whom? And we want to open up with some of what they had to say. But first, we want to introduce our two guests who will lend us their insight on these questions. Dr. Allison Briscoe-Smith is a friend of EmbraceRace and literally the guest we've had on the webinars most often.

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: The OG.

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: It's great to see you. Great to see you, Allison. Allison is a clinical psychologist and a consultant. She's done a lot of work with schools, with higher ed institutions, with philanthropy, and healthcare organizations. She's a clinician. She's again, a consultant, a trainer. And she has a particular specialty in ethnic minority mental health and identifies as Blackity, Black, Black, and lives in Seattle for the last three years.

Her colleague and friend and co-author, Dr. Ralina Joseph is a scholar, a teacher, and a facilitator of race and communication. And I'm reminding myself to slow down for the interpreters and reminding all of us to do that. She is a Professor of Communication at the University of Washington, Seattle. She also studies multiraciality. And indeed, she and Allison wrote a book together called Generation Mixed. A note for this conversation. Ralina shares Kamala Harris's Black and Indian heritage and may choose to speak to that or not. Welcome to both of you. It's great to see you.

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: Thanks for being here. So, we wanted to start with just a few things from all of you that you wrote in. You guys wrote in a bunch of stuff, and we will be sharing it throughout this time. 

The question was, what does Kamala Harris mean to you and to your kids? What are the conversations you're having? How are you feeling? What are you seeing in relation to that in your home?

So Landy writes, "I have no words to articulate exactly what I feel, but as a mixed-race Black woman myself, it goes deep for me." Joni, an adult, writes something that a bunch of people wrote about their kids, which is, "She looks like me." Shauna writes, "For my daughter and I, having a vice president and major party presidential candidate in Kamala Harris means that we are valued and witnessed. We are important and our needs can be understood and taken into consideration for political change." Kim writes, "My 4-year-old granddaughter is so excited to see a woman who looks like her running for president." Shantha writes, "I feel an incredible sense of belonging and being represented on the main stage as a first-generation South Asian woman and mother." We heard from some teachers: "A child in my art class asked me how to spell ‘Kamala Harris First Woman President.’ Made me smile." Manny writes, "Some of my students have been remarking, 'Kamala looks like me!' with great joy." So those are just some of the things that you all wrote in.

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: Let me start by actually asking you to respond, not directly necessarily to those, but Allison perhaps in your clinical practice, you have lots of contact with school-aged kids and you draw on all that experience, and all that context, all those contacts you've made.

For a lot of people, one or more of her identities really strikes a chord and is important as part of their experience engaging in this election campaign. So, what are you seeing? What are you hearing of how people are responding to Kamala?

Allison Briscoe-Smith: First, it's good to be here in this space. Thank you for hosting this really important conversation. It's good to be here with my sister, friend, and colleague. And to see some names that I recognize in the chat as well, folks that I know that have children at the center of their work and world. And I love listening to those quotes. They're very resonant and they reiterate the idea of the need for windows and mirrors to be able to see oneself and to see what's possible. And it resonates with what I see as a clinician and as a person that spends time in schools. This is meaningful. It is salient to see what's possible for you. To see oneself represented is really, really meaningful.

And then as you all know, I'm a clinical psychologist that focuses on trauma, so I'm going to get real depressing real quick, which is, it's really meaningful, it's really hopeful. I think we have a tendency to look towards that. And we also need to listen to how she's being treated and represented because our children are bearing witness to that as well. The misnaming, the mis-racing, the invisiblizing, the questioning, that too is also really resonant for people of color, for multiracial folks, for people who cannot be easily categorized. I'm watching with both hope and excitement, but because I'm super depressive, I'm also watching for the ways in which we treat her [because it’s] really meaningful for how we make sense.

“This is meaningful. It is salient to see what's possible for you. To see oneself represented is really, really meaningful… And we also need to listen to how she's being treated and represented because our children are bearing witness to that as well. The misnaming, the mis-racing, the invisiblizing, the questioning, that too is also really resonant for people of color, for multiracial folks, for people who cannot be easily categorized.”
- Allison Briscoe-Smith

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: Dr. Joseph, what do you think about Kamala’s candidacy?

