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Race and Ethnicity in the Lives of LGBTQ Parents and Their Children: Perspectives from and Beyond North America University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Arts Arts Research & Publications 2020-04-04 Race and Ethnicity in the Lives of LGBTQ Parents and Their Children: Perspectives from and Beyond North America Brainer, Amy; Moore, Mignon R.; Banerjee, Pallavi Springer Nature Switzerland AG : LBGTQ-Parent Families Brainer, A., Moore, M. R., & Banerjee, P. (2020). Race and Ethnicity in the Lives of LGBTQ Parents and Their Children: Perspectives from and Beyond North America. "LBGTQ-Parent Families". Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2020. pp. 85-103. https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/10.1007/978-3-030-35610-1_5 http://hdl.handle.net/1880/112847 Unless otherwise indicated, this material is protected by copyright and has been made available with authorization from the copyright owner. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca Race and Ethnicity in the Lives of LGBTQ Parents and Their Children: Perspectives from and Beyond North America Amy Brainer, Mignon R. Moore, and Pallavi Banerjee In 2016, Black Lives Matter Toronto (BLM-TO) society and within the movements themselves immobilized the Toronto Pride Parade to protest (see, for example, Alimahomed, 2010; Boston & anti-Black racism in pride organizing and other Duyvendak, 2015; Chambers-Letson, 2018; LGBTQ spaces. Protestors presented pride orga- Stormhøj, 2018). The BLM-TO protest was nizers with a list of demands that centered queer responsive as well to a contemporary climate in and trans communities of color, including spe- which White supremacy, nationalism, homona- cific needs of Black, indigenous, and South Asian tionalism, and a variety of anti-Black and anti- queer groups.1 The BLM-TO action and similar immigrant measures structure people’s daily actions at pride parades in other Canadian and lives. It is in this climate that queer and trans US cities are part of a legacy of protest and dia- people form and sustain their families. Thus, as logue around issues of racial exclusion within the BLM-TO protestors stressed, in order to ade- LGBTQ communities. From the inception of quately understand, represent, and support LGBTQ movements in North America as well as LGBTQ communities, it is necessary to see race in many European nations, activists of color have and address racial oppression. critiqued, disrupted, and at times successfully In the USA today, Black, indigenous, and dismantled unjust structures and practices in Latinx2 LGBTQ people are the most likely among all LGBTQ people to be raising children (Kastanis & Wilson, 2014). Johnson (2018) 1 For a complete list of demands and record of writes that when he began conducting interviews achievements, see: https://blacklivesmatter.ca/demands/ with Black queer southern women, he had no (retrieved September 5, 2018). idea how powerful a role motherhood would A. Brainer (*) play in their lives or how deeply the desire to Womens and Gender Studies and Sociology, have children would run for many of his inter- University of Michigan Dearborn, viewees. A growing number of scholars focus on Dearborn, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] LGBTQ parents of color and push queer theories and methodologies to be more responsive to M. R. Moore Sociology, Barnard College, Columbia University, issues of race, class, citizenship, and colonialism New York, NY, USA (e.g., Acosta, 2013, 2018; Battle, Pastrana, & e-mail: [email protected] P. Banerjee Sociology, University of Calgary, 2 See Salvador Vidal Ortiz and Juliana Martínez, “Latinx Calgary, AB, Canada Thoughts: Latinidad with an X” (2018) for a discussion of e-mail: [email protected] contestations around Latinx and its connections to other forms of linguistic resistance. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 85 A. E. Goldberg, K. R. Allen (eds.), LGBTQ-Parent Families, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35610-1_5 86 A. Brainer et al. Harris, 2017a, 2017b; Glass, 2014; Karpman, application of the intersectionality paradigm to Ruppel, & Torres, 2018; Leibetseder, 2018; the study of Black women’s sexuality is also a Moore, 2011a, 2011b; Pastrana, Battle, & Harris, useful way to conceptualize sexuality as one of 2017; Rodriguez, 2014). At the same time, White several social locations that LGBTQ parents lesbian and gay parents remain overrepresented inhabit. in the literature on LGBTQ-parent families as LGBTQ group interests are often analyzed well as in popular culture (see Bible, Bermea, and advocated for in ways that privilege the inter- van Eeden-Moorefield, Benson, & Few-Demo, ests of higher-income White individuals within 2018; Huang et al., 2010; Singh & Shelton, those groups (DeFilippis, 2018). When these 2011; van Eeden-Moorefield, Few-Demo,interests are constructed as separate from and Benson, Bible, & Lummer, 2018). As one Black even oppositional to the interests of (presumably gay father put it, heterosexual) racial communities, it is queer peo- We’re in the gay community, and the gay commu- ple of color and their families who are especially nity itself is segregated. So we’re the Black guys, harmed (Cahill, 2010; Romero, 2005). Cahill you know, the Black section of the gay community. (2010) argues that while antigay groups have And then we’re in a smaller—we’re in the Black constructed LGBTQ rights as “special rights” section with children in the gay community. We don’t see our image around anywhere. (Carroll, that threaten the civil liberties of people of color, 2018a, p. 111) antigay policies in fact have a disproportionate impact on Black and Latinx same-sex couple The invisibility articulated by this father goes families who are more likely to be raising chil- beyond a politics of representation to reveal the dren and to have economic challenges—points interlocking systems of power that shape the lives we return to later in this chapter. of LGBTQ parents and their children. In this The study of race is also important within the chapter, we highlight work by scholars who make larger discourses of diversity politics. For exam- the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and ple, Hicks (2011) argues that White LGBTQ par- sexuality more central to the production of ents have the privilege to ignore inequalities knowledge about LGBTQ-parent families. around race and racism in a way that people of color do not. In his analysis of in-depth inter- views with lesbian, gay, and queer parents, Hicks Theoretical Frameworks describes one White gay father who claimed that race was a “nonissue” for him and his two In the second edition of Black Feminist Thought: adopted Vietnamese sons. However, Hicks notes Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of that this White father could not possibly know all Empowerment, Collins (2000) conceptualizes the ways his sons will be positioned racially by sexuality in three ways: as a freestanding system others. The literature we review rejects a color- of oppression similar to oppressions of race, blind view of race as a “nonissue” for parents and class, nation, and gender, as an entity that is families and instead acknowledges the signifi- manipulated within each of these distinctive sys- cance of race, ethnicity, citizenship, and colonial tems of oppression, and as a social location or legacies in queer family formation. conceptual glue that binds intersecting oppres- Conversations about how best to integrate sions together and shows how oppressions con- intersectionality frameworks with queer theory verge. In her later work, Collins (2004) theorizes have also come to bear on family studies (see sexuality through the lens of heterosexism, which Few-Demo, Humble, Curran, & Llyod, 2016). she identifies as a system of power similar to rac- Allen and Mendez (2018) find that efforts to ism, sexism, and class oppression that suppresses decenter heteronormativity in family studies heterosexual and homosexual African Americans often do not address the racialized contexts in in ways that foster Black subordination. As we which families are situated. Acosta (2018) argues demonstrate in this chapter, Collins’ (2004) that a “queerer” family scholarship is possible Race and Ethnicity in the Lives of LGBTQ Parents 87 when we theorize in the flesh and from the bor- most likely to have children (45%) followed by derlands, connecting with material realities and respondents who are Latinx (40%), White (40%), attending to race in our work. Allen and Mendez, Black (36%), multiracial (29%), and Asian (18%) Acosta, and other scholars working at the inter- (Stotzer, Herman, & Hasenbush, 2014). Among sections of race and sexuality hold that queer same-sex couples (and same-sex couples may theories will be strongest when they are race- include trans and gender nonconforming people), conscious and mindful of how these constructs 41% of women of color and 20% of men of color shape people’s real lives. have children under 18 in the home; for White The chapter begins with demographic charac- women and men, these estimates are 23% and teristics of racially and ethnically diverse LGBTQ 8%, respectively (Gates, 2013b). As of the 2010 parents in North America and structural inequali- US census (the most recent census data available ties that emerge as salient for these groups. We as of this review), 34% of African American, next examine racial variation in how LGBTQ 29% of Latinx, and 26% of Asian American people become parents and navigate the gendered same-sex couples report that they are raising chil- institutions of motherhood and fatherhood. While dren (Kastanis & Gates, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c). our focus is on families of color, we include stud- These families tend not to be clustered in areas ies of race and ethnicity in the lives of White les- with proportionately large numbers of LGBTQ bians and gay men who become parents through residents.
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