Through the eyes of a multiracial family: a collaborative intercultural positive autoethnography perspective

Mental health has become a concern in countries all over the world, especially in contexts which have increased in diversity of cultures, intercultural contacts and communication (Balcombe, 2023; Kirmayer and Minas, 2008; Mayer and Boness, 2013; Moitra et al., 2023). Countries like South Africa are high in diversity and are affected by colonial histories, imperialism and apartheid, which still influence intercultural relationships across the country (Osemuyi, 2024). Although South Africa is thirty years into its post-apartheid phase, intercultural communication and interactions are still visibly influenced by experiences of racial belonging, racialised perspectives and ascriptions in daily life situations (Houston et al., 2018, 2022; Kaziboni, 2022; Steyn, 2024).

Historically, South Africa was colonised from the 15th century onwards. It was shaped by an enforced segregation of members of different (racial) population groups, which found its peak during apartheid (1948–1994) and which caused a great deal of violence, inequality and frustration for the members of the racially segregated groups (de la Sablonnière et al., 2013; Hayem, 2017; Mayer, 2005). After 46 years, the apartheid system fell as a result of social movements and a shift in governmental leadership when the first Black president of the nation, Nelson Mandela, was inaugurated (Hino et al., 2018). While writing this article, South Africa is in the 32nd year of its post-apartheid phase, which aims for racial equality and education for members of all different racial groups (Hino et al., 2018; Phaswana, 2021; Rabie, 2016).

This article is based on a specific positive autoethnographic research methodology. Gonot-Schoupinsky and Mayer (2025, p. 5), highlight that positive autoethnography (PosAE):

In this article, the authors use a collaborative intercultural positive autoethnographic (IcPosAE) approach (Mayer, 2025a) to present a selected experience of four multicultural and multiracial family members from their individualised systemic perspectives. Previous research has presented a collaborative autoethnography of a mother and a child, presenting an intergenerational autoethnography (Little & Little, 2022), however not from an IcPosAE or a systemic perspective.

This study provides a unique methodological way of presenting personal, individualised systemic perspectives through the lens of a positive psychology (PP) perspective, which gives the authors the ability to transform their challenging autoethnographic experiences into a positive learning (Derakhshan and MacIntyre, 2026; Wong et al., 2021, 2022). While PosAE may build on PP movement 1 (PP1.0), PP movement 2 (PP2.0) and/or PP movement 3 (PP3.0), this article uses PP3.0 since it is systemic in nature (Mayer, 2025b) and presents a systemic family perspective. Through autoethnographic descriptions of their roles as individual family members of a multicultural, multiracial family in post-apartheid South Africa, unique and essential individual and family perspectives are explored.

The systemic perspective is important in IcPosAE since it aims at capturing different individual and sociocultural perspectives regarding a life event, an experienced phenomenon and/or the in-between diverse cultural perspectives (Mayer, 2022, 2025b; Poulos, 2021). Stanley (2020) points out that critical autoethnography in particular can enhance intercultural learning and inform new research paradigms within the intercultural field, provide new insights, shift thinking and perception and present the multidimensional nature of intercultural situations and identity. However, in this article, a positive systemic and transformational approach (PP3.0) is used rather than a critical approach. Its purpose is to contribute to holistic and integrative understanding to foster and enhance the understanding of complexities of a phenomenon from multicultural and multiracial family viewpoints and to develop ideas on how to transform perceptions and mindsets towards overcoming the divide of racialised experiences. The IcPosAE is systemic since it aims at including various viewpoints, their interconnectedness and the relations of elementsbsystems and processes. Thereby, the term "system" defines the interrelationship of the system elements, their communication, sense-making and meaningfulness (Von Bertalanffy, 1968).

In the case of this multiracial autoethnography, four different perspectives of family members – three children and a mother – are presented to explore a specific experience of family members from different viewpoints which are individually, socioculturally and racially framed. This article therefore provides a unique view of a collaborative IcPosAE of members of a multicultural and multiracial family, thereby providing systemic perspectives of a specific experienced event and its transformation for positive family growth through reflections of racialised experiences in a specific family context. The aims of this collaborative IcPosAE are manifold:

• to provide insight into the experiences of family members of a multicultural and multiracial family from a systemic perspective using the PP3.0 movement;

• to offer a unique insight into in-depth experiences and reflections of four family members in a post-apartheid South Africa that remains racially divided (at least in the minds of individuals);

• to explore the discourse about the experiences among the different family members; and

• to provide a transformational, learning-orientated, positive perspective as well as conclusions and recommendations that may offer insights to constructively transform racialised experiences in multicultural and multiracial families from different viewpoints of family members, thereby providing guidance for other families in similar situations.

