Mixed race in America -- New York Times edition

Over the year, the New York Times seems to be doing more pieces on multiracial Americans. I'm not sure why this focus--or perhaps it's not a focus and it's just that as someone who is interested in multiracial issues, I'm more attuned to it.

[Aside: Actually, the ARE doing a series called "Race Remixed" -- I've posted links to some of the pieces in the past, but if you click here you can see other essays in this series]

Anyway, this morning I woke up and saw this video on their home page:



with this accompanying article (click link).

One of the things I was struck by in the above video are comments from the white parents who adopted bi-racial (black-white) children. The mother says that she does not think of their family as mixed--that they are "just a family." The father acknowledges the stares and comments that they received in the 1970s and says that they experienced racism on behalf of their children.

While there is a part of me that has a problem with the color blind rhetoric of "we're just a family"--there's another part of me--the part that looks ahead to my own future family that will be formed out of adoption, and wonders if I, too, will want to claim that we are "just a family"--one that challenges the nuclear norm of biological, same race, families but still a family none-the-less. As for experiencing racism on behalf of your child, I'm not sure that parents experience racism for their children so much as they may (esp. if they are white parents who perhaps had not been conscious of their white privilege or racism before) be experiencing racism with their children. Because I guarantee that the targets of the racist comments are not just the parents but the children as well.

[Aside: If you read the article, you will realize that the Dragans (the parents) are not clueless to racism and are not people who acted in the past or the present in a color-blind manner--which makes me wonder if their comments were edited out of a larger context (which often happens when you are filming/interviewing someone). The article is much more nuanced and complex in how they handled racist incidents in their family, although I still think the question of how or if one should "normalize" one's multiracial family experience is interesting to think about]

However, as someone who is not yet a parent and not multiracial herself, I'm curious what other folks think about this piece and the idea of whether a multiracial adoptee family can ever be (or should ever be) "just a family" and whether one can experience racism on behalf of one's children. Thoughts?