From the day Karen Katz brought her infant daughter Lena home, there was a certain question she knew was coming. It finally came when Lena was four; she turned to her mother and asked, "Mommy, how come I'm not the same color as you?" Her heart stopped. Then Katz, who is white, explained to her cinnamon-skinned, Guatemalan-born daughter that they came from different countries. Over the years, Katz and her husband Gary Richards have consciously worked to minimize the distance between themselves and their daughter: taking a trip to Mexico to surround Lena, now eight, with people who look like her and choosing to live in a polyglot Manhattan neighborhood where she blends in easily. Nonetheless, Lena sometimes seems to reject her dark skin, crying over her inability to match her parents. But recently she's begun to explain proudly to strangers her adopted status. "Which isn't to say we're home free now," says Katz. "It's an ongoing conversation."
Dialogues about difference are going on in an increasing number of American households that have been made multiracial through either intermarriage or transracial adoption. The Census Bureau estimates that there are more than 1.3 million interracial marriages. Nearly a third of the children adopted from the public foster-care system are placed with families of a different race. And in the past decade, the number of children adopted from China, for example, has jumped from less than 200 to more than 4,000. You see it even in Hollywood, where Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise and Michelle Pfeiffer are parents of adopted nonwhite children.
And like Katz, more and more parents are wrangling with tough questions: how to handle the external aspects--the stares, comments and other public behaviors that arise when families look different--and perhaps more important, how to handle the internal--the need to affirm the family bond while helping a child craft a strong racial sense of self.
DEALING WITH INSENSITIVITY
The spectrum of multiracial families is broad but embraces some common issues. For example, parents can't be as arbitrary in their choices of neighborhoods, schools, play groups or other social situations when they have a mixed household. "For a child, it's easier to blend," says Mary Durr, an executive with the Adoption Services Information Agency in Washington. She and other experts suggest searching out racially diverse communities--much as Susan Weiss, a Chicago social worker, had to do after acknowledging the negative racial remarks to which her adopted daughters, Indian-born Cathryn, 12, and Peruvian-born Amanda, 7, were subjected in the city. The family moved to a more mixed neighborhood in Oak Park, where, says Weiss, "there are so many parents and kids that don't 'match' that no one notices."
Despite such efforts to create a comforting environment, a trip to the supermarket or McDonald's can be fraught with insensitive public behavior. People stare, children taunt, strangers ask rude questions. To be constantly asked, "Are you just the baby-sitter?" or "Do they look like their father?" can be trying, say those who have endured such questioning. "Some days I want to scream out...'Leave us alone. My life is none of your business!'" rages Chicago drama teacher Jennifer Viets in The Coffee Man and the Milk Maid, a monologue about being the white mother of three biracial children.