Autoethnographies provide the opportunity to reflect upon individual experiences in specific sociocultural contexts (Adams, 2013; Chenail, 2014; Wall, 2016). Mayer et al. (2025) observe that in autoethnographies, personal, context- and system-specific experiences are presented, offering insights into complex individual processes in selected sociocultural contexts. The narrations are often strongly connected to identities and the question of how to define and develop oneself in context (Grant and Lloyd-Parker, 2024). Bochner (2014) mentions that researchers often illustrate their own cultural perspectives that inform research processes and narrations that lead to a deeper understanding of self in cultural contexts. Mayer and Wolting (2016) present meaningful narrations to provide deeper insight into specific cultural surroundings from autoethnographic perspectives. Grant and Carson (2025) point out the importance of autoethnographies in psychology and mental health, exploring especially selfhood, trauma and grief. Other authors such as Adams et al. (2017) suggest that selected aspects need to be explored and understood when dealing with autoethnographies, such as self, autoethnography and ethnography. Recently, PosAEs have been published to specifically capture the perspectives of the positive, the positive and the negative and the systemic transformation, development and growth (Gonot-Schoupinsky and Mayer, 2025; Wong and Gonot-Schoupinsky, 2025; Worthington and Gonot-Schoupinsky, 2025).

While autoethnographies in cultural contexts help to increase the understanding of the self in specific contexts, autoethnographies across cultures can support the exploration and understanding of the “in-between” of sociocultural and ethnographic contexts (Mayer, 2025b). Nisa-Waller and Piercy (2024) indicate that the development of narrations and reflections of historical concepts and colonial contexts can support even shifts in identity development and socio-historical concepts such as colonialism.

According to Mayer (2020), culture is a sociocultural construct which is negotiated and renegotiated in terms of values, norms and meanings in a specific group of people, an organisation or another system. In intercultural situations, the boundaries of these cultural group constructions are renegotiated in the context of members of different cultural groups coming together or sharing spaces. Mayer (2025b, p. 61) states:

This can happen between specific countries or nations or even within them, since Hannerz (1992) has highlighted the heterogeneity of cultures in specific nations. South Africa is a multicultural country, high in cultural diversity, language groups and ethnic origins (Barber, 2001) and on different levels strongly influenced by its history (Mukaddam, 2024).

In South African autobiographies, this cultural complexity of colonialism, imperialism and apartheid has been addressed in the cultural context and reflected with regard to changes in the new South Africa (Grzeda, 2015). In the autoethnographies, historic and contemporary changes can be reflected upon and narrations become more holistic, including shifting cultural worldviews, societal developments and structural changes that include changes in identity intersections such as race, gender and languages. Various authors have written about their autoethnographic experiences in South Africa and the post-apartheid era with a focus on colonial and apartheid struggles, Black feminism and other experiences in post-apartheid South African contexts (Grzeda, 2015; Mampane, 2024; Mayer and Mayer, 2018; Ngwenya, 2000, 2020; Schmid, 2019). Recent publications include collaborative autoethnographies in the educational context (Du Toit, 2025; Govender and Markus, 2025), social work (Perumal et al., 2021), industrial psychology (Avraamides, 2007) and transdisciplinary and intercultural experiences of South African Gen Zs (Mayer et al., 2025). Autoethnographic studies have increased in popularity, especially during the past decades and have begun to give a voice and agency to South Africans from various sociocultural backgrounds, such as Muslim Coloured women (Davids, 2022) and Black women in townships (Mampane, 2024), leading to the exploration of race and its influence in South African contexts in relation to issues such as mobility (Rink, 2016). Other work focuses on, for example, the experiences of disability in families in specific cultural contexts (Harrison, 2018).