Ralina Joseph: Yeah, absolutely agreed. I think that for me, it's impossible to be able to enter into that moment of celebration of likeness without thinking about the counter that Allison so beautifully named, the base misogyny, the anti-Blackness, the ways in which she has had to, in response, actually not name the violence that's been coming towards her. And I think that teaches our children something as well. We understand this is an important political strategy in order to bring in as many potential voters as possible. And yet there is something that stings about the ways in which she winks and nods but doesn't do the naming. And at the same time, I understand fully. I get it. I get it. But we see that tension. I think it's important to name that tension as well for kids.

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: She's been ‘the first’ in so many moments in her life and as the first woman of color to get this far and to be a real serious contender, she's a real provocation for a lot of people, including for our kids. So she doesn't have to talk about it to be a provocation. So totally agree. And we got a lot of comments like that as well about people having fear about what comes next. Is it a good thing if she wins or a bad thing, depending on repercussions and violence? A lot of people talking about their kids experiencing, and themselves experiencing, some of the questioning of her identity. "What is she? I'm confused. You can't be both." And the "DEI hire." So a lot of that has come up. "My kid is told he can't be Black because he's Brown or light Brown." Those kinds of things are coming up and people are resonating with the difficulties that she's having as well.

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: One thing I'm hearing, especially what Melissa just said, is whether she wins or loses, things will happen and some of it will be painful, right? Allison, going back to what you said, and actually what you both said, there is some pain now in the way her identities are being treated. We all know that it's a very, very close election. What I'm wondering is, when you think about people's investment, and especially the hope, the meaning you said that they find in her identities and that role she's playing, if she were to lose, some people will feel, and it may well be true, that she loses in part because of those identities. Right? 

We had a couple of questions that relate to this from folks who wrote in. They're wondering, "What should I say to my child who sees themselves in Kamala Harris and worries that if she loses, it's because of the identities they share?"

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Yeah, I mean, as I think about that, I think about what stories we need to tell our children regardless of the outcome. I think first we need to listen to how they're making sense of this. And I also think we need to frame this in the context of, we've been through this before. We have been through conversations about multiraciality before in the context of a presidency, and I hope we don't forget. This is different. Yes, gender, the type of racial makeup, the experiences, but we have this moment to not approach this as brand new because this is an old conversation that we've had in the United States for a long time.

To your question, we have a lot of stories that are going to show up no matter what. Win, lose, whatever happens. We know that winning will put her in a place of being able to solicit and take on a whole bunch of this kind of feedback and threat that our kids need to make sense of anyway. We have some stories to tell no matter how this turns out. And the stories are going to be relatively consistent with this continual, "I'm confused by her identity." "I don't know how to make sense of her identity." Or, "Her identity is why she's in the place." All the tropes that we're really quite familiar.

But I would like us to think about, remember we have been through conversations at this level about what multiraciality means, and it's in that context that I also want to think about, and invite us to pay attention to, whether or not we're tired, whether or not we have gotten worn down in this particular moment around race and DEI. We are in a context. So it's an opportunity for us to think about, how do you feel now versus 2008? Were your kids around then? What does it mean if you've got teens? I've been in conversation with Ralina and really defer to her thinking about framing this. I think we need to pay attention to our cups. Are they filled? Are we tired?

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: We're tired, Allison. We're tired.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Let's remember that.

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: Ralina, Did you want to add to that?

Ralina Joseph: Yeah, yeah. I think what Allison is partially referring to is the work, I have a forthcoming book that's called Moving Through Racial Exhaustion. And trying to name the moment that I date to, certainly the idea of racial exhaustion is not a new one, but I date it to the election in 2016 and that brought in a different level of racial exhaustion. I think that the moments of hope and change that we all experienced with Barack Obama, that's been tempered for this particular candidate. And so we have to figure out, how do we continue to articulate our long fight with and for our children? How do we talk about the realities of racism and sexism in such a way that prepares them for the world, but does not kill their spirits?

And I think part of that is the work that Allison and I do fundamentally starts with the concept of radical listening, of listening in deeply even when it's uncomfortable, even when what we hear might grade against our own wishes and wants for ourselves and our children. And then figure out how to talk together to move forward. But I think that it feels like quite a different moment to me than in 2008 as we were dealing with and combating so much virulent racism against President Obama. This does feel different, not just because of the tone and tenor that is a lot less coded. It's not just on the cover of the National Review, it's in all of Trump's campaign rallies. We see clips of these circulating all the time, that children of course are hearing [them] in the background. And so how do we also name that while maintaining the wonderful moments that Allison was naming of windows and mirrors for our kids?

