“They’re Only a Quarter”: A Duoethnographic Exploration of Multiracial Fatherhood

Abstract

In this duoethnography, we examine our own experiences of multiracial fatherhood to disrupt metanarratives about race, multiraciality, and privilege. By synthesizing critical multiracial theory and critical race parenting, we advance three propositions of critical multiracial parenting to attend to the permanence of (mono)racism, the shifting salience of multiraciality across time and space, and the possibilities of expansive pedagogical approaches to challenge racial rigidity. We weave together and disrupt each other’s narratives by presenting two scenes of multiracial fatherhood, complicating our understanding and assumptions of White privilege, multiracial identity, and generational proximity to an interracial union. Our hope is that our duoethnography is not a beginning nor an end; rather, we call on readers to continually add their voices to disrupt and complicate how whiteness works in family systems and multiraciality discourses.

1. Introduction

Multiraciality1 has grown in prominence in the United States, stemming from an increase in interracial marriages in the 1980s, the popularity and visibility of mixed-race celebrities, and expanded federal data collection standards that allowed respondents to select more than one racial category (Root 1996). While multiracial2 identity and experiences are often portrayed as a modern phenomenon, multiracial people have existed throughout history (see Wilkinson 2020). However, ahistorical framings of racial mixing complicate how discourses of multiraciality address systems of oppression that stratify society based on race. Often centering first-generation children of interracial and monoracial parents as “poster children for multiraciality” (Morning and Saperstein 2018, p. 63) within scholarly and cultural discourses, there remain questions about the privilege and oppression of multiracial people as a social group and the transmission of these power dynamics across generations. Such questions are increasingly complicated as multiracial people transition to parenthood and raise what Song (2017) termed second-generation multiracial children.

Social sciences researchers Johnston and Nadal (2010) advanced the concept of monoracism, a system of power that oppresses those “who do not fit monoracial categories” (p. 125), including, but not limited to, multiracial people. Monoracism manifests in two distinct, interconnected forms. First, individuals may experience multiracial microaggressions, or everyday experiences of discrimination based on multiracial status (Johnston and Nadal 2010). For example, comments like “that can’t be your dad” deny and devalue one’s multiracial reality. Second, monoracism manifests as a structural form of oppression (Harris et al. 2021). For example, only since 2016 have all states in the United States offered the option to report multiple races on birth certificates (Martin et al. 2018), which has obscured multiraciality in national health equity research (see Lam-Hine et al. 2024). While scholars have examined how multiracial individuals navigate monoracism within familial relationships (e.g., Atkin and Jackson 2021; Waring 2025), few scholars have examined how monoracism collectively impacts family units. As an exception, Johnson (2024) highlighted that interracial parents navigate increased public scrutiny and surveillance around their relationship to their biological children, fueling pressures to prove or perform familial legitimacy. Thus, multiracial parents with partners of another race may experience compounding manifestations of monoracism, as multiracial individuals and as members of a multiracial family.

Some scholars have questioned whether multiracial people have more privilege than monoracial people of color. For example, Johnston-Guerrero and Tran (2018) examined how “passing” as White could grant a multiracial person temporary access to White privilege. Additionally, Waring (2023) challenged the notion of privilege that is exclusively based on physical appearance by arguing that some multiracial people may benefit from White privilege by proxy, such as having a White parent. Further, multiracial people of different racial heritages may have differential experiences when traversing multiple monoracial groups (for example, see Loblack 2023). Thus, there remains an ongoing debate about who can claim a multiracial identity, multiracial people and privilege, and the influence of multiraciality on parenting and family systems.

Synthesizing critical multiracial theory (J. C. Harris 2016) and critical race parenting (Matias and Montoya 2015) as a conceptual framework, we employed a duoethnographic methodology to explore our experiences being and becoming multiracial fathers raising second-generation multiracial children. In sharing our narratives, we contribute to the existing and growing body of literature about multiracial families and generational proximity to multiraciality, in order to complicate our understandings and assumptions about race, mixedness, and privilege. Accordingly, the following questions guided our inquiry: (1) What does it mean to be a multiracial father? (2) How do we approach raising second-generation multiracial children, with critical attention to issues of multiraciality, whiteness, and (mono)racism?

2. Literature Review

In this section, we trace the foundational literature that undergirds our study. First, we focus on monoracial parents raising multiracial children, as well as the minimal literature on multiracial parents. Then, we explore multiraciality across generations and notions of privilege associated with (mixed) whiteness.

2.1. Multiracial Parenting

Twine (2011) advanced the concept of racial literacy to describe how monoracial White parents learn to name and negotiate racism as they raise multiracial children, drawing from the experiences of White women in interracial relationships with Black men in Britain. For some, this included deploying “whiteness as a valuable resource to counter and minimize the racial discrimination that [their multiracial child] might encounter” (Twine 2011, p. 107). Similarly, building on research centering the socialization messages about race that multiracial young people receive from family members (e.g., Csizmadia and Atkin 2022; Atkin and Jackson 2021; Atkin et al. 2022a; Atkin and Yoo 2019), Vezaldenos et al. (2023) outlined five ways in which monoracial mothers approach amplifying or suppressing antiracist agency among their multiracial children. These approaches range from (a) perpetuating dominant racial ideology, (b) avoiding conversations about race or responding with silence, (c) focusing on preparing children for potential future bias, (d) explaining how systemic racism affects multiple groups, and (e) engaging children in social justice perspectives (Vezaldenos et al. 2023). Rarely do such studies on multiracial socialization focus exclusively on fathers (e.g., Green and Bryant 2023; Reyna 2022; Rosen and Greif 2023; Seto et al. 2021). As an exception, Durrant and Gillum (2024) examined how monoracial White fathers approached race-related conversations with their multiracial (Black/White) sons, noting that some had hesitations about when and how to explicitly discuss racial discrimination with their child. As Vezaldenos et al. (2023) noted, future research on fathers’ perspectives on multiracial socialization is warranted.

Within the growing body of literature on parenting multiracial children (e.g., Ashlee and Combs 2022a; Nakazawa 2004; Nayani 2020; Rockquemore and Laszloffy 2004; S. H. Chang 2016; Wright 2000), few scholars consider the experiences of parents who identify as multiracial. As a notable exception, Song (2017) explored the parenting experiences of multiracial people with White ancestry in Britain, including Black/White and Asian/White participants. Song (2017) identified a pattern of cosmopolitanism in multiracial parenting, which emphasized appreciation for an increasingly diverse, interconnected world without overlooking the real harms of racism. While many multiracial parents believed that phenotypically White features would insulate their children from overt racism, they expressed willingness to discuss this topic with their children in more proactive and explicit ways than did their own monoracial parents. Notably, Song (2017) found that Black/White parents more strongly expressed an attachment to Blackness to their children, while Asian/White parents discussed insecurities around not being seen as authentically Asian. According to Song (2017), multiracial parents with White ancestry, particularly those who had children with White partners, expressed anxiety around a perceived dilution of multiraciality, which we explore further in the next section.