Adams and Manning (2015) highlight that autoethnographic research can be used as a method of studying families, thereby pointing out that autoethnographic family research can provide insight into families by studying both normal and unexpected familial experiences and behaviour. Furthermore, the authors emphasize that autoethnography in families can support the understanding of unique and difficult situations in families and may increase in-depth knowledge of family research while also making the experiences also accessible to various audiences (Adams and Manning, 2015). However, most of the autoethnographic research taking place in family contexts is written by individuals highlighting specific aspects of their family, such as, for example, the experience of being a hearing child with deaf parents (Harrison, 2018), identity formation and childrearing in a specific family and cultural context (Mashiya, 2018), mothering with mental illness (Oehlers, 2024) or exploring experiences of migration of a family from Turkey to Greece (Demirhan, 2025). Many accounts exist on multiracial identities and autoethnographic perspectives of individuals (Gatson, 2003; LeMaster, 2013; Lester Murad, 2005) on the exploration of family stories from an individual family member’s perspective (Fraser, 2024) and the reflection and (re)construction of multiracial family and sociocultural experiences (Stohry and Hanna, 2025). However, scarcely any autoethnographic accounts can be found written collaboratively by different family members with their systemic perspectives regarding multicultural and multiracial experiences. This seems to be even less the case for inter- and multicultural families and their experiences of sociocultural and racial differences that occur within the family based on differences in appearance, racial features or a combination of multicultural and multiracial factors.

In this article, the researchers use a collaborative IcPosAE approach based on the systemic perspectives fostered in PP3.0. The PP3.0 movement was introduced by Lomas et al. (2021). It aims at “capturing the complexities of research through systemic thinking” (Mayer, 2025b, p. 31) through the exploration of different cultural, linguistic, ethical and individual system layers, which include post-disciplinary well-being research, taking positive characteristics and positive subjective experiences into consideration which shape the collective understanding of optimal functioning and purpose in life experiences (Ng et al., 2021). Another focus of PP3.0 is on personal growth and development (Joseph, 2021) which may include different system perspectives. The PP3.0 approach is used in the present article since it provides an ideal framework for this multicultural and multiracial family study.

The theories and research methodologies of autoethnographies have developed dramatically over the past decades (Adams, 2016; Beattie, 2022; Ellis, 1997, 1997, 2016; Ellis and Bochner, 2000, 2006; Gonot-Schoupinsky, 2025; Hayano, 1979). They are qualitative in nature and often describe the social phenomena and experiences of individuals from the first-person perspective, thereby presenting the researchers and authors with first-hand experiences (Wall, 2016). This type of highly qualitative research was based on the critique that research cannot only and primarily focus on quantitative aspects but should rather explore in-depth individual phenomena while creating empathetic, meaningful and accessible research and that fosters the outline of various and diverse perceptions, experiences and subjective viewpoints (Ellis et al., 2011). Various authors, such as Anderson (2006) and Gonot-Schoupinsky et al. (2023), highlight the subjective and reflexive nature of research, which may focus on different aspects, such as roles, insights, perceptions and emotions in research contexts. In addition, autoethnography explores the individual viewpoint within specific cultural contexts by using specific research methodologies such as storytelling or audio-visuals (Adams and Herrmann, 2023) to express the self and provide individuals with a voice (Poulos, 2021). Emotions are part of these first-hand descriptions (Ellis, 1997, 1999).

The researchers of this article position themselves transparently and openly with regard to the subject of research (Adams and Herrmann, 2023).

Our story is written in the first person. We, the authors of this study, all belong to a single multicultural and multiracial family whose cultural origins are German and South African and we introduce ourselves briefly in the following paragraphs. We are connected as researchers and family members. Our family has a unique structure in terms of diversity, cultural and racial features (Table 1).

I am studying psychology at a UK university (online) and enjoy the subject. I was born a Black South African but was adopted by my mum when I was only a few weeks old. Therefore, I grew up as a bicultural South African and German. Often people seem to be confused that I look and behave differently from the local Black people and think I am from another country due to my attitude, my behaviour and body language, my hairstyle, my language skills and British accent. Usually, they place me as a foreign African, sometimes as British. When people assume I am South African, then they are surprised that I do not speak any local South African Black language. I feel that I am South African and German at the same time; both cultural backgrounds and languages are integrated in me as a holistic identity.