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: Thank you for that, Ralina. I think part of what you're saying as well, or what I feel about this, and in our work, is that representation matters, but it's not enough. We really need to, in terms of preparing children in our lives, and all children, no matter how they're positioned racially or otherwise, we really need to help them make meaning. Because we did get a lot of comments from people who said either that their kids hadn't brought up Kamala's race [or] ethnicity, or that they hadn't spoken to their kids about it yet. And even that they didn't know how to at various ages.

And it does make me think of this, the doll test, everyone knows about the doll test and how Anderson Cooper's folks redid the doll test some years ago. And I remember before that reading this amazing piece by Michele Wallace, who was Faith Ringgold's daughter, and she's a feminist theorist. And she talked about the doll test and about what if the kids were understanding the question differently? They know what the right answer is. If you are asking me, “Who's beautiful? Who has more money?” and you're Anderson Cooper's crew or some university folks asking me, if you're only doing that, the kids might say, "Oh, well I know what the right answer is." And that doesn't necessarily mean, “I think I'm not beautiful.” It could mean that, but it could also mean, “I see the patterns, because I do, and I know who has more status. I know who's considered more beautiful. It doesn't mean that that's true in my house. It doesn't mean that's true in my head.”

A big important part is to notice that kids are noticing the patterns with or without you. They see her. She is a provocation of sorts because she's not like the others. And we need to help kids. Representation is not enough. We have to do what you guys call radical listening. We really have to get on the floor with our kids and help them understand the meaning that they're making and help guide them where they're being led astray because there are a lot of very negative messages, as we talked about. 

Can you talk a bit about how to have that conversation with kids? And why have the conversation with kids?

Allison Briscoe-Smith: I mean, I think you just provided a great example of why, which is you're exactly right in that we don't know the meaning that kids make out of what they're seeing, but they're seeing a lot. So the story that I like to tell with this is that, for example, we're thinking about our kids and how to teach them to cross the road. And we have two options with that. We can do it to tell them to anticipate, "This is a road. This is what we should do when we get there. This is how you can cross it." Or we can let other people teach them how to cross the road when they get to the intersection. Which would we prefer?

And when we frame it in that way, then often parents will say, "Well, I'd like to tell my kids about the road first. And I actually don't know who the person is at the corner that might teach them to cross the intersection." That's my invitation for us to think about not leaving this up to chance or to goodwill or to others, but rather for us to talk about the intersection. And I see that in the chat, some of the questions around how would we prepare, how do we engage?

And that intersection and the ‘why’ is, that intersection is a road of racism and of meaning making or of stories that could tell many of the kids that we're talking about that they aren't beautiful or smart or capable or what they can and can't do. We have this opportunity to get them ready, prepare them, engage with them, and to do that. And the science that you mentioned is actually really super interesting, which is we do have some evidence that for kids under the age of 10, that the complex task that you're talking about, which is projecting, "I know what this interviewer wants me to say" is a really complex metacognitive task. And that issues of social desirability do impact that doll test, meaning that kids after the age of 10 are doing that logic of, "They want me to do this." Kids under the age of 10 aren't doing that so much. So it's giving us a little bit of window.

The only way we knew that is because of active listening. Of not just doing the tests, but interviewing the kids and listening to the kids and listening to what parents are telling us that kids are saying, asking the questions, "What do you think it means?" There's some beautiful work and great storytelling that's been done around how kids are really seeing and making sense of things around them and that it could have a very negative impact. There's a lot of stories that I can think of that they are listening to what's going on, and it's not hard to listen to or to breathe in the smog of negative messages around you and have that taint how you feel and think. And part of that storytelling is also Ralina and I had a chance to listen to kids talk about both the powerful things, their agency, but also we got a lot of negative stories out there as well.

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: I want to push you a little bit in keeping with some of the questions coming in. So both the kids you may work with in your professional work. Allison, we know that you're a mom. Maybe you're willing to share some of the kinds of conversations you're having. And of course your kids will have had, right? You're doing a lot of scaffolding along the way. So it may be that the conversations you're having with your kids aren't the ones that some of our listeners can have with same age kids because they don't have scaffolding. 

What are the kinds of things that you are saying in response to the meaning that kids are making? 

