The Manifestation and Contestation of White Privilege in Multiracial Families: A Disruption

“Genealogy is the retrieval of vital and familial data from records of various types, and its ordering into meaningful relationship patterns” (Durie 2017, p. 2). This Special Issue explores how white privilege operates as “vital and familial data” in multiracial families in ways that impact several aspects of family life, including relationships, identities, loss, family formation, parental wishes, and media portrayals. Family relationships are some of the most influential and meaningful relationships throughout one’s life. Examining white privilege in multiracial families with white relatives is a worthwhile empirical pursuit because white privilege is a dominant force in American society. However, it is overwhelmingly understood in monoracial terms (Waring 2023) due to the monoracial paradigm of race (Harris 2016) that facilitates the erasure of mixed/multiracial1 people (Ford et al. 2021). Furthermore, white supremacy is a global phenomenon, as our featured articles demonstrate, and consequently shapes how whiteness, mixedness, and family membership intersect and are interpreted.

Inspired by one of our featured articles, “‘They’re Only a Quarter:’ A Duoethnographic Exploration of Multiracial Fatherhood” (Wong-Campbell and Soltis 2025), I decided to call this paper a “disruption,” rather than an “introduction” for three reasons. First, I needed to acknowledge that for the majority of American history, multiracial families were “disruptive,” as they were socially constructed as anomalous (DaCosta 2007). Second, I wanted to recognize the complexity of the “both/and” dynamic of white privilege in multiracial families; our articles disrupt binary logic by demonstrating how white privilege, by proxy, creates advantages and disadvantages. Third, I felt called to take advantage of an opportunity to disrupt academic norms of individualism (Camargo et al. 2024) by declaring that the “introduction” to this Special Issue has already been written by every trailblazing critical mixed race studies scholar whose work built the foundation of our ideas, and perhaps, in part, our motivation for developing such ideas in the first place. We proudly stand on the shoulders of ground-breaking scholars who established what we now call “critical mixed race studies” with their research on mixed-race people, a group that did not even have a Census category at the time of their initial research in this subfield (Funderburg 1994; Gibbs and Moskowitz-Sweet 1991; Kilson 2000; Nakashima 1992; Nishimura 1998; Rockquemore 1999; Root 1992, 1995; Socha and Diggs 1996; Spickard 1989; Zack 1993). Embracing disruption in the research process, rather than relying entirely on “established, systematic and formulaic approaches,” (Clark 2025, 299), facilitates innovative reasoning and important new directions for analytical inquiry.

In this Special Issue, scholars examine every type of family relationship, except siblings: parent/child, grandparent/child, partner/partner, in-laws, and even family members who have passed on. Importantly, this issue also includes families formed through adoption. Drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT), Critical Multiracial Theory (MultiCrit), and Critical Adoption Studies, the authors explain how white privilege impacts how multiracial family life is experienced in countries around the world, including South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. One article analyzes how multiracial families and interracial couples are portrayed to a global audience. Research on the mixed/multiracial populations’ identities and experiences has become a global phenomenon (King-O’Riain et al. 2014), with research from Poland (Balogun and Joseph-Salisbury 2021), Singapore (Rocha and Yeoh 2022), South Africa (Metcalfe 2022), Sweden (Hübinette and Arbouz 2019; Osanami Törngren 2020), Latin America and the Caribbean (England 2010), New Zealand (Rocha and Webber 2017), the United Kingdom (Garrett 2025; Njaka 2022; Joseph-Salisbury 2018), and the United States (DaCosta 2020; Daniel 2010; Jackson and Samuels 2019). In the United States, the nation with the most published research on this population, there is a paradoxical approach to the mixed/multiracial community: pointing to multiracial people to verify racial progress, to perhaps distract from centuries of racism (Mitchell 2022; Waring 2024), while also marginalizing them as “other” for not aligning with rigid racial categories2 (Harris et al. 2023; Johnston-Guerrero et al. 2020). This divergent experience reverberates around the globe.

In our opening article, Jody Metcalfe’s “The Impact of White Supremacy on First-Generation Mixed-Race Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” explains how South Africa’s history of colonization via two colonial powers and apartheid provides a specific backdrop for experiencing mixedness through a white parent. Although many of her participants self-identified as mixed, they did not identify with whiteness because it was the centerpiece of apartheid. In acknowledging the white privilege that her participants’ parents have, which her participants temporarily access, she outlines the limits of white privilege. While white parentage creates a “shield” of protection, it is conditional—and therefore, largely unreliable—as is acceptance from white South Africans. Similarly, while partial-white ancestry facilitates access to formerly white systems, like universities, mixed-race students’ experiences in such institutions were alienating as they were expected to conform to white standards. Metcalfe’s research cautions against overlooking how white supremacy continues to operate even as white privilege appears to expand to not entirely white people.

SunAh Laybourn’s “Critical Adoptee Standpoint: Transnational, Transracial Adoptees as Knowledge Producers” centers the voices of Asian adoptee authors by calling for a new paradigm in adoption narratives. She disrupts three dominant narratives that are all connected to power relations. First, the “forever family” narrative “relegates the birth family to a past that has been overcome” (Laybourn 2024, p. 5), failing to recognize the continued significance of adoptees’ birth families and complex histories. Second, the narrative that adoption is a humanitarian effort, removed from geopolitical relationships with familial and emotional consequences, obscures the host of factors that impact adoptees’ lived experiences as transnational, transracial adoptees, including their unique identities. Third, the narrative that adoptees are “perpetual children” (much like “perpetual foreigner” tropes of Asian Americans) whose lives are better in white Western families disregards adoptees’ human agency and self-definition. Laybourn’s article invites readers to reconsider simplistic stories of adoption by recognizing the self-determination that adoptees express, and that needs to be honored.