I am a 25-year-old woman and grew up primarily in South Africa. I am a trained ranger and work at the moment in Germany but always return to my home whenever possible. I grew up in different areas of the country, in South African government schools and also in international private schools. I was born five years after the end of apartheid, attended a Jewish kindergarten in Cape Town and a diverse English-speaking pre-school in Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha). In Grahamstown (now Makhanda), I attended an English-speaking government school that included South Africans from all cultural backgrounds and the same in a Pretoria school. My high school followed a Cambridge curriculum and I was immersed in the international community in Pretoria, which I really enjoyed. I enjoy creative writing, as well as narrations about my own experiences in different cultural contexts.

I am Ecee and I am the last born in the family. My dad is South African and Zimbabwean and because of my skin colour, people in South Africa assume that I belong to the South African Coloured community. However, my hairstyle does not fit that community – I wear dreadlocks – and in public spaces often people just call me “Rasta” and greet me with “Jah”. The way I look often leads to surprise, irritation and questioning. Often people assume that I am adopted, like my brother; however, I am not. The other day, a man called me a “mix-up” because people struggle to place me in terms of the apartheid race categories. I speak English, German and Afrikaans as my first languages. Since I attended an Afrikaans school, I am part of the Afrikaans-speaking community in Pretoria. However, it often happens that people call me a Kaapenaar – which is a derogatory term for a coloured person from the Cape or Cape Town – although I speak Afrikaans with a Pretorian accent. But owing to the colour of my skin, people often classify me as Kaapenaar. I spent my pre-school days in an international creche, then moved to an Afrikaans-speaking kindergarten and pre-school until Grade 6. I then moved back into the international high school. Because I speak Afrikaans well, most of the time people assume that I am South African Coloured. Sometimes, however, it seems to be difficult for them to place me fully.

I am a professor in Industrial and Organisational Psychology at the University of Johannesburg and the mother of Blanchie, Lolo and Ecee. I grew up in Germany and my family originated partly in Poland and partly in Denmark. I have lived, studied and worked in different cultural contexts, such as England, Tanzania, Botswana, the US and South Africa and have travelled extensively, professionally and privately, throughout southern Africa and Australia. I have been interested in autoethnography since the 1990s when I studied ethnology and intercultural didactics and familiarised myself with the work of Ellis and Bochner (Ellis, 1997, 1997, 2016; Ellis and Bochner, 2000). The autoethnographic movement grew notably in the field of ethnology and cultural anthropology during that time. My cultural specialisation as a cultural anthropologist is anchored in East African and South African cultural studies, in which I have focused on exploring values, emotions, conflicts and cultural concepts from ethno-psychological perspectives. Table 1 presents an overview of the researchers.

Qualitative quality criteria have been applied to present this research study with trustworthiness, credibility, dependability, transferability and confirmability (Miles and Huberman, 1994; Lincoln and Guba, 1985). The study follows ethical principles applied in autoethnography, which presents personal and private human experiences, exposing inner ideas, thoughts and feelings (Douglas and Carless, 2016; Morse, 2007; Sparkes, 2024; Wyatt, 2005), which therefore makes the researchers vulnerable. In this case, the researchers are part of one family and provide systemic views regarding an experienced situation. The research study is limited by its context, the subjective views and biases of the individuals and the family, the theory and the contextual and methodological aspects chosen. We present our experiences with regard to one specific experience which we narrate from our personal viewpoints, taking in diverse aspects influenced by our personal diversity aspects and our cognitive, emotional and behavioural ability to reflect, change perspectives, organise, analyse and reorganise data, which is led by the reflective approach of the researchers (Koopman et al., 2020) and the research setting (Lincoln et al., 2013).

We are a family of multicultural and multiracial backgrounds and we all speak English and German within our family home. We have lived primarily in South Africa, but also for some time in Germany, the US and Australia and we have travelled together extensively. As a family, we always reflect on our intercultural experiences together; we discuss cultural and individual experiences on a daily basis because we live an intercultural life together and we share our experiences based on our differences in experiencing the world and the phenomena in the world.

