ColorsNW video on transracial adoption
by Carmen Van Kerckhove
ColorsNW magazine, based out of Seattle, has recently started a video podcast. Here is a video they made on the subject of transracial adoption (hat tip to Jae Ran). It features, among other folks, Sarah Kim Rudolph, whom I had the pleasure of meeting when she was in New York City for a conference.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
Kim wrote:
This is incredibly powerful for its personal testimonies, and visible struggles – across memory, across time, across the gentle connection of family and their wish to honor those ties- of those persons to speak to what they feel is needed, is necessary, in the layered world of being from/in a transracial adoptive family.
Was is four minutes long? If so, it was the most intense and pulling four minutes I have had this year.
When the young woman who said she identifies as multi-racial spoke to the expectations others have of her in knowing about the history/background of the group to which they understand her to be descended , and the sense of (my words:) fluster at having those expectations placed on her, I thought of commuications with a TRAP.
I thought of this parent, once again, ‘how prescient’ her intentions in raising her children with such contact and experiences that they will begin to develop a language and an ear for the cultural cues that are associated with their biological heritage.
All that we give to our children in their developing years is the tightly packed bag they take out into world, and from which they pull out the gear they need to meet each day.
I will share this.
Posted 20 Apr 2007 at 12:43 pm ¶
daisy wrote:
Carmen, thanks for posting this! Just this weekend, a friend who is white and lives in rural, predominantly white area was asking me about transracial adoption. I’ll send this to her as a way of expressing much more eloquently some of the ideas fumbling around in my brain.
Posted 24 Apr 2007 at 8:51 am ¶