Transracial Adoption and Fostering: Understanding Race & Racial Identity

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Are you a transracial adoptive or foster parent? Have you wondered how you can help your child form a healthy racial identity. Does racial identity formation change depending on the race of the child? Today we talk about all this and more with Dr. Gina Miranda Samuels, a professor at the University of Chicago and Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. She is a transracial adoptee and co-author of the book Multiracial Cultural Attunement.

In this episode, we cover:

• How do children in the US come to understand race at different ages and developmental stages?
• How early do children develop a racial bias? How early do children associate certain characteristics to race and show a preference towards a person of a certain race? 
• How does transracial adoption or fostering or kinship care impact a child’s understanding of race?
• How does transracial or transcultural adoption or fostering or kinship care impact children? 
  • Racial identity formation: How does being adopted transracially impact the adoptee’s racial identity formation?
  • Coping with racism
• In your research and in your experience, do you see a difference in the experience of race is perceived by both transracial adoptees or adoptive or foster parents depending on the race of the child? Asian, Latinx, Black, Bi-racial?
• Why is taking the colorblind approach to parenting not helpful? 
• “It’s About More Than Hair”
• Transracial parenting requires the family to be fluent in “race talk” – socialization is not a conversation, it is a daily, incremental, and developmental family process.
• As our kids age, what is it like for our tweens, teens, and young adults to have parents of a different race?
• How does transracial adoption or fostering impact siblings in the family who are the same race as the parents?
• How does transracial adoption or fostering affect extended family members, such as grandparents and aunts and uncles?
• Practical tips for parents raising a child of a different race or ethnicity.

Additional Resources:

• Diverse Book Finder
• The Brown Bookshelf – highlights Black voices writing for young readers.
• The Conscious Kid 
• Multiracial Cultural Attunement by Gina Miranda Samuels and Kelly Faye Jackson, 2019
• Tips for parenting your transracially adopted child by Dr. Gina Samuels 
• EmbraceRace was founded to create the community and gather the resources they needed (need!) to meet the challenges faced by those raising children in a world where race matters.
• Dr. Erin Winkler,

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