In post-apartheid South Africa this is extremely relevant, since we are usually put into different categories. Claude and Blanche are often viewed as White foreigners, with Claude being classified as German and Blanche as South African (as she was socialised in South Africa since her first year of life). Lolo is usually viewed as Black; however, South Africans experience him as “different”, so they usually ask him where he is from, especially since he speaks English with a British rather than a South African English accent. Ecee, due to his looks and his ability to speak Afrikaans, is usually considered Coloured, but people are often confused about classifying him because he wears dreadlocks and is often approached as a Rastafarian or as Coloured.

In the following, we describe a situation that we each experienced in very different ways due to our diverse backgrounds and belonging to different cultural and racial groups, generations and genders, while being part of the same family.

This autoethnographic story is about an investigation regarding a robbery based on racial characteristics, stereotypes and prejudices. We describe our different experiences of the incident from individual and systemic perspectives.

Friday 24 October 2025 between 10 and 11 a.m.

I am walking with my brother and our Labrador dog on a spring day to the nearby mall in our neighbourhood. We are not talking much, just walking to do some grocery shopping this day. My brother, who has been adopted, walks with me along the sidewalk. A police car stops next to us and a policeman shows us his police ID card and tells me to step back with my dog. I feel irritated and do not understand what is going on. I start feeling anxious while the officer starts interrogating my brother, asking questions about who he is, wanting to see his ID and knowing what we are up to.

I listen to the conversation, becoming nervous. What is happening? What is this all about? What did Lolo do? The police officer tells us that eight million rand was robbed from the mall this morning and they are looking for the suspects. My brother a suspect?

The policeman asks, “Is this your friend?”, obviously talking about me. Lolo replies that I am not his friend but his sister. The man gets angry and says, “You are lying. Did you steal money and phones from the mall?”

I am shocked and I want to interfere, but I just stay quiet and observe the situation, holding the dog, watching the scene from afar. I am scared and anxious – what is going to happen? In South Africa, life can change at any minute, I think. How can they say he lies? Surprised and my body frozen, I am getting worried they will just take him away. What can I do? Lolo seems to be calm, not displaying any irritation. After a few more questions, the policeman turns around and gets back into the car. They drive off. We look at each other. And walk to the mall. Silently. Still in shock.

On 24 October 2025, I was walking to the mall with my sister and our dog, just thinking about what we were going to make for dinner. It was an ordinary walk. Nothing felt off. Then a car pulled up beside us and two men motioned for us to stop and that normal feeling vanished almost immediately.

They told my sister to step back with the dog. I did o’t really understand why but did not argue. Part of me just accepted it automatically. I walked closer to the car, already a little confused.

They said they were police officers and asked where I was going. The question felt strange, almost pointless, but I answered anyway. The mall. Then they asked who the woman with me was. At that point I felt my body tense up. I’d never been stopped by police before and suddenly I was aware of everything I said and how I said it. I told them she was my sister.

They did not believe me.

That moment stuck with me. Not because I felt guilty or scared of being caught doing something wrong, but because I realised the truth did not matter as much as whatever they had already decided about me. I stayed quiet, telling myself it would be over soon.

They said they were looking for suspects involved in a robbery at the same mall we were heading to. They showed me a blurry photo and talked about banks being hit and eight million rand being stolen. It sounded unreal, like a story from somewhere else. I could not connect it to myself at all.

Then they asked what phone I had on me.

That’s when it really hit me. Until then, I had not fully processed that I was being treated as a suspect. My stomach dropped. I handed over my phone, suddenly aware of how exposed I felt. They asked again if that was the only phone I had. They asked how much money I was carrying. Each question made me feel smaller, like I was being judged for something I knew I did not do.

Eventually, they stopped asking questions. I waited for them to speak to my sister, to question her too, but they didn’t. They just drove away.

We stood there for a moment after they left. The walk to the mall continued, but it did o’t feel ordinary any more.

A few weeks after the incident described by my siblings, I had a similar experience. I was running to the mail, as I sometimes do, just to keep fit, when a police car pulled up next to me and stopped me short. They said they were still looking for the robbers and they enquired about the phone I was using and if I was aware of the incident. “Sure,” I answered, “I heard about it. My phone? Unfortunately an old, broken iPhone 12.” And if I have money on me? “No, not at all; I am just running down to the mall to keep fit.”

I turned around and kept on running.

