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International adoptions have rarely been studied from the angle of racial mixedness in France, as opposed to the way the adoption debate is shaped in the United States and the United Kingdom. However, a large majority of adopted children in France come from countries colonized by Europe in the past, and are very likely to be racialized as non-white. Adoptive parents, for their part, belong overwhelmingly to the majority population, racialized as white. As such, adoptive families usually involve, like families formed by mixed-race couples, white parents raising non-white kids. These two types of families can thus provide valuable insights on racial boundaries and how they are negotiated at the microsociological level. Moreover, as whiteness is generally characterized by invisibility and unspeakability, white parents of non-white children occupy a singular and heuristic position. They also experience an atypical whiteness: the norm of intrafamilial racial homogeneity being disrupted in their families, they experience racial alterity in a very intimate way—inaccessible to most whites. Drawing upon an ethnographic study conducted between 2015 and 2017, this article explores what racial mixedness does to the whiteness of white parents raising non-white kids in the French colorblind context. Investigating the different ways their whiteness is not only rendered unusually visible, but also questioned, reshaped, and—partially—disrupted, the article considers the socializing power of racial mixedness. As such, it considers parents not only as socializing agents but also as (re)socialized individuals, arguing that parenthood is a site of racial socialization.

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While France is largely considered a “colorblind” society, which hinders any public use of racial categories, this article explores the case of international procedure, arguing that it constitutes an exception to institutional colorblindness in the French context. Racial categories are not only explicitly used on a daily basis by adoption professionals, but their use is also officially encouraged, yet in an ambiguous way. In this regard, adoption procedures operate as a moment of color consciousness for many adoptive parents. By focusing on this particular case study, the article aims more generally to unpack the stakes of the taboo surrounding race in France.*Full article in French