Family Ethnicity

Family ethnicity is the sum total of our ancestry and cultural dimensions: how families collectively identify the core of their beings. Our ethnicity is fundamental to the all-encompassing core of our identity. Families differentiate themselves from other groups and form linkages with families that assume similar identifications and provide reference groups for their members. Ethnicity involves the unique family customs, proverbs, and stories that are passed on for generations. Almost all of us are from families that are part of ethnicities. This new edition provides extensive information about the various cultural elements that different family groups have drawn on in order to exist in the United States today. In each chapter, the authors are intimately familiar with the particular groups, by way of membership in the group or intensive study of the group. The eight sections of the book cover Native American Indians, Native Hawaiian, Mexican American and Spanish, African American, Muslim American, and Asian American families.

Harriette Pipes McAdoo is a University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, Department of Family and Child Ecology.  Previously, she was Professor at Howard University in the School of Social Work and Visiting Lecturer at Smith College, the University of Washington, and the University of Minnesota.  She is a Director of the Groves Conference on Marriage and the Family; was a National Adviser to the President of the White House Conference on Families; was former President and Board Member of the National Council on Family Relations; and was a member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research in Child Development.  She was the first person honored by the National Council on Family Relations with the Marie Peters Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Leadership, and Service in the Area of Ethnic Minority Families.  Dr. McAdoo received her B.A. and M.A. from Michigan State University and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and she has done post-doctoral studies at Harvard University.  She has published on racial attitudes and self-esteem in young children, Black mobility patterns, coping strategies of single mothers, and professional Kenyan women and HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe.  She is editor of Black Children: Social, Educational, and Parental Environments, Second Edition (2002, SAGE) and Family Ethnicity: Strength in Diversity, Second Edition (1999, SAGE), as well as Young Families, Program Review, and Policy Recommendations.  She is coauthor of Women and Children, Alonge and in Poverty.  She has four children and four grandchildren.