2.2. Multiracial Identity and Generational Proximity

As individuals in the United States have been able to select more than one racial category when self-reporting their demographic data, scholars have questioned who is multiracial and who can claim a multiracial identity and identification (e.g., Harris and Sim 2002; Morning 2000; Morning and Saperstein 2018). According to the most recent U.S. Census, the number of individuals reporting two or more races has increased significantly (Jones et al. 2021). Although many scholars conflate this uptick of the two or more races category with an increased multiracial population, an accurate picture of multiracial people in the United States is more complex. Rockquemore et al. (2009) argued that multiracial identity may not correlate with how individuals self-report racial categories on official forms. This assertion aligns with other scholars who frame the selection of racial categories as a political act which may or may not align with personal identity (Ford 2023). Our understanding of multiracial identity in this article includes both: we grapple with our personal understanding and meaning making about race in relation to our self-concept and the politicized construction of race through categorization.

Numerous scholars have explored factors that may lead an individual to identify as multiracial and/or select more than one racial category when prompted to disclose their race. One of the most notable models of multiracial identity is Wijeyesinghe’s (2012) intersectional model of multiracial identity (IMMI). While she outlined eleven factors, Wijeyesinghe (2012) argued that multiracial identity is influenced by multiple intersecting dimensions that may appear, disappear, and interact across a person’s life. The influence of family and racial ancestry is included in the IMMI model.

Family influence has been shown to impact multiracial children’s personal racial identity, which can include how race is discussed in the family system and how parents choose to racially identify their child. However, the results of research on family influence often conflict with each other regarding how family influences multiracial identity. For example, Aspinall and Song (2013) found that those who identify as multiracial overwhelmingly do so because their parents are from two distinct racial groups. On the contrary, Harris and Sim (2002) argued that simply having parents from different racial groups is insufficient for children to identify as multiracial; multiracial children need parents that are supportive of multiracial identity development. This tension highlights the complexity multiracial children navigate, as they may not find support for their multiracial identity from parents and may receive implicit and explicit (mono)racist messages throughout their early and adolescent lives (King 2013; Lynch 2022; Malaney-Brown 2022a).

Research regarding the influence of distant racial ancestry concludes that it has little effect on affirming an individual’s multiracial identity (see Aspinall and Song 2013). Morning and Saperstein (2018) found, in a survey of adults with mixed heritages, that while 18% of respondents were identified as multiracial by the researchers (i.e., within four generations of an interracial union), only 2.5% chose more than one racial category on the U.S. Census. Thus, they concluded that generational proximity influences multiracial identity, with those closest to an interracial union more likely to claim a multiracial identity. Additionally, Morning and Saperstein (2018) explored different mixes of racial heritages and their likelihood of identifying as multiracial, concluding that Asian/White individuals were overwhelmingly more likely select more than one racial category, regardless of generational proximity.

The proliferation of consumer DNA testing raised questions about whether knowledge about distant ancestry would impact individuals’ understanding of race and racial identity. However, Roth et al. (2020) demonstrated that DNA test results broadly had an insignificant impact on beliefs about race; rather, test results have been shown to strengthen already-held beliefs about race (Hu et al. 2024). Within postsecondary contexts, Mohajeri et al. (2023) explored the impact of DNA testing on racial discourses among graduate students. DNA test results surprised students, disrupted family narratives of ancestry, and reinvigorated pride in students’ heritages, particularly for White European students. However, DNA test results did not necessarily change students’ racial identity, nor their racial categorization choices. For example, many students felt restricted in their ability to identify with multiple racial groups because they were not [insert race] enough, reifying a biological notion of race. Notably, White graduate students were most likely to explore their multiple cultural heritages, while still having the privilege of identifying as White (Mohajeri et al. 2023). This research affirms other studies about race and genetic testing, which reveal that test takers are unlikely to change their racial identity but may consider ethnic identity shifts (see Roth and Yaylacı 2024).

There is less research on the identity of second-generation multiracial children and the generational locus of multiraciality (Morning and Saperstein 2018; Pilgrim 2021; Song 2017). While Atkin et al. (2022b) defined second-generation multiracial people as those with “one or two multiracial biological parents and monoracial grandparents” (p. 384), Pilgrim (2021) cautioned against using the term to “imply a biological transfer of race” (p. 2555). When multiracial individuals have children, certain racial or ethnic heritages may become less salient in both the family system and, subsequently, for children. In other words, as children become farther in proximity from an “immediate” multiracial experience (i.e., the child of parents from two distinct racial groups), it is unclear whether they will identify as multiracial (see Soltis 2025). Again, family socialization may have a large influence on racial identity development for children of multiracial parents. For example, in a quantitative analysis of U.S. Census data, Bratter (2007) examined the likelihood of parents classifying their child as multiracial in families with one multiracial and one monoracial parent. Bratter (2007) found that parental racial overlaps (e.g., one race from the multiracial parent matches their monoracial partner) more often resulted in classifying children as monoracial. Notably, monoracial parents may be more likely to classify their children as multiracial (Morning and Saperstein 2018). With a focus on Black/White families, Pilgrim (2021) asserted that “examining second-generation multiracials with primarily White ancestry gives a fuller understanding of racial boundaries and the meanings of racial groups due to their range of identity options” (p. 2552), which we explore further in the next section.

2.3. White (Multiracial) Privilege

In multiraciality discourses, scholars have debated whether multiracial individuals have racial privilege. This line of inquiry is rooted in assumptions that multiracial people have White racial heritage, which contributes to the erasure of multiracial people with multiple minoritized racial identities (see Rondilla et al. 2017), and that (White) racial mixtures are desirable, stemming from the exotification and commodification of racially ambiguous bodies (J. C. Harris 2017; Museus et al. 2016; Waring 2013). Thus, we argue against the idea of multiracial privilege and assert that multiracial people with White racial heritage may benefit from White supremacy.

