Please Stop Fetishising Mixed-Race Kids!
Photo by Joice Kelly on Unsplash
I was recently at a dinner party where a white older woman stated that her daughter would be moving to Guadeloupe soon and that she’s quite scared since things can get a little “rough in these places”.
I quickly retorted, “There are dangerous places everywhere, including in mainland France.”
To which she responded, “Well, my daughter agrees and thought that I’d be pleased given that she’ll now have the opportunity to bring back a Black man and give me biracial grand-babies. They’re the cutest! They’re more beautiful than…”
This is the point at which I turned my head in the other direction in order to avoid any confrontation with this woman.
As you would imagine, it’s mentally exhausting to have to talk about social issues in both my personal and professional life every single day. So, in that moment, I chose to ignore her and her ignorant comments.
Clearly, she didn’t understand my non-verbal cue, since she took my head turn as an opportunity to continuously tap me on my thigh, while jovially repeating her racist statement to everyone else at the table who, to my knowledge, remained in awkward silence until someone else changed the subject.
I then took this as an opportunity to escape to another room and mindlessly scroll through Instagram. So, could you imagine my surprise when I received a message from a friend who was just letting me know how weirded out that she and her cousin were about the growing number of interracial couples showing off their biracial kids with hashtags like #beautifulmixedkids, #prettymixedkids and #mixedlove on TikTok?
Although I heavily doubt that it would come as a shock to anyone that census figures predict that mixed-race people are the fastest growing ethnic minority in both the US and the UK (Brinkhurst-Cuff, 2016), I imagine that it must be quite surprising to many of you that there are Instagram accounts dedicated to posting and reposting images of mixed-race kids, with dedicated followers (some with over 200 000 followers!) who are actively liking, sharing and commenting about how cute mixed-race kids are and whether or not the darker ones look mixed enough.
When I first stumbled upon these accounts, I couldn’t help but think about The Lovings and how they would have never imagined that their fight to overturn the law banning interracial marriage in Virginia in the 1960s would somehow lead to present day interracial couples playing into the racial fetishisation of their mixed-race children.
Racial fetishisation is a (sexual) preference for members of a certain race, usually people of colour or minoritised groups (Morris, 2020).
I also can’t help to think about the long-term effects of this fetishisation on the children involved.
When I was at secondary school, I had a close biracial friend (half-white and half-Black) who throughout our five years of friendship battled constantly with both depression and anxiety all while trying to navigate the fetishisation that she faced by boys who were only interested in dating her just because of the way she looked.
According to psychologist Dr. Roberta Babb (as cited in Morris, 2020), “being racially reduced to a sexualised object can negatively impact a person’s sense of personal safety, their sense of self, self-esteem and self-worth. It can also be demeaning and infuriating not to be seen as a real person who is multidimensional and who has lots of different things to offer a potential partner.”
To make things worse, she was also quite burdened with the stress of trying to fit into the unrealistic mould that the popular light-skinned mixed-race and white girls established for their clique.
Surprisingly, this was a clique that her younger sister was never really able to infiltrate given that she looked "more Black" than her elder sister, even though she too is biracial.
This dichotomy of experiences in a majority-Black country reveals that whilst one sister was fetishsised for her close proximity to whiteness, the other was ostracised due to her closer proximity to blackness. (Needless to say, their relationship was quite strained at that time.)
According to Asare (2021), “within communities of color, fetishization can look like the glorification of lighter skin (colorism) and more Eurocentric features (featurism) as well as hair discrimination (texturism).
The treatment that each sister received from their peers echoes the findings of the “Doll Test” (ABC News, 2006 cited in Bryant, 2013) published by Kenneth and Mamie Clark in 1947. Their research proved that Black children — of all shades — living across the USA had a clear-cut preference for white dolls (Clark & Clark, 1947).
When questioned about their doll preference, many explained that the white one was prettier given “its got blue eyes” and that the brown one was ugly because “it looks like a Negro” (ibid., p. 348).
One is left to imagine how Black and Brown children developed such strong opinions on race, featurism and colourism at the tender age of 7.
Well, for one, research suggests that negative or nonexistent images of Black people and culture in mainstream children’s television programming can distort a child’s self-image and damage her, his or their developing self-concept (Banks & Grambs, 1972; Roberts, 2004).
Simply put, Black and Brown kids are very likely to perceive whiteness as superior (Roberts, 2004; Greenberg & Mastro, 2008) and thus, develop anti-black beliefs and tendencies.
"Anti-Black racism is prejudice, attitudes, beliefs, stereotyping or discrimination that is directed at people of African descent and is rooted in their unique history and experience of enslavement and colonization." (Toronto For All, n.d.)
So, with the availability of countless research studies and articles discussing the racist history of praising biracial and mixed-race children, one can’t help but wonder why interracial parents would feel comfortable posting images of their kids with hashtags that promote this problematic behaviour.
Well, in a 2016 VICE interview (Brinkhurst-Cuff, 2016), one parent explained that mixed-race babies — like her daughter — are highly sought after by popular companies, like Disney, Walmart and the Home Shopping Network, for ad campaigns due to their racially ambiguous look. In other words, these companies cast actors and models whose racial background is not easily identifiable in order to appeal to a larger international market.
Hopefully, we can all agree that using your child’s racial identity to earn money is just as problematic as opening up your child’s looks to being judged by complete strangers online.
However, until both of these things become illegal, there’s nothing we can do to avoid the exploitation of mixed-race babies except educate ourselves and others about why this behaviour is problematic and undoubtedly, quite creepy.
Sources:
ABC News. (2006, October 11). What dolls can tell us about race in America. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/ GMA/story?id=2553348& page=1#.U Jh36cXR7TA
Asare, J. G. (2021, February 16). What Is Fetishization And How Does It Contribute To Racism? Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2021/02/07/what-is-fetishization-and-how-does-it-contribute-to-racism/?sh=351e0a4d6e39.
Banks, J. A., & Grambs, J. D. (1972). Black self-concept: implications for education and social science. New York : McGraw-Hill.
Bryant, S. L. (2013). The beauty ideal: The effects of European Standards of beauty on black women. Columbia Social Work Review,IV, 80–91.
Brinkhurst-Cuff, C. (2016, June 21). Inside Facebook's Totally Adorable, Kind of Racist Mixed Race Baby Community. VICE. https://www.vice.com/en/article/vv59px/inside-facebooks-totally-adorable-kind-of-racist-mixed-race-baby-community.
Clark K.B., Clark M.P. (1966) Emotional Factors in Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children. In: Grossack M.M. (eds) Mental Health and Segregation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-37819-9_7
Greenberg, B. S., & Mastro, D. E. (2008). Children, race, ethnicity, and media. In S. L. Calvert & B. J. Wilson (Eds.), The handbook of children, media, and development (pp. 74–97). Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444302752.ch4
Morris, N. (2020, December 22). Racial fetishisation: Why it's racist to say you 'have a thing' for Black women. Metro. https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/22/what-is-racial-fetishisation-and-why-is-it-a-form-of-racism-13762955/.
Roberts, E. (2004). Through the Eyes of a Child: Representations of Blackness in Children's Television Programming. Race, Gender & Class, 11(2), 130-139. Retrieved June 28, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41675128
Toronto For All. (n.d.). Toronto For All: Confronting Anti-Black Racism Initiative Community Guide [Brochure]. Toronto: Author. Retrieved March 26, 2021, from https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/97d4-community-conversation-guide-participants.pdf