When her oldest child, Hans, was born in 2017, Lynn VanderWielen, who is Dutch American, initially described him to strangers as “half Dutch, a quarter Russian, and a quarter Nigerian.” But that didn’t quite feel right. Nor did she know what language was appropriate. Then, when Hans was a few months old, she had a revelation while breastfeeding. It suddenly occurred to her that the questions she had about mixed race identity weren’t really about Hans.
“This is a me issue,” she said to herself. “I need to educate myself more.”
Digging into the literature, she quickly realized that “doing the fraction thing” was not honoring her son as a whole person. He was both black and white: Russian, Dutch and Nigerian all at once, not parceled out in pieces. “I had to learn and unlearn a lot of stuff,” as she explained in a recent phone interview.