Some scholars have explored multiracial people and the practice of racial malleability or fluidity, arguing that this could be a distinct form of multiracial privilege that monoracial individuals may not have access to (see Sanchez et al. 2009; also see Gaither 2015). On the contrary, in their study exploring the concept of multiracial privilege, Johnston-Guerrero and Tran (2018) concluded that the ability to access and navigate multiple cultures and racial groups is not aligned with the concept of privilege—an unearned benefit or special advantage granted to a dominant group—as it relates to systems of power and oppression. We agree with this assertion because while multiracial people may benefit from racial malleability, we disagree that this is an unearned benefit for multiracial people as a group. For example, numerous scholars have demonstrated how multiracial individuals may be excluded from monoracial groups based on their physical appearance or cultural knowledge (A. Chang 2016; J. C. Harris 2016, 2017). Further, research has shown that constant movement between monoracial groups can have a detrimental effect on a multiracial person’s well-being (i.e., chronic codeswitching; Wright et al. 2022). Group membership, then, may be negotiated, earned, or denied for multiracial individuals navigating monoracial spaces.

However, Johnston-Guerrero and Tran (2018) argued that participants in their study contextually claimed White privilege, often associated with their physical appearance. Thus, we understand racial malleability as a contextual privilege in its relation to whiteness. The ability to “pass” as White in certain contexts has led to the stereotype of multiracial people as “honorary Whites” (see Bonilla-Silva 2002), giving certain multiracial people access to resources through whiteness (Johnston-Guerrero and Tran 2018). However, the idea of “honorary Whites” is based on physical appearance and an individual’s ability to “pass” as White. Waring (2023) expanded understanding of how whiteness works in multiracial families by coining the term “White privilege by proxy” (p. 61) to acknowledge the material benefits of having a White parent. For example, one of Waring’s participants shared how having a White mother helped him secure housing, because landlords were more amenable to rent to a White woman. This scenario demonstrates how a multiracial child benefited from whiteness as property (C. I. Harris 1993), which portrayed the White mother as an inherently trustworthy tenant.

White privilege is further nuanced among Asian/White multiracial people. It is important to note that the Asian racial category contributes to the erasure of many diverse ethnic groups lumped into this broad category, implicitly referring to East Asian ethnic groups (Gogue et al. 2022). The model minority stereotype places Asian people as a buffer class to maintain White supremacy and perpetuate anti-Black racism (Poon et al. 2016). Sometimes also referred to as “honorary Whites”, Asian people are often accused of striving for whiteness (Museus and Iftikar 2014). These shifting stereotypes are used and thus reinforced through social and political events that ultimately protect whiteness, such as the Supreme Court case ruling race-conscious admissions unconstitutional (see Ward 2023) and leveraging the increase in anti-Asian violence to condemn racist acts while maintaining racist systems (Soltis 2024). Further, the model minority stereotype is implicated in discourses of Asian/White multiracial families, including accusations of Asian individuals trying to be accepted as White (see Miyawaki 2015). Accordingly, Asian/White multiracial people may be viewed in the racial hierarchy as “closer” in proximity to whiteness, although there lacks evidence to support this “whitening” narrative (see Song 2021). With the flexibility to claim a multiracial identity, Asian/White people may have more access to White privilege and its associated opportunities.

3. Conceptual Framework

In this section, we outline the two theoretical perspectives that undergird our conceptual framework. First, we outline critical race parenting before overviewing key aspects of critical multiracial theory. Finally, we provide a synthesis of both theories and advance three propositions of critical multiracial parenting.

3.1. ParentCrit

Following the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, at the hands of a White police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Matias and Montoya (2015) introduced the term critical race parenting (ParentCrit) to grapple with the “painful pedagogy” (p. 83) of teaching their children of color to navigate a violently racialized world. Matias (2016) later defined ParentCrit as an “educational praxis that can engage both parent and child in a mutual process of teaching and learning about race, especially ones that debunk dominant messages about race” (p. 3, emphasis added). Here, echoing scholarship on parental racial humility (e.g., Green and Bryant 2023), we amplify the power and potential of children to support their parents in (un)learning the rigid rules of race. As Nishi (2018) noted, ParentCrit is deeply rooted in the parenting practices of Black parents, many of whom work early and often to equip their children with skills to survive the pervasive dehumanization of Blackness (Dumas 2016; Dumas and Ross 2016). Conversely, White parents may avoid, if not actively resist, the aims of ParentCrit (Nishi 2018).

Rooted in the intellectual lineage of critical race theory (CRT) and its applications in educational contexts (e.g., Crenshaw 1996; Delgado and Stefancic 2023; Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995; Patton 2016), ParentCrit foregrounds racial realism and critical race pedagogy (Matias 2016). Bell (1992) positioned racial realism as an acknowledgement of the permanence of racism—within a cycle of progress and retrenchment—in order to mitigate the generational (re)production of racial oppression. In other words, parents who focus only on racial progress fail to prepare their children to navigate the realities of racism (Matias 2016). As articulated by Lynn (1999), critical race pedagogy broadly considers the liberatory practices that educators of color employ to resist overlapping oppressions (e.g., racism, sexism, classism) while supporting and affirming students of color. Thus, ParentCrit recognizes that parents are often the first to implicitly and explicitly teach (and learn from) their children about race (Matias 2016). Finally, Matias (2016) noted that ParentCrit is informed by the Black feminist wisdom of womanism (see Walker 1983), subverting deficit framings of teaching (and parenting) as “women’s work” by harnessing care as a critical catalyst for emancipatory learning (Beauboeuf-Lafontant 2005). Though we reflect on our experiences at the intersection of multiraciality and fatherhood, we acknowledge that the labor, love, and lineage of our (fore)mothers is central to our parenting praxis.

3.2. MultiCrit

Recognizing that CRT did not fully speak to the lived experience of multiracial people in the United States, J. C. Harris (2016) advanced critical multiracial theory (MultiCrit), which both adapted previously established CRT tenets (challenge to ahistoricism; interest convergence; experiential knowledge; and challenge to dominant ideology) and proposed new tenets (racism, monoracism, and colorism; a monoracial paradigm of race; differential micro-racialization; and intersections of multiple racial identities). J. C. Harris’ (2016) central argument outlined how race in the U.S. context is bound by singular, separate categories. The organization of race with unmovable and impermeable boundaries discounts how racial meanings shift over time and has resulted in interpersonal and systemic monoracism (see Johnston and Nadal 2010). This monoracial privileging (see Hamako 2014) restricts opportunities for multiracial people, including within their own family system.