In “‘My Dad Is Racist as Hell:’ Navigating Racism, Monoracism, and White Privilege by Proxy in Multiracial Families,” Chandra D. L. Waring disrupts the narrative that multiracial families are racially progressive and racism-free. First, she shows how multiracial people navigate racism, monoracism, and colorism with parents, grandparents, in-laws, and even their own children. Second, she explains how these forms of inequality interface with “white privilege by proxy,” the unearned privileges that accompany having a white parent/caregiver. Third, she elucidates how this form of privilege is influenced by the intersectional identities of the white parent/caregiver. This article illuminates how and under what conditions this form of privilege can be restricted or revoked. These findings have important implications as they show that the existence of white privilege in multiracial families does not protect multiracial people from experiencing racism, monoracism, or colorism. Also, Waring’s work demonstrates how family relationships, particularly with elders, complicate how multiracial people address discriminatory comments made by relatives.

“‘They’re Only a Quarter’: A Duoethnographic Exploration of Multiracial Fatherhood,” by Jacob P. Wong-Campbell and Brendon M. Soltis, introduces readers to an ongoing, vulnerable reflection on what it means to be a multiracial father in the United States. Wong-Campbell, a father-to-be, and Soltis, a father-of-two, disclose their concerns about having children who are “only a quarter” Asian in a white-dominated society where race, phenotype, and mixedness matter. Throughout their dialogue, they bring readers into their friendship and their own family histories as they share memories of their fathers and how those interactions have informed how they want to parent their children. Grounded in ParentCrit and Multiracial Critical Theory (MultiCrit), they describe the dynamic of understanding that race is socially constructed yet being uncomfortable with the idea of their child identifying as white despite affirming that their child will have lived experiences that do not correspond with theirs. Their duoethnography shows how multiracial families with white relatives grapple with whiteness and white privilege.

Rhianna Garrett’s “The De/Construction of Identity: The Complexities of Loss and Separation for Mixed-Race Britain” delves into two of the most challenging and life-changing family experiences: loss and separation. Through an innovative methodology, Garrett analyzes the personal testimonies of an online mixed-race organization in the UK to explore how losing family members of color through death and separation impacts the racial and ethnic identities of mixed-race Brits. Her article examines how her participants re-envision their identities, illuminate monoracist family norms, and work through intergenerational trauma as they heal from the loss or separation of a loved one with a minority background. Garrett’s participants’ counterstories demonstrate how whiteness and white privilege complicate and, in some cases, disrupt mixed-race people’s abilities to claim racial and ethnic identities that are no longer represented in their families or in their lives. Her pioneering work pushes us to consider how family transitions change mixed-race people’s identities, communities, and lived experiences.

In “The ‘Whites’ Who Loved Me: How Bridgerton Facilitates Digital Lynching,” Tre Ventour-Griffiths analyzes the Black/white interracial relationships in the popular show Bridgerton, a show which centers on a fictitious royal family in the UK. His work disrupts the notion that merely casting Black characters (and other characters of color) and creating interracial romantic relationships depicts racial progress and/or Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) through media representation. On the contrary, it perpetuates white supremacy by continuing to center whiteness, even in a diverse, fictitious “post-racial utopia.” Furthermore, Ventour-Griffiths explains how Black characters are written (a) as “honorary whites” (Bonilla-Silva 2003), (b) purely to serve white characters’ interests, and (c) out of their Blackness, meaning the lived experiences of Blackness are entirely absent from the script. These critical observations that reveal how white privilege, capitalism, and the institution of media converge offer sharp sociological insights into how interracial relationships and multiracial families with white relatives are represented in Hollywood.

Miri Song’s contribution is two-fold in “The Double-edged Nature of Whiteness for Multiracial People with White Ancestry.” First, she offers a critical review of the literature on whiteness and mixedness to demonstrate a pattern of advantages outlined by scholars and an absence of complexity. Second, she disrupts this trend by showing how whiteness functions as a burden or liability for many multiracial people with white parents, white partners, and white-presenting children. Her work contests longstanding academic assumptions that multiracial people with a white parent want to be white or are “honorary whites” (Bonilla-Silva 2003). In two studies that span two nations, Song shows how (a) white parentage jeopardizes community membership in communities of color and (b) white partners complicate co-parenting understandings, decisions, and desires. Furthermore, white-presenting children give rise to unsettling comments from strangers and family alike, creating emotionally challenging situations for multiracial parents. Her work is an intervention in critical mixed-race studies, particularly as it relates to the “honorary white” discourse.

Taken together, these articles contribute to our understanding of how multiracial people and transracial, transnational adoptees with white relatives experience and navigate whiteness and white privilege. It is our hope that these articles challenge simplistic notions of mixedness and family and offer complex, nuanced testimonies of multiracial family life as it is experienced by people whose racialized experiences exist outside of invented racial norms. The initial idea for this Special Issue came about in 2023, which, to say was a very different time in the United States would be an understatement. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)—often a code word for “race”—is under attack in the United States (Savage and Olsen 2025) in ways that threaten to re-write history and change the future we thought we would enter mere months ago. It is with this context in mind that we invite readers to engage with our work, contribute to critical research that centers power, and strengthen our community by pushing the field in new directions.