Ralina Joseph: Mmy kids are big, 18 and 21, but my god kids, Allison's children, are a bit younger. I think that making meaning of race for us has always been natural because of the ways in which when they were little and naturally naming race, we helped them do that. And race has always been a part of our language. So, reading in the chat folks who are choosing not to talk about race, not only are you not preparing your child to go out into the world, the intersection, you're setting them up to get run over, honestly. But also, as a parent, part of my job has been to try and be as honest and open about the ways in which I negotiate the world. And I negotiate the world as a racialized being, as all of us do, as white people do, because white people have races as well.

And so, for us naming and talking about how race functions. Not silencing descriptors around race and talking about, "Who is that kid?" "Oh, you know, that white kid in my class" has been really important for them to then figure out all of the sophisticated ways to make their way through race.

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: Thank you, Ralina. 

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Much like Ralina, and in part what we're also kind of talking about is what it means to be in community with each other, that to be in community with folks that can talk about it with each other and with each other's children. Ralina's children talk to my kids and that is a co-creation of their experience as well. But we've had a lot of conversations about race and racial identity. I would say that we have a fluency or an ease with race and race as part of our identity because we practice it. So, because we've got a fluency with it doesn't necessarily mean that the cars aren't coming for you at the intersection. I'm going to work this metaphor to death. It doesn't mean that the cars aren't coming for you.

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: It's got a lot of lives left.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: It just means that my kids know how to tell me and others that they can see those cars and they understand what those cars are and how to get help for it.

There's this tension that's very normal of protection, and I often hear from folks saying, "I don't want to say the wrong thing. I don't want to give them the wrong idea. I don't want to teach them that the world is full of these cars." That desire to protect. And what we've learned by listening to kids is that preparation is actually the best way to protect them. Ralina and I interviewed kids, or actually had kids interview each other. And what they told us in many different ways was that preparation, knowing that there was a language that they could turn to understand what these cars were that were coming for them, did help to protect them. I think an invitation that we'd like to make as people are holding on to that "I haven't talked to them. I don't know what to say. What if I get this wrong? What does that mean?" My invitation is to think about how your love and care and protection can be manifested through preparation.

“There's this tension that's very normal of protection, and I often hear from folks saying, ‘I don't want to say the wrong thing. I don't want to give them the wrong idea.’… That desire to protect. And what we've learned by listening to kids is that preparation is actually the best way to protect them… My invitation is to think about how your love and care and protection can be manifested through preparation.”
- Allison Briscoe-Smith

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: Thank you so much, Allison. There's a comment about what scaffolding means, I used the term scaffolding, so forgive me for that. We just mean that Allison and Ralina are two people who started those conversations about race and identity and lots of things early and familiarize their kids with the language, the emotion, the substance of race.

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: As we have with our kids.

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: As we have with ours. And of course, what you say to a three-year-old is not what you say to a thirteen-year-old. There are different things you can say to your thirteen-year-old, if you said something to them at three, the kinds of things that are appropriate at three and at five, and at seven. The scaffolding is the cumulative building so that you can have different kinds of conversations. If you haven't had that conversation explicitly with your thirteen-year-old, then it's very difficult, or it's a different challenge, that you face than people who have had that conversation. So that's what we mean by scaffolding.

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: We’re also getting some comments in the chat that, for some people, it's just more natural because they had to think about race and mixed-race people: "My intermixed kid is excited to see someone of mixed background reach this level." "My daughters are multiracial, and they're inspired by Kamala, not just because of her racial and gender identities, but because of the cool, calm, and kind way she approaches people in the world." "My fifteen-year-old daughter is excited about Kamala Harris's candidacy. My daughter is Black and Mexican, so she relates to her." And this one's great. Rohini writes in that one of her children's middle name is Kamala, named after her grandmother, who was Kamala, an amazing person who survived the partition in India and raised seven kids in New Delhi and wrote books and did amazing things. Rohini says, "My children rejoiced with me when Kamala Harris became Vice President, a woman and one who shared a family name and our culture. My kids recognized the extraordinary significance of her running for president, but they were born into Barack Obama's presidency. In their lives, it is unquestionable that a woman of color could be president." This is kind of amazing.