Agreeing with CRT scholars, J. C. Harris (2016) argued that (multiracial) people of color have experiential knowledge that can specifically challenge dominant ideologies (see Delgado and Stefancic 2023). Multiracial people may have access to more expansive perspectives (i.e., interdisciplinary and eclectic perspectives; Matsuda et al. 1993) due to their shifting racial locations and experiences with multiple systems of racial oppression (i.e., racism, monoracism, and colorism; J. C. Harris 2016). Scholars argue that multiracial individuals have a heightened consciousness about race based on their lived experiences (A. Chang 2022; Malaney-Brown 2022b). To illustrate this heightened sense, Anzaldúa (2022) introduced the concept of la facultad, or the “capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see deep structure below the surface” (p. 47). As a result of inhabiting a liminal space, “caught between the worlds” (Anzaldúa 2022, p. 47), multiracial people can connect experiences of individual harm to systems of power and oppression in order to work towards social justice and liberation (see Malaney-Brown 2022b). While J. C. Harris (2016) initially articulated the tenets of MultiCrit in relation to the experiences of multiracial women in college, Lynch (2022) argued that MultiCrit has applicability across the lifespan. Further, we situate our analysis alongside that of other scholars who have applied this theoretical framework to explore the experiences of multiracial families (e.g., Cardwell 2021).

3.3. Combining ParentCrit and MultiCrit

Rather than advance specific tenets, Montoya and Sarcedo (2018) framed ParentCrit as a “set of considerations for critically minded parents” (p. 71), with specific attention to race and racism. Further, they invited parentscholars to leverage their parental epistemologies to theoretically expand ParentCrit and its applications. As such, we draw on our ontoepistemologies or “hybridized ways of knowing and being” (Boveda and Bhattacharya 2019, p. 8) as multiracial (soon-to-be) fathers to consider how ParentCrit might more explicitly engage the nuances of raising children in a monoracist world. This is not to suggest that ParentCrit alone overlooks the complexities of parenting a multiracial child (e.g., Matias and Montoya 2015). Rather, we assert that ParentCrit and MultiCrit are complementary frames through which to sharpen focus on the experiential knowledge of multiracial parents and how they approach raising children to recognize and resist a monoracial paradigm of race. Specifically, we advance three propositions at the nexus of ParentCrit and MultiCrit.

First, critical multiracial parenting recognizes the permanence of (mono)racism. Despite incremental progress (e.g., overturning anti-miscegenation laws, adding the option to self-select more than one race on the U.S. Census), monoracism persists (in)formally in policies and practices. For example, the reliance on monoracial categories in determining eligibility for federal Minority-Serving Institution designations prevents some higher education institutions with highly multiracial student populations from accessing competitive grant funding (Espinoza et al. 2024). Thus, to face the ever-present reality of racism (Bell 1992), one must not overlook its myriad manifestations, including the intertwined relationship of racism, monoracism, and colorism (J. C. Harris 2016). In other words, a multiracial child may experience oppression as a person or color (racism), while also navigating implicit and explicit racial boundary policing (monoracism) and accessing varied levels of privilege as a function of skin tone (colorism). Daniel et al. (2014) positioned monoraciality as the lynchpin in the social construction of whiteness. As such, critical multiracial parenting attends to the porosity of racial boundaries as a strategy to destabilize the enduring logic of White supremacy.

Second, critical multiracial parenting attends to the shifting salience of multiraciality across time and contexts. J. C. Harris (2016) noted that multiracial people are racialized differently on both macro and micro time scales. On the macro level, phenotypical changes between childhood and adulthood may impact how a multiracial person experiences race and racialization across their lifespan. On the micro level, a multiracial child may be racialized differently on a daily basis depending on parental proximity (e.g., being dropped off at school by their White parent and picked up from school by their Black parent). In addition to such changes across time, multiracial people may employ a situational identity in which they foreground aspects of their racial identity as a function of context (see Renn 2000, 2003). Thus, critical multiracial parenting must decouple mixedness and fixedness, regularly (re)framing race not as a static descriptor, but as an active, ongoing, power-laden process (e.g., Moya and Markus 2010; Omi and Winant 2015).

Third, critical multiracial parenting embraces expansive pedagogical possibilities beyond racial rigidity. Hamako (2014) argued that antiracist educational efforts are not inherently antimonoracist. As such, it is vital to not only expose children to representations of multiraciality, but to engage them in critical, developmentally appropriate dialogue around these depictions. Otherwise, representations of multiracial families across picture books (e.g., Sands-O’Connor 2001), children’s literature (e.g., Chaudhri and Teale 2013), and popular media (e.g., Wong-Campbell 2024) may inadvertently reinforce a monoracial paradigm of race. For example, Chaudhri and Teale (2013) found that multiracial protagonists in children’s literature were often “the only biracials in monoracial environments” (p. 365). Acknowledging the limits of either/or thinking that fuels White supremacy culture (see Okun 2021), a critical multiracial parenting approach amplifies the power and potential of a both/and paradigm when teaching and learning about race and racism.

4. Research Design

Norris and Sawyer (2012) defined duoethnography as a “collaborative research methodology in which two or more researchers of difference juxtapose their life histories to provide multiple understandings of the world” (p. 9). In line with the use of counter-storytelling in critical race scholarship (Solórzano and Yosso 2002), one intention of duoethnography is to explore “personal and collective narratives of resistance in relation to dominant discourses” (Norris and Sawyer 2012, p. 10). Drawing inspiration from Ashlee and Combs’ (2022a) duoethnographic exploration of multiracial motherhood, we focus our inquiry on multiracial fatherhood.

Norris and Sawyer (2012) described nine tenets of duoethnography. First, duoethnography positions one’s life as a curriculum, the meaning(s) of which can be reframed and reclaimed in partnership with the Other (Norris and Sawyer 2012). Our interests are not in self-understanding, but in collaboratively tracing and transforming the meanings we make of a specific phenomenon: multiracial fatherhood. Second, duoethnographies are polyvocal and dialogic, emphasizing distinct voices over a single, shared narrative (Norris and Sawyer 2012). We make intentional formatting choices later in this manuscript to visually represent our unique voices. Third, in juxtaposing multiple perspectives, duoethographies resist advancing a singular truth and instead invite readers to actively participate in disrupting metanarratives (Norris and Sawyer 2012). Rather than pursue consensus, we prioritize grappling with complexity in this project. Fourth, duoethnographies intentionally attend to difference, as “different people can experience the same phenomenon differently” (Norris and Sawyer 2012, p. 17). Alongside our similarities as first-generation multiracial Asian/White cisgender men partnered and parenting with White cisgender women, we resist universalizing our experiences by considering the nuances of Brendon’s experience raising two young children in the Midwest alongside Jacob’s experience preparing to raise a child on the West Coast. Despite parenting in these geographically distinct regions, we each live in predominantly White communities and navigate predominantly White and monoracial academic spaces, which contributes to being read more frequently as ambiguously Asian. Further, we unsettle an essentialized Asian American experience by exploring Brendon’s Japanese heritage and Jacob’s Chinese and Filipino background. Fifth, change is central in duoethnography (Norris and Sawyer 2012). We did not enter this project to concretize what we already believe, but to witness and be witnessed in the process of transforming these understandings.