I enjoy all communication. Just keep on smiling. I always smile, no matter what. It helps in life and with the strangest situations. And in the end, you keep on running.

When Lolo and Blanchie came back from their visit to the mall, they were both in a state of irritated excitement. Lolo explained the situation and I (Claude) was surprised at what had happened. The first comment I made was that I was relieved that they had arrived home again. We started to talk about it. Ecee was mainly listening to the talk:

Lolo is laughing now. I keep quiet and do not know what to say:

We sit in silence:

I look at both of them:

Looking back at the situation, I learnt a lot. I learnt that I was afraid in this situation. I felt overwhelmed and could not stand up for my brother. Next time, I would do it differently. I would support Lolo more, telling them – whoever they might be – that he is not a liar but my brother. I think I would also be more prepared, if it happened again, to stand up. We belong and we are one family and people need to know that. From the beginning, I remember we always had to deal with the different stereotypes of people in South Africa, always depending on which group they belong to and which group belonging they see in us. Often it was not easy, because the racial segregation we always had to discuss at home so that it would not drive us, as siblings, apart but make our bond stronger. Because people always wondered who we are, how we belong and how we build a family and we always had to justify it and it made us stronger and it increased my intercultural competence and my ways of understanding and interpreting the world around us. It was not always easy, but it brought us closer together.

What did I learn? I learnt that even in a post-apartheid society, inequality and especially racial inequality, is still rampant and even systemic. Further, I learnt that from one moment to the other, your own reality of being part of a multicultural and multiracial family can be deconstructed by an etic perspective that is imposed upon you by people in power. And looking back, I have realised that these are the situations in which you have to stand up and stand in for the truth and make this not only a learning course for yourself but also a learning for people in this society who might not have had the chance to see a different post-apartheid society than the reconstruction of apartheid categories.

If we want to make a difference in the world, we have to stand up for what people might not see in us. I could have made a more impactful difference in this moment if I had insisted that I was not a liar and that Blanchie is my sister besides our racial differences. It could have been a learning for the policemen, too. Their South Africa is no longer “black and white” – we live the colours of the rainbow nation in one family. For us, it is not only a theoretical construct. And we learn so much by living it, because each of our realities is different due to our intersectionalities and we learn on a daily basis how this affects our lives, how people treat us, how they see us, how they interact with us and how they open or close doors for us and how much they believe in what we say.

Exploring the situation of Lolo and Blanchie, I learnt that it is always good to be aware of who you are and of what people consciously or unconsciously ascribe to the way you look. Often, we do not know what people think about us, but in this case, we learnt about the inner concepts and stereotypes of the policeman. Maybe it was not the situation for my brother to stand up and contradict the policeman and tell him that he was not a liar, because he did not want to get in trouble and you cannot really contradict a person of authority in public. But we always need to be prepared to deal with unforeseen situations that are based on our outer appearance.

Since I knew what had happened to my brother, I was prepared when the policeman stopped me some time after the first incident. I was prepared to react in a calm, conscious and contained manner and resolve the situation for myself with a smile. In the end, the situation made me stronger, because I knew – since people perceive me as coloured or as Black rather than as White – that I will have to deal with certain views, perceptions, values and prejudices throughout my life and most probably different ones with regard to the context I am in. But I feel prepared for it, because we are such a diverse family that I could witness over all the years of my life that people are treated differently based on how they look and how they are perceived and that provided me with awareness, consciousness and also strength. Since we always discuss our experiences at home and share different perspectives within the family, I could develop an image of who I am and I have learnt to deal with it when people reduce me to one limited aspect, such as race or gender. I try to understand their perspectives and what their needs and underlying ideas are and I move on with my life and keep on running, because I know who I am and I will not be reduced to what people want to see in me.

In a way I learnt once more that intersectionalities play a huge role in building our identities and often people perceive us in a different way than we perceive ourselves and they just see a piece of who we are. The policeman saw a young Black man, well-dressed, walking next to a young woman in sports clothes with a dog. To him, just by looking at these exterior criteria and the differences he saw on the surface level, he could not make any sense of the two as being members of the same family. Without reflecting deeper and being “on automatic”, he used the concepts that were close to his reality – the young Black man is a liar. In the end, this incident says more about the policeman than about my children. Both incidents show that segregation and racial separateness still exist in the minds of people. In one of my earlier publications, I called it the “inner apartheid” (Mayer, 2005). Twenty years later, we experience a very similar phenomenon: the reconstruction of racial segregation and divides that once were a strong part of the apartheid lived realities and experiences in contemporary South Africa. Even when non-existent in what we experience and in who we are, we still see ourselves reduced to concepts that were vivid during apartheid and that are reconstructed by members of different race groups, here a Black policeman.