It's easier for some families where literally your name's Kamala, so you make the connection. We did get a question about folks who are white and don't share Kamala's gender identity, which to me would suggest they're not a woman. How do they talk about the provocation that is Kamala, about the fact that she's the first in some ways? I think that's how you talk about it, right? You say, "Let's look at who the other presidents are. We can take out a book. What's similar about them? What's different? Sure, we had Barack Obama, and why is that?" And we've in our podcast, we had a great episode (episode six season one) with Marjorie Rhodes about how kids tend to, especially younger kids, move towards individual explanations for things instead of systemic because of the culture that we live in that does that. And that in talking to kids in her work, kids actually thought, "Oh, there's only been one Black president. I guess no other Black people wanted to be president."

These are all things that we can talk about. We can talk about, "Gosh, I don't share her identities, but I think we're living in a more fair place if anyone can become president or if you don't have to look a certain way. I want your world to be full of different kinds of people, and I want people to not just look like us, who come to our home, who run our country, who run our businesses." There are definitely ways to talk about it. 

How else would you recommend people who might not share the same racial or gender makeup as Kamala talk to their kids about her candidacy? 

Allison Briscoe-Smith: My thinking is there isn't a wrong way. That's probably a lie. There's probably some bad stuff you can say. But I think the opportunity here is to think about what you think about, think about what you want to convey, and think about speaking that out loud. I think Ralina made a really important point, which is our kids are watching us and watching how we are moving through our lives. They're watching how I move through in all my identities and making sense of that. So, we are speaking to them about what this means to us when they notice me attending to the TV in a particular way or mentioning a name with reference in a way, they're making sense of that. I think the invitation is for us to pay attention and to notice that. No matter what our identity is, it's happening. As Ralina said, we are all racialized beings in this space, and just because we don't share the same name or racial makeup doesn't mean that we're not communicating, talking, or teaching our kids about how to do race. So that's how I'm making sense of the conversation.

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: And this is, by the way, a very basic point, but I want to lift it up. As we all know, there are lots of people with reference to kids who think that if kids don't name race, they're not thinking about it, they're not engaging. And of course, what you're saying and what we say all the time is, no, they are engaging. And as you said, the choice is, are you waiting for the person that they may meet at the corner to help them get across the street, or are you taking that responsibility thoughtfully and deliberately and in an informed way? Ralina, what's your thinking?

Ralina Joseph: Yeah, no, I thought that it was really interesting, Melissa, when you named this as a challenge for white people as though white people don't have the responsibility to talk about race. I think that white parents with white children need to talk about their whiteness. And to name that early. Also, not just not silence conversations about people of color, but not silence conversations about their own whiteness. And I think that part of the challenge that we see with the racism that emerges is from the lack of those moments of fluency.

I would encourage all of the white parents who are here, white parents of white children, hopefully there are some of those here as well, to work through their own discomfort to have conversations all the time about race. And conversations about race are not always conversations about racism. I think that sometimes can be what those folks who don't have the conversations, who don't have the fluency that Allison named. Conversations about race are joyful conversations. And they're not necessarily always celebratory, but they're a part of who we are intimately and intricately. And so, we need to name and talk about.

“I would encourage all of the white parents of white children who are here to work through their own discomfort to have conversations all the time about race. And conversations about race are not always conversations about racism… Conversations about race are joyful conversations. And they're not necessarily always celebratory, but they're a part of who we are intimately and intricately.”
- Ralina Joseph

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: Thank you for that. We want to go to some questions. We've already incorporated some questions that people are asking of course into the conversation. But here's one, I'm going to tweak it slightly from the original, but it basically goes like this… 

The campaign, of course, has featured a lot of really ugly rhetoric around immigration and immigrants, of course, very prominently the talk about Haitian immigrants in Springfield and whether or not they're eating people's pets, which we know is untrue. Clearly untrue. And yet that chatter continues. How do I talk to our kids about this? Of course we can say these things are untrue, but how do we talk about how and why it's so harmful?

Allison Briscoe-Smith: You want to try it first, Ralina?

Ralina Joseph: I mean, I won't do it as well as you, Allison. But I mean there are moments where we can come in light and try and have a conversation. And there are moments where we need to call out bigotry and hatred in very clear and stark ways. And I think this is an example of when we can't excuse something away. This is not a time for relativism or both sides-ism. This is a time to say, "This is blatantly wrong. We never talk about people this way. This is a lie. And these are the ways in which it's really harmful if we let this sentiment lie." What would you say, Allison?