The remaining tenets of duoethnography consider issues of reflexivity (six), accessibility (seven), ethics (eight), and trust (nine). Duoethnography acknowledges the inherent fiction of objective truths and posits that trustworthiness is a product of transparent researcher reflexivity (Norris and Sawyer 2012). Additionally, duoethnography prioritizes audience accessibility (Norris and Sawyer 2012). Thus, we center storytelling as praxis, with hope that our children might one day read and re-story these words. Duoethnographers research with not on one another (Norris and Sawyer 2012). While we enter this process willingly, we acknowledge the ethical issues that arise when our disclosures involve those beyond our dialogic process (e.g., our parents, our partners, our children). Thus, we stress that our stories reflect our subjective experiences, filtered through the prism of our positionalities. Finally, duoethnography requires a foundation of trust (Norris and Sawyer 2012). Since trust begets deeper disclosure, we approached this project as an opportunity to further forge our friendship. Next, we discuss how these tenets informed the data collection and analysis methods we employed in this study.

Our Process

While we typically interact virtually since we live in different states, we dedicated time at a recent academic conference to physically plan and prepare for this project. After an initial brainstorm exploring this Special Issue’s central focus on the contested nature of White privilege in multiracial families and framed by our larger research questions, we developed three prompts to further focus our individual reflections in advance of a recorded Zoom conversation: (1) Will your child identify as multiracial?, (2) What messages about race did you learn from your White father?, and (3) How do you feel about raising a child with more proximity to whiteness than you? In duoethnography, researchers engage in dialogue with one another as well as with cultural artifacts (Norris and Sawyer 2012). Like Ashlee and Quaye (2021), we identified artifacts to enhance our personal reflection (e.g., family photos/videos). For example, Brendon shared the printed program from his grandfather’s funeral, and Jacob presented a children’s book featuring a Flippish (Filipino/Irish) protagonist. We used these artifacts, rather than the reflective prompts, to structure an approximately two-hour virtual dialogue, sharing stories that the artifacts elicited, attending to points of connection and difference across our experiences, and honoring imperfection and ideation. In true parentscholar fashion, Brendon’s daughter was not quite ready for her naptime when we met, so she joined the first half of our conversation. Following our meeting, we individually reviewed the Zoom-generated transcript of our dialogue. With the tenets of duoethnography in mind, we each identified excerpts that amplified our unique voices, highlighted difference, and gestured toward transformation. Then, we met again via Zoom to further discuss the transcript and select excerpts to prime additional written reflections. Throughout this process, we engaged both ParentCrit and MultiCrit to connect emerging learnings to broader social structures and systems of power. In the next section, as part of our duoethnographic emphasis on voice and accessibility, we present key scenes of dialogue, alongside written reflections on our conversation.

5. Finding Disruptions

We frame what traditionally might be labeled “findings” through the concept of disruption, which aligns with the duoethnographic emphasis on disrupting metanarratives. Disruption occurred within our research process, such as Brendon’s children frequently disrupting his analysis process. Disruption also emerged from our narratives, such as Jacob’s impending disruption of his PhD program by the birth of his child. Critically, we acknowledge the negative connotations of disruptions (e.g., impeding progress) and embrace these forced fractures as invitations to access more expansive understandings and advance epistemic changes in research (see Patel 2014)—to pause, to marinate, to (re)think. Through disruption, or the forced pauses which academia does not always value, we found expansive understandings of mixedness, whiteness, and privilege through our interwoven narratives.

While we outlined the prompts that primed our reflection, we resisted restricting our dialogue to merely answering these questions; instead, we acknowledge that each prompt and our guiding research questions permeated our conversation in full. Rather than try to distill the entirety of our dialogue, we present two salient scenes of mixed fatherhood (in italics), followed by nonlinear amalgams of our written reflections on these scenes, with Brendon’s (B) voice in purple and Jacob’s (J) in green. We assert that both elements—our linear conversation and our layered reflections—are essential to the duoethnographic process, with the former identifying our (in)congruent experiences and the latter disruptively transforming our co-constructed meaning(s) of these experiences. By visually representing the layering of our individual voices, we gesture toward a new collective understanding of multiracial fatherhood.

5.1. Scene One: “What Is More Whiteness?”

J:

We’re in this situation, because we’re having children with a White partner, where we’re having to reframe whiteness again. I don’t know that it’s stemming from the privilege of, or my proximity to, my White dad. It’s that, plus more whiteness.

B:

Yeah, what is more whiteness?

J:

It’s like the idea of multiracial privilege. I don’t know if that’s real. I think when people say multiracial privilege, they mean White privilege. I think a lot of times when people say multiracial, they mean mixed-White. I think the resistance or the anxiety that we’re talking about is the idea of a child who might claim more of that, or is racialized in ways that they might gravitate toward that, but I don’t think that’s multiracial privilege.

B:

I think my son will have the privilege of not having to think deeply about race but also have the privilege to claim culture if he chooses to—and claim culture without the baggage of being racialized based on physical appearance.

J:

Hmm.

B:

Now is that multiracial privilege? I don’t think so. I think it’s still White privilege. I think it’s whiteness working that would allow him to do that, but I think that’s some of the type of privilege that he will have that I don’t have. I think people—White people—would respond positively to both him passing and claiming culture.

J:

The authenticity test might be really different for him because of White privilege. It’s back to my dad celebrating “weird” Asian food. It’s like, “Oh, you’re so cool and different because you’re ‘White and’” in a way that I didn’t experience. I feel like my lens is always that I wasn’t Asian enough, but we’ve moved the scale such that, I don’t know, it’s cool and different at that point.B: You’re not too Asian.

J:

Yeah—you’re only a quarter.

B:

Yeah, yeah. We’re back to the quarter. Yeah, you’re not too much. Exactly.

J:

Yeah, it’s like he’s less threatening to the concept of whiteness.

B:

It’s the ultimate, palatable, mixed person.

J:

And that may be a particular privilege that our children, or maybe your son, particularly, will have. Yeah, I’m gonna have to sit with that.

