‘Keeping the Story Alive’: Is Ethnic and Racial Dilution Inevitable for Multiracial People and their Children?

This paper explores how multiracial parents with White partners articulate narratives of ethnic and racial ‘dilution’ and cultural loss in relation to the socialization of their children. In our broader study of how multiracial parents raise their children, we found that parents commonly spoke of concerns around dilution and generational change in relation to four key themes: the loss of cultural knowledge and diminishing practices that connected parents and their children to a minority ancestry; the embodiment of White-appearing children and the implications of this for family relationships; the use of biological or genetic discourses in relation to reduced blood quantum; and concerns amongst Black/White participants about whitening and the loss of racial consciousness. Parental understandings of dilution varied greatly; some expressed sadness at ‘inevitable’ loss; others were more philosophical about generational change; and others still proactively countered loss through strategies to connect their children to their minority heritages. We show that despite growing awareness of the social constructedness of race and an emergent cosmopolitanism among these parents, discourses of genetics, cultural lineage, and the ‘naturalness’ of race continue to hold sway amongst many multiracial parents.