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Ditto. Yes. I think the piece that's really helpful about what Ralina is framing is that we have to do our own thinking about what we stand for and what we mean and what our values are. And telling lies doesn't typically resonate as a value. This information, if we're going to take this specific story, was not true. That's something little kids can understand, big kids hopefully understand. And then we can also say, "These stories, this gossip really hurt people." And to be clear. And to also come to something I've talked about to this community a lot is our own mission statements, our value statements to think about this conversation with awe. "We don't hurt people that way. We don't talk about people that way." And to come back to who it is that you want to be and who you want your kids to be.

I understand that's complicated as we're watching big authorities do this. "Why would grown-ups with power do this?" "Yeah, isn't that confusing? And sometimes people try to get power in this way. Do you notice?" It's equating and pulling this to your values as well. So, I think the piece I really resonate so deeply with what Ralina has just framed is we get to say, "No. That's not right. Don't do that." And I think sometimes in a sense of curiosity or gentleness with our kids, perhaps we forget that it's okay to call out and be like, "Nah. No."

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: Yeah, nah. Nah to the nah. Absolutely. A live question from the chat…

"For all her merits, I wonder if Kamala Harris would've gotten this far if she had a darker complexion. To what extent is colorism at play here? And also, why do people still say she's African American when in fact she is not?" Now that's an interesting take. I've heard her identify as African American with an Indian mother, and that's her prerogative. And I think growing up where she did when she did, looking at her age, that was probably also the choice as well. But we don't know.

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: She can certainly claim it, and she does.

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: Yeah, I think that's okay. Speaking as a mixed-race person, we can name ourselves. And then we get named as well, which is happening to her a lot. But it is interesting, Allison, you were saying, we've been here before. And we've been here before in this multiraciality and how the confusion that some people claimed that caused for them, and also just the idea that might've been an advantage as well for Obama, right? That there's still such a deep anti-Black strain that we weren't going for Blackity Black.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Yeah, there's a lot of complexity and. The piece where I kind of land is I'm not super compelled by confusion. I know it's something that I narrated before. A person isn't confusing. You're making a choice to not to see them and how they identify. So just to say my own exhaustion is even as I narrated upfront, it's not confusing. This isn't that hard. Listen to what a person says. And what a great lesson for our kids to hear as well.

And I think I'm familiar in the context of multiraciality with how important it is to believe kids with what they say and also the constant pushing and pulling and the ways in which other people feel like they want to define them. So perhaps that's my own form of racial exhaustion, which is I'm not compelled by anyone's confusion because, easy, listen to what the person says! We are complicating multi-identity racial folks. We could move away from that confusion by simply not making these a test and what kind of test of authenticity gets passed where.

And of course, this is complicated as one brings up colorism. Yeah, very complicated, very nuanced changes over time. But I'll just land in a place, and really want to hear what Ralina has to say, but I'm just going to hold as a clinician, as a scholar, as a person in this space, as a therapist, and as a mother of multiracial kids, let's pause in the confusion. How about not? Just don't be confused. Just listen to what the person told you.

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: We know that you have both done research on multiracial kids, some together. At EmbraceRace we have a significant share, we think, of our community that consists of especially white moms of multiracial kids or kids of color. There are obviously separate ways that can happen and does happen. 

We get this question a lot from them, which is, "How do we respond to the questions of race and gender identities when we ourselves don't share that race or that gender and/or that gender identity?" How does that, as it were, a mismatch, a parent mismatch, complicate the conversation between parent and child? Or adult and child? Ralina?

Ralina Joseph: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that one would make the assumption that you have to share every aspect of an identity with a child in order to have a conversation. I think that part of what we need to do is to put aside that assumption that the child is going to be like us. And we know that this is not true in a wide variety of ways. I mean, this is part of where our radical listening comes in, that around racial issues, around gender issues, your desire for a child to be gendered a particular way might not be what the child is actually going to decide. So, I think about, I don't know if you were thinking about this, Allison, we had these two examples, we had many examples, but the two white moms of multiracial African American kids in our study who really were just miles apart in terms of their levels of comfort and their own children's subsequent levels of comfort and navigating themselves as racialized beings in the world.