[B] This excerpt spoke to me because I think it demonstrates the palatability of certain mixes. Mixes that are not too non-White. [J] Earlier in our conversation, I brought up a recent interaction in which a friend said my son will be “half Asian” and was quickly corrected by another friend saying he’ll be “only a quarter Asian”. [B] The cracks of multiraciality. [J] It’s interesting to see how my relationship to that comment evolved over our conversation. At first, I processed that comment personally. Essentially, because I’m not seen as fully Asian, I am limited in how much Asianness I can pass down to my son. In some ways, him being read as barely Asian (especially by monoracial Asian people) would personify the insecurities I have internalized in a monoracist world. [B] I have been obsessed with the question: how far is too far from a racial or ethnic heritage to claim it? Two generations? Three generations? This to me exposes the fallacy of race and multiraciality—it exposes the social construction of race. This question was amplified when I had my son. [J] He’ll be “only a quarter Asian”.

[B] His physical appearance is nothing like my own, and I am pretty sure he can move through the world racialized as White, whereas my daughter is more ambiguously Asian. [J] This is whiteness at work. [B] But how will he see himself and his relation to his Japanese family? How will external messages of race shape his sense of self?—[J] he’ll be “only a quarter Asian”—[B] How will the world respond to a White person who could claim Asianness? [J] Brendon pushed me to consider the contextual meanings of such comments—not to diminish their impact, but in recognition of the social processes that shift and shape how my child might experience such comments. [B] The cracks of multiraciality. [J] If he is primarily racially read as White, being seen as a quarter Asian could be an affirming experience. While I have been socialized to interpret this comment as subtractive, he could hear it as additive.

[J] As a multiracial father, I need to be mindful about passing down self-doubt around my own racial enoughness. [B] With having a White partner, I wonder how my son will both identify and how he will be received. I think this “second gen” mixed identity places him as an “ideal” mixed person in how whiteness works. In other words, he is the ideal palatable mixed person. [J] This is whiteness at work. [B] In this sense, he has privilege afforded to him by whiteness that I do not. I think he will have choices about where and how to express his family heritage and thus, will have greater access to predominantly White spaces. I also think he will be largely celebrated if he discloses his Asianness and seeks greater cultural knowledge. [J] Uncomfortable with the idea that they might identify as only White.

[B] As mixed people become farther from the experience of having monoracial parents and multiracial parents have White partners, those mixed people will be even less threatening and most likely embraced. However, I am unsure how he will navigate predominantly Asian spaces. As Jacob commented, “the authenticity test might be really different for him because of White privilege”. [J] What stuck with me from unpacking the “only a quarter” comment with Brendon was the implicit message that my son is three-quarters White. Here, I recognize the tensions between my understanding of race as socially constructed and the ease with which I perpetuated biological notions of race reminiscent of hypodescent and blood quantum—[B] the cracks of multiraciality—[J] when thinking and talking about my child.

[J] Similarly, at another point in our conversation, I asked “am I passing down White privilege?” [B] I am struck by the analogous use of measurement when talking about racial mixes and privilege. I have grappled with my own White privilege, musing if I was half privileged and if my children would be three-quarters privileged (Soltis 2025). [J] This is whiteness at work. [B] I do think they may benefit more from whiteness than I do but hesitate to make that comparison using measurement. [J] Looking back, this framing invisibilizes the social systems and structures that predicate White dominance on notions of White purity. [B] The insinuation is that more White heritage automatically equals more privilege, which reifies race as a biological truth, the same way saying our children are “only a quarter”. [J] This is whiteness at work. [B] I have been reflecting a lot on the phenomenon where White people and families claim a distant non-White heritage. Conveniently claiming a Native American/Indigenous ancestry based on family mythos or a small percentage of “African heritage” based on DNA tests.

[B] White people claiming a minoritized ancestry is problematic. [J] This is whiteness at work. [B] But as I think about this scenario, it points to the cracks of multiraciality because we focus on multiracial children of two monoracial parents—they have immediate multiracial experiences and nuanced experiences of racialization. The assumption undergirding multiracial identity and experiences is the immediate experience is the only experience. What happens as we get farther from an “immediate” experience? What happens when our children do not look like us? What happens when we lack the cultural knowledge to pass down? [J] Throughout our dialogue, we mused on feelings of failure as parents if our children choose to identify as monoracial White people. [B] I fear that a possible monoracial White identity comes at the expense of and the erasure of the little cultural knowledge I have left.

[B] I sometimes imagine myself as a distant ancestor of a White family claiming Asianness based on a DNA test or family mythos passed down. I might be the reason why someone long in the future claims 1/32 Asian heritage. [J] Again, we found ourselves at tension with our understanding of scholarship on multiracial identity development (which positions a monoracial identity pattern as a valid choice) and the visceral discomfort we experienced as multiracial fathers around our children potentially distancing themselves from mixedness. More specifically, we were uncomfortable with the idea that they might identify as only White. [B] The cracks of multiraciality. [J] Interestingly, we were less resistant to the idea that they might identify as only Asian, though skeptical that they would come to this choice or that others would affirm this choice. Even as we wrestled with what it would mean (and how it would feel) personally for our children to claim monoracial whiteness, we expressed confidence in our ability and responsibility to support their capacity to critically reflect on race and power and work toward racial justice.

5.2. Scene Two: “All out the Window”

J:

I’ve been so focused on multiracial identity development research but raising a new human—it’s not throwing it all out the window, but it’s underscoring that there’s not an end point. I think supporting his development is also going to really reframe how I think about my own identity and privilege or proximity to whiteness. It’s going to have to be renegotiated through how I raise him and how he experiences the world and the questions that he asks or doesn’t ask, and that just feels like a lot of responsibility.

B:

It does. I always come back to—I just want my child to find meaning in life. I just want him to be happy with who he is, confident in who he is. And when I think about research and all these things, it’s true and it’s kind of all out the window. When multiracial people start having children, it just exposes cracks in how we think about race in general. It’s hard when all these thoughts are going through my head, but the goal is: I just want you to be okay in a very not okay world.

J:

Yeah, seriously. I also think there can be an opportunity for my own healing in this journey too, right? Even this reflection on my relationship with my father—it’s been pretty strained, and I look back, and I’m like, of course he wasn’t talking to me about these things, because he’s probably never thought about these things. Why would he have as a White man? So, I can’t really hold that against him, but I can approach it differently, because I have lived and experienced the world differently. If my son has questions, I can approach them in a different way. I had to do a lot of learning about multiraciality on my own—figuring it out on my own. It’s something that I’m now carrying into fatherhood. I would hope some of that work doesn’t have to be totally on his own. I think being available—creating the conditions to feel like those conversations are possible in our home—that’s something that I can do my best at. It’s something that makes me different from the father that I have. We talked earlier about repeating generational patterns, and this is one area where I think I have a lot of agency to disrupt that cycle.