In this incident, the multiracial family reality was declared a lie; the young Black man was the suspected robber who did not belong to the young White woman and who would not be part of a family walking a Black Labrador down to the mall. It was the young Black man who was questioned why he walked in this previously White area, now a little bit more mixed but still upper-class. The young White woman did not have a say; the dog was removed from the scene.

In the end, we ourselves can decide on individual, organisational and societal levels which realities we share and which we support, construct and reconstruct ourselves. Through a reflexive intercultural communication practice, we might make a difference in deconstructing apartheid mindsets, just by making a difference to statements and reactions and by telling the truth that multicultural and multiracial families exist within South Africa.

This collaborative IcPosAE primarily aimed at addressing four aims. Firstly, it aimed to present insight into the experiences of family members of a multiracial family and their systemic perspectives on an incident that implicitly led to family conversations about race and post-apartheid South African concepts of racialised biases. This article provides unique systemic perspectives and insights, as well as the intercultural positive learnings which the multicultural and multiracial family member drew from the incident. Exploring these experiences in the context of the literature review, it can be highlighted that experiences of racial divides – as constructed by the police officer in the post-apartheid society – remind us of the fact that multiracial families are still not the norm in South African society and are far removed from the perceptions in the public sphere.

Despite the fact that we are trying to construct a diverse post-apartheid South African society that aims to overcome colonial mindsets, imperialised constructs and apartheid categories, it appears that racialised biases, colonial concepts and apartheid segregations are still the norm (Houston et al., 2018, 2022; Kaziboni, 2022; Steyn, 2024). Intercultural conversations and relationships are influenced, as in the described incident, by racially biased interpretations (Osemuyi, 2024). The direct experience and reconstruction of racialised societal splits and segregation in daily life situations, even more than three decades after apartheid, brings about a deep concern regarding ongoing inequality and feelings of frustration. It reconnects us with the collective consciousness that has captured often unconsciously lingering memories of violence, inequality and frustrations that were at their peak during apartheid times (de la Sablonnière et al., 2013; Hayem, 2017; Mayer, 2005). Racial belonging, as in this described case, is still often created along apartheid categories (Osemuyi, 2024), while the ideal of equality and harmony is desired (SBMorgen, 2025).

The article presents four individuals’ perspectives on an intercultural case to provide an in-depth insight into different individual and sociocultural perspectives regarding a life event of three siblings of a multicultural and multiracial family (Mayer, 2022, 2025b; Poulos, 2021). A descriptive autoethnographic approach is used, which leads into an IcPosAE perspective highlighting the learnings of a racialised situation from four different perspectives. Referring to Stanley (2020), this IcPosAE aims to enhance intercultural learning, not necessarily through a critical view, but rather through a transformative insight into how the situation is used as an indicator for change, transformation and personal growth on an individual but also on a systemic family level.

This IcPosAE presents the “in-between” of a situation in which subjective constructs of culture, race, identity and belonging are renegotiated and reconstructed in the contextualisation of apartheid and post-apartheid categories. The lived experiences, emotions and reflections of the inner lives of the family members are presented, which differ based on their sociocultural belonging and racial features and which include a growth element for each family member’s intercultural learning (Mayer and Wolting, 2016). At the same time, the narrations offer insight into identity constructions and development in the specific context and consequently respond to the call of Bochner (2014) and Adams et al. (2017) to use autoethnography for a deeper exploration and understanding of the self in context and the development of the self in contest as highlighted by Grant and Lloyd-Parker (2024). After capturing discourses on the experiences, the transformational aspect is presented through reflecting the learnings of the family members and the transformation of the racial divide that challenges the family relationships. Individual reflections present different foci of the family members of the intercultural learning and personal strategies, as well as how the family manages to transform the apartheid category spill-over from public places into the family and uses the reconstructed racial divides to deepen communication about lived experiences, intercultural learning, overcoming splits and constructing deeper bonds and understanding, thereby presenting parts of this autoethnography from IcPosAE perspectives of development, transformation and growth (Gonot-Schoupinsky and Mayer, 2025; Wong and Gonot-Schoupinsky, 2025; Worthington and Gonot-Schoupinsky, 2025). Based on the idea to present the voices of four family members, the “in-between” of cultural and racialised experiences in context can be explored and transformed towards growth (Mayer, 2025b).