So, we had this one white mom who literally had Mama School, is what she called it, where she filled in the Black history that was absent during the week from school. So, her kids who at the time were in middle school lamented but also were proud about all of the Black history that they knew and learned from their white mom, who was a single mom as well. So, we had her and these kids that were so proud of who they were and just spoke with each other and with their community in all kinds of amazing ways. And then we had this other mom, a white mom of a multiracial African American boy who refused to speak race. And more than that, as he identified himself as Black, she said, "No, you're not Black." And so, over the course of the hour, we watched this child fall apart and ended up sobbing in the space as the mother said, "No. No." So, I think that shows you those are two incredible extremes, but I don't believe that racialized identity should dictate the ways in which you can and should be talking about race with your kids.

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: Well, let me follow up. So, in fairness to this person and to many in our community who ask the same question, I don't think the question is, “Should we have the conversation?” necessarily. It's, “How do we, in light of?” 

Is it a different conversation you have if I'm Black and my child is Black versus if I'm not Black and my child is Black? We do know from the way it was actually framed that the person was almost surely white. 

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Yeah, I think very similarly. The "how" question I appreciate and hold empathy for because I try to find that there's a loving desire with which to do it. And the extremes that Ralina just held up that we heard were one person holding on to, "The best way to protect my kid is to not have them be Black." And that was a communication. The other extreme was a person who did not have the shared experience of what Blackness could mean, take on with humility and gumption and grace, attempt to do it, and may have messed it up, but did it.

That's the frame there and to hold on to the question of "How?" Perhaps I often jump to often the question of "how" moves to, "I won't do it." There's probably, with such a big community here, some folks that are asking "How?" which is, "I'm trying, and I really want to do this right." What the research bears out, and I think, Melissa, you spoke to this, is that the rates of people talking about race do differ according to racial identity, with the data indicating that white parents are speaking about it less.

And even in the context of multiraciality, that fluency, or that pressure, what we heard was, on one side, the loving kind of hope, which is that parents (and we're talking about this in terms of white and Black) we interviewed hope their whiteness would protect their children from that street. And the more that they could perhaps lean into their proximity to whiteness or their children's proximity to whiteness, the more protected they would be. We can understand and hold empathy for that. And we heard children say that that meant something really different. And that in this case, and in a case that we see a lot, again, this kid fell apart crying in our interview. We hear this in other places.

And to think about, as we think about how multiraciality is being formed here with Vice President Harris is another layer of not necessarily complexity, but multiracial identity that is different than the white-Black space. And perhaps that difference is showing up in some of the questions that we have around authenticity and what that multiraciality means. And I think it brings us, again, to a place of, let's do some listening. The "how" might be asking. The "how," as a white parent, maybe we should ask kids, "How do you think? What do you think? What would you like? Would you imagine?" The humility and grace and gumption might be a way of leaning into it.

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: Yeah, I think that that's great. I love your radical listening and you're doing that at the center that you run, Ralina. And just the idea that we need to do more of that. A psychologist told me they thought in general, parents should speak 85% less. And that really resonated with me doing this work. People just talk over and talk over and talk over, and the kids are like, "Ugh." And my kids too. And I'm always like, oh, okay, the glazing, I need to ask another question in this moment.

Mark Hall was talking about his granddaughter in the chat here and how he's white, she's African American, she thinks he's overprotective. You can have so many conversations with that eleven-year-old about, "Do you think it has something to do with my race?" And she's just got a lot of ideas about it. "Is it because I look different? Are you treated differently?" It sounds like Mark is having those conversations, but it does feel like radical listening and sitting on the floor and asking, and talking 85% less in my case, is absolutely the answer.

We're at the end of our time.

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: We are.

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: That was quick you guys. So wanted to just thank everyone who made this happen. Everyone who's here. Thank you so much to our special guests, always. Dr. Allison Briscoe-Smith, Dr. Ralina Joseph.

I want to encourage people to listen to our podcast, which hopefully these guys will be on in a future season. We were excited that Tanya Mosley of Fresh Air put our first episode in her podcast feed today. So, you guys should listen to that. Her podcast feed being Truth Be Told, and She Has a Name. So that's another one you guys should listen to. We really appreciate you. We hope to be having webinars quarterly now instead of the weekly and more pace that we had back in the day. And doing more podcasting. So, we hope you all are following us and we'll pay attention to that. And of course, find out more about these lovely guests on our website.

EmbraceRace, Andrew Grant-Thomas: Great talking with you. Thanks for coming.

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: Thank you. You guys are amazing.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Thank you.

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: Great.

Ralina Joseph: Bye-Bye.

EmbraceRace, Melissa Giraud: Bye.