B:

Yeah. I’ve been pretty intentional about doing things very differently.

[J] This portion of our conversation challenged me to sit in the both/and. [B] This reminds me that I often sit within theory but the most important parts of my life are the actual things I do. In other words, theory needs practice. [J] I am immersed in literature and theory on multiraciality as I work toward my PhD. [B] As Jacob reflected about being steeped in multiracial identity development research, I too have been immersed in “academic” multiraciality discourses. I came into my PhD program convinced that I would be studying multiracial identity and experiences in very specific ways. But as my son grew, I came face to face with the reality that theory does not map neatly onto experience. [J] I am eager to learn from him—to make space for new, expansive understandings of race. [B] My son and our relationship have radically changed how I think about race, privilege, and my research. [J] I find myself questioning where and how this work will intersect with my emerging father identity. I am approaching my parenting journey with the hope that what I currently know about race, multiraciality, and whiteness will not negate what my son teaches me about these topics.

[J] Instead of tossing something “out the window”, becoming a multiracial father is an invitation to open the window—to see race anew in and through my child’s eyes. [B] Before I had children, I was very aware that if I did have a biological child, they would grow up in a multiracial family and possibly identify as multiracial. I wanted to provide an openness about race for my children that I never had with a White father. [J] I entered this project with an assumption that, as a multiracial father, I will be able to offer my son a type of support my monoracial White father never could. In some ways, I still believe that to be true.

[B] When first thinking about this project, it was hard to answer the question: What did my father teach me about race? This is because whiteness was so normalized in everything we did. [J] What I did not expect from this process was a newfound empathy for what I have always framed as my father’s faults with regard to discussing race. Earlier in our conversation, I shared a video with Brendon of me as a carefree toddler dancing with my father at a wedding to Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. Prior to this project, I did not connect the lyrics “the kid is not my son” to the challenges my father may have faced raising a phenotypically dissimilar child. My father may have felt limited in his ability to support me in making meaning of multiraciality, just as I may falter in helping my son navigate the nuances of his relationship to mixedness, if any.

[J] However, I do wish my father played an active role in my development of a critical understanding of whiteness. While whiteness may have been invisible for my father, my mixed-whiteness was a constant tension in my racialized experiences—unavoidable, hypervisible, exoticized. [B] When Jacob pointed out that his father would point out “non-White” things, like Asian foods, as different, I made the connection to my own experience. I was socialized to whiteness through the racialized marking as non-whiteness as not normal. [J] What would it mean to reframe this tension as a unique strength I bring to multiracial fatherhood? [B] Like in this excerpt, I just want my children to be okay in this world; to find joy and be happy with themselves and their identity. I desperately want to shield them from inevitable racialization and the associated systems of power which will impact their life. I already see how my son moves through life as assumed to be White, whereas my daughter presents as more racially ambiguous and often receives comments praising her beauty, reverberating the common exotification and objectification of multiracial women. [J] I repeatedly expressed fears that I might fail to pass Chinese and Filipino culture to my child, with less attention to how I might help my “more White” child resist the invisibility of whiteness—to actively leverage White privilege to destabilize White supremacy. [B] As much as I am immersed in this work and think my research can create change, I sometimes feel hopeless in this effort, knowing that my children will have differential encounters with race and racism. [J] As I shared with Brendon, “I would hope that I do not raise a White man who is not attentive to what it means—to the privileges of whiteness”. [B] I can and will do my best. I can raise children who are thoughtful and critical about race.

6. Discussion

Despite scholarly attention to the rise in interracial partnerships and the resulting biracial baby boom (see Root 1992, 1999), few studies have centered the parenting experiences of multiracial people in the United States. Building on Song’s (2017) examination of multiracial parents in the British context, we offer our duoethnography as a disruption to the dearth of inquiry around multiracial parenthood broadly and multiracial fatherhood specifically. Like the multiracial parents with White heritage and White partners in Song’s (2017) study, we similarly wrestled with a so-called dilution of multiraciality and connected this tension to a sense of parental failure if our children assert a monoracial identity, even as we recognize such a choice as a valid multiracial identity pattern (see Renn 2003). A product of internalized monoracism (Harris et al. 2021), this sense of failure stemmed from not feeling racially enough (Ashlee and Quaye 2021) to pass down cultural knowledge and pride to our children—an insecurity that Song (2017) noted was more prevalent among multiracial Asian/White parents than multiracial Black/White parents. Acknowledging that our experiences are reflective of what Bratter (2007) termed racial overlaps with our White partners, we are cautious not to extrapolate our narratives as multiracial Asian/White fathers onto those of all multiracial fathers. To do so would reinforce the centrality of whiteness in multiracial scholarship (e.g., Rondilla et al. 2017) and mask differential experiences at the intersections of other racial identities and oppressions (J. C. Harris 2016).

The scenes we presented are just one illustration of critical multiracial parenting. Central to the scenes was the recognition of the permanence of racism and monoracism, and the influence of these systems on how we approach fatherhood. Our experiences with (mono)racism in childhood and its connection to fatherhood led to us wanting to break previous family cycles of race socialization, to explicitly consider how these systems of power may uniquely impact our children. We also grappled with our own bias towards multiracial identity, our experiences in a multiracial family with a White father, and the present and future ahistorical framings of multiraciality by attending to how it shifts over time and location. The scenes speak to both shorter term shifts, as well as to the ever-evolving racial project of multiraciality (see Omi and Winant 2015). For example, we confront how generational proximity complicates multiracial salience and the racial identity and identification of our children, surfacing our bias towards a monoracial identity pattern. However, we end with hope—hope that we may break free from rigid racial categories, use our ontoepistemologies as multiracial fathers to address White privilege in our family, and provide support for expansive possibilities of knowing and being for our children. This critical multiracial pedagogy of parenting, ultimately, challenges our either/or thinking and moves us towards both/and parenting.

