The ILI Multi-Racial Relationships Initiative

-Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Director

Last week, in a conversation with my adult stepdaughter, I had an idea in response to something she said about her experience of being Black at this particular moment in history. She was struggling. I held my tongue. But she knows me well, and she asked, “What are you thinking?”
 
“Oh I don’t know,” I said, “do you really want to hear from a white woman about this right now?”  
 
She looked at me directly, “I want to hear from you.”
 
This was decidedly not a feel-good, color-blind moment; both of us are keenly aware of the color of our skin and the stark contrast in the ways we are therefore met by the world. We were swimming in complex waters.  As adrienne maree brown (lower case intended) suggests in her 2017 book, Emergent Strategy, my stepdaughter and I were “living inside these constructs while evolving beyond them.”
 
brown was referring to the construction of the concept of race, long ago and persisting, to keep some down and others up. Racism grows from that foundation, and often takes the shape of white people speaking up when listening would be the better course, especially when it comes to black and brown people’s experience.  I held my tongue because of that. On the other hand, race, my stepdaughter was saying, is made up, and she needed to hear from me.

Race is not real in any biological sense. Racism is very real, dangerously so. In order to be in loving family with each other, multi-racial families must live in that complexity, seeing each other as fully human, transcending race, while at the same time acknowledging racism and our very different experiences of it.
 
This is the foundation of one of the ILI’s initiatives, Multi-Racial Families: Transcending Racism in a Racialized World. Many of us at the ILI are members of multi-racial families, with parents, partners and/or children whose skin color is different from each other’s and who don’t share the same experience of racism. In order to be in loving family with each other, we see each other as fully human, transcending race. At the same time we acknowledge racism, and our differing realities, ancestral histories, and experiences.

This project focuses on the lived experiences of these families, and the collective wisdom in those experiences, as a source of insight and practice in support for strong and intentional multi-racial relationships. If you are part of a multi-racial family, we hope you’ll join us. For more information about participating, click here.