In the described lived experiences, cultural and racial aspects are negotiated and renegotiated in terms of values, norms and meanings for individuals of sociocultural and racial groups. In this case, the renegotiation takes apartheid and post-apartheid categories into consideration and explores potentials and synergies of culture and their impact on diverse individuals (Mayer, 2025b).

While South Africa is a multicultural country, it is still influenced by its segregating history (Mukaddam, 2024), as described in this case. This IcPosAE contributes to previous autoethnographic literature published in the South African context (Grzeda, 2015; Mampane, 2024; Mayer and Mayer, 2018; Ngwenya, 2000, 2020; Schmid, 2019), while expanding it into a more systemic, intercultural and positive view. Furthermore, this family-founded autoethnographic approach provides voices and agency not only to one single individual but presents a collaborated IcPosAE of family members, giving family members of different racial features, genders, generational groups and professional identities a voice and agency in a systemic context. By taking on this family-orientated perspective in collaborative IcPosAE, the article expands the methodological approach of providing single family members a voice and agency by presenting four family member perspectives, including aspects of PP3.0 in terms of focusing on growth, development, transformation and intercultural learning.

This collaborative IcPosAE presents four voices of a multicultural and multiracial family with regard to an investigative incident in a public space in a previously White area of Pretoria, South Africa. The autoethnographic case is unique since it includes four family perspectives, which are at the same time highly diverse in terms of sociocultural, racial, gender, generational and professional backgrounds. It shows how, when transformed constructively, the experience of racial divides through an “inner apartheid” mindset and through the experience of apartheid categories can bring about intercultural conversations and discourses on race, racial stereotypes and perceptions in a multiracial family when adequately addressed. If addressed constructively in the multicultural family, it can bring about bonding, intercultural learning and inner growth beyond racialised ascriptions.

It is recommended that future research focus on IcPosAE from a PP3.0 perspective, especially taking systemic perspectives into consideration. These systemic perspectives can support a deeper and more holistic and complex understanding of intercultural situations since they take viewpoints into account that are based on individual and sociocultural perspectives which might differ according to diversity criteria and to how individuals with different sociocultural and racial ascriptions perceive the world and are being perceived by others in specific historical and cultural or national perspectives. Definitely, future IcPosAE research needs to focus on positive transformation and the shift from racialised and stereotyping perspectives towards a holistic, systemic understanding. Simultaneously, IcPosAE research can explore a solution-based approach on how to enable deep cultural understanding and, in the end, tolerance, acceptance and a more complex behaviour approach to individuals of different sociocultural and racial groups in context, particularly in decolonising and post-apartheid scenarios.

Practically, this IcPosAE research could be used in classrooms in higher education institutions, as, for example, in cross-cultural psychology courses or in industrial and organisational and social psychology courses. Such courses might serve as “eye openers” for both students and lecturers, in that intercultural contexts often require systemic perspectives for a holistic intercultural understanding. Learners would be given an idea of how cultural ascriptions might affect intercultural situations and the subjective coding, decoding and understanding of these situations. This research can further be used to explore solutions for intercultural contexts and might help to build up intercultural competences based on PP concepts. Therefore, IcPosAE might even be therapeutic (see therapeutic PosAE, Mayer, 2025c) and could be used in family contexts to better understand family constellations, especially patchwork families or those with various diversity factors, including culture, race, language, age, gender and generation.

The author would like to thank professor Jerome Carson for inviting me as a keynote speaker to the international conference on “Autoethnography in Mental Health: Multidisciplinary Perspectives” at the University of Greater Manchester in Bolton, United Kingdom, 9–11 September 2025, on which this paper is based. Many thanks also to my language editor, Mrs Ruth Coetzee, for, like always, doing a great job.