One that's proven effective is to have multiracial children create family trees, an exercise that helps identify their own place among the many branches. Barber, whose mother is white, his father African-American, lived it himself growing up in Topeka, where a girl once scratched him to see what color his blood was. Society's tendency to force people into single-race categories creates internal struggles for those who don't fit neatly into those boxes, Barber says. I mean a struggle of trying to identify. A monoracial person has a base group to identify with.
Multiracial children have two groups they're trying to identify with.
On the grow In 1990 there were 2 million children younger than 18 who were reported as being of a different race than one or both of their parents. That number is expected to grow after the latest census count. Sophia Julieta Dominguez-Heithoff, born in Kansas City last month, will be part of that future. Hospital forms that asked Sophia's race offered only the traditional categories. There's just a certain coldness in the description.