Our relationship with our fathers taught us about fatherhood, and maybe more pointedly how we did not want to father. In our dialogue and reflection, we questioned the role of fathers in the transmission of race, identity, and culture. From our perspective, both of our fathers avoided explicit conversations about race or multiraciality, and thus communicated messages about race and culture through seemingly innocuous comments and conversations. The role of our mothers, motherly care, and motherly labor contributed most to our understanding of our non-White heritages in subversion of whiteness (i.e., a callback to the wisdom of womanism; Walker 1983). Thus, our role as multiracial fathers challenges traditional conceptions of fatherhood and the fatherhood we experienced as children in a multiracial family. Fatherly responsibility recognizes that we will have different experiences than our children, and that their unique positioning will result in differential racialization. For example, Brendon’s son and daughter, even at their young ages, move through spaces in both similar and different ways, with Brendon noting how the intersection of gender and multiraciality will impact his daughter distinctly. We share responsibility with our partners and our larger community to learn and grow alongside our children by addressing issues of race, multiraciality, and cultural transmission, leveraging care for emancipatory, mutual learning.

Twine (2011) discussed how monoracial White mothers developed racial literacy as they raised multiracial Black children, including increased awareness of racism and the social maintenance of rigid racial boundaries. Further, some of these mothers strategically leveraged White privilege to insulate their multiracial children from the impacts of racism, an example of what Waring (2023) termed White privilege by proxy. Conversely, monoracial White fathers in Durrant and Gillum’s (2024) study were hesitant to explicitly discuss racism with their multiracial Black sons. Gesturing towards multiracial literacy, we emphasized in our overlapping narratives a commitment to creating the conditions for expansive conversations about race and related systems of power (e.g., racism, monoracism, colorism) with our children, even if they do not claim a multiracial identity. Like Johnston-Guerrero and Tran (2018), we reject the notion of multiracial privilege without dismissing the reality that some multiracial people benefit from proximity to whiteness. However, we contend that our (multi)racialized experiences fuel a sense of fatherly responsibility to support our children in seeing and subverting the monoracial paradigm of race that is foundational to the ongoing operation of White supremacy (Daniel et al. 2014; J. C. Harris 2016; Harris et al. 2021). This responsibility does not happen in isolation; rather, we both have frequent conversations about race and multiraciality with our partners and family, recognizing the importance of communal support in critical parenting. Like Ashlee and Combs (2022a), we aim to actively prepare our children to “exist, dream, and think beyond the rigidity of the systems and structures they have inherited” (p. 7).

7. Recommendations for Research and Praxis

Rooted in our three propositions on critical multiracial parenting, we outline several recommendations for future research and praxis. Recognizing the permanence of (mono)racism, we push to position multiracial people as vital voices in the movement to raise critically conscious children. We encourage other multiracial parentscholars to add to, expand, and complicate our narratives, particularly those with multiply minoritized racial backgrounds. While we explored how racial overlaps with our White partners informed our understanding of White privilege and multiracial privilege, we wonder how parenting across other racial overlaps relates to notions of monoracial privilege more broadly (see Ashlee and Combs 2022b). We do not mean to suggest that multiracial fathers alone should shoulder the responsibility of preparing their children to question the monoracist underpinnings of White supremacy, nor that unsettling “assumptions and beliefs in singular, discrete racial categories” (Johnston and Nadal 2010, p. 125) should be relegated to multiracial family systems. Instead, we call for increased attention to the parenting practices of multiracial people of all genders and family formations (e.g., How do multiracial parents who share the same multiracial background prepare their children to navigate a monoracist world? What are the experiences of multiracial parents raising monoracial children via transracial adoption?). Parental silence on the nuances of monoracism and colorism may leave children—whether they identify as multiracial or not—underprepared to navigate the multifaceted realities of racism.

Attending to the shifting salience of multiraciality across time and contexts, we stress the importance of lifelong learning with and from one’s child(ren). While we resist biological notions of race, we acknowledge the ocular dimension of race and the racialization of physical features (Omi and Winant 2015). As multiracial people, we have been racialized differently as a function of our changing physical features (e.g., strangers often exoticized Jacob’s blonde hair and tan skin as a child in ways that he no longer experiences with brown hair and fairer skin). We anticipate that our children’s physical features may similarly shift over time, as should our conversations about race, mixedness, and White privilege. Such shifts may be further impacted by contextual changes (e.g., moving to a new state, attending college, traveling abroad). As such, we recommend longitudinal approaches to future research examining how multiracial parents support their children in developing their critical awareness of (mono)racism, which Malaney-Brown (2022b) described as multiracial consciousness. Heeding our own call, we hope to pursue a future duoethnographic exploration with our children, revisiting—and perhaps disrupting—our key learnings in this manuscript.

Embracing expansive pedagogical possibilities beyond racial rigidity, we resist advancing singular strategies for teaching and (un)learning from children about multiraciality. As Okun (2021) articulated, adhering to binary thinking and valorizing one right way are central characteristics of White supremacy culture. As one of many strategies to interrupt and interrogate generational silence on multiraciality—particularly from our monoracial White fathers—we reflected on the role of children’s books in presenting multiracial families and protagonists alongside their utility as critical conversation starters around issues of racism, monoracism, and colorism. We recommend that future researchers explore the utility of pairing MultiCrit with Pérez Huber et al.’s (2023) framework for critical race content analysis to consider how children’s literature maintains or mitigates a monoracial paradigm of race. Similarly, we suggest that parents conduct an audit of their children’s bookshelves with a focus on opportunities to question and critique how monoracial categorization reinforces White supremacy. Rather than retrofit child-centered conversations around multiraciality and monoracism within existing postracial discourses (e.g., Osei-Kofi 2012), we urge parents to welcome the wisdom and wonder of children who are untethered to rigid racial rubrics (A. Chang 2016).

8. An Invitation

At the intersection of ParentCrit and MultiCrit, we offer our duoethnographic reflection on multiraciality and fatherhood as an example of critical multiracial parenting. Building on the limited literature that foregrounds the parenting experiences and expectations of multiracial people (e.g., Ashlee and Combs 2022a; Song 2017), we highlight the disruptive nature of our individual and intertwined experiences as multiracial fathers. We consider how raising/expecting children has forced us to expand our understanding of multiraciality, privilege, and (proximity to) whiteness. Critically, we describe a collective commitment to disrupting the invisibility of whiteness in our own upbringings by actively and explicitly supporting our children in naming and navigating racism, monoracism, and colorism as interconnected iterations of White supremacy (J. C. Harris 2016).

As Norris and Sawyer (2012) asserted, “duoethnographies do not end with conclusions. Rather, they continue to be written by those who read them” (p. 21). As such, we are not writing a conclusion. Instead, we invite readers into this ongoing discourse on multiraciality, fatherhood, and privilege. We call on readers to add your voice—to build upon and disrupt our narratives. Together, we can imagine critical parenting across, between, and beyond the boundaries of race.