by Anti-Racist Parent columnist Natasha Sky
I recently met someone friends have been trying to hook me up with for weeks; her family is planning to adopt. She had heard about me, and I must admit I was excited to talk to her–another multiracial family in our community! (I should know better by now.) I asked all the standard questions and, with a sinking heart, received all the standard answers. They chose international adoption because they were told they couldn’t choose gender with a domestic adoption, and they don’t want ongoing contact with birthfamily (although she likes the idea of meeting their child’s birthfamily once). They chose Ethiopia because the children are young and healthy, there are girls available, and the wait for China is getting long (up to 2+ years). They also find “African culture fascinating” although neither parent has travelled to the continent. They do not plan to adopt a second child of color.
She left and I felt something inside of me I was not expecting. I was about to cry. What is surprising about this situation is how it gets me every single time–because this could be the description of more than half the internationally adopting families I know. (Actually, this family has more adult adoptee connections than most adopting families.) Part of what pushes me to tears is total frustration. How can I possibly reach this woman? How much White Privilege is at work in the world, in our society, in an individual White family’s life that a couple’s choice to adopt includes considerations of (a) gender, (b) health, (c) amount of time the adoptive family will have to wait, but NOT (d) what it will be like for their child to grow up as the only child of color in their family and one of the few people of color in the community, or (e) what it means to become an inclusive, educated, multiracial family.
As my husband pointed out, no one has to complete a class or fill out a race-awareness form before they become a multiracial family through birth—of course they shouldn’t. What is different about creating a multiracial family biologically is that usually an adult of color (and often their extended family) is present in the child’s life–and the White parent first has an intimate relationship with this adult of color. In the case of transracial adoption, White parents do not have to know (or have ever known) anyone who shares their child’s heritage, and suddenly they are head of a multiracial family. If White parents are not fully invested in learning about their child’s heritage and incorporating their child’s culture into the family’s traditions and culture, this responsibility falls to the child. The fact that race does not seem to matter to many transracially adopting parents is the epitome of White Privilege.
White adults can say things like, “Race doesn’t matter to me,” or “I don’t see race.” But I have yet to meet an adult of color in this country whose experience would allow them to say such a thing. It is scientifically true that all people are part of a single human race; however, the societal construct of different races affects us all.
I received an email shortly after posting a sanitized version of the pre-adoptive parent story; this is an excerpt from the emailed comment:
I am outing myself as that woman on the playground. Please do not judge me upon meeting me during one situation with a million kids around. I gave you my quick surface answers. It is not a simple choice for our family to adopt transracially and from another country. This is a long thought out decision. Just because I do not want to get up on a soapbox when talking about our choices to add to our family please do not get offended or think that I am a lost cause. I support your causes and think what you are doing is good, but do not be offended if we are making different choices.
This was my reply:
You became an example of one of many families I know. Your family is simply the most recent story, and for that I apologize. I have no doubt you love your children, and you will love your new child as well. I do not think you or your husband have not thought this idea out. What scares and frustrates me is the thought of any child growing up in a family and a community where virtually no one looks like them or shares their heritage–and where no one shares their experience of the world as a person of color. This happens to many transracially adopted children, including some of my friends. I’m sure you have noticed there are almost no adults of color in this community.
I understand not everybody is as comfortable talking about their choices and their family as I have had to become. The fact of the matter is that any transracially adopted child has no option to “pass”, even as a member of their own family. They are stared at and asked questions about their family relationships throughout their life. When this is a child of color and they grow up in an all-White community, they can never blend in. Every single experience in their life puts them front and center stage, whether they like it or not. I know transracially adopted people (now adults) whose personality would have had them center stage no matter what their life situation, and they generally fared well. And I know transracial adoptees who were born shy, and the constant attention has made their life almost unbearably difficult.
In exploring our elementary school and talking to the few parents here with children of color, I’ve heard too many disturbing stories to simply dismiss. It is clear to me that this town will not be a friendly place to raise Black children, especially when they are becoming teens. My friend has a biological son with Black heritage who is in late elementary school. He is a skinny little guy (I think of my son at ten). This boy was riding his bike home–alone–from the playground on a Saturday evening (not yet dark) about a month ago. He was just past the grocery store when a car starts following him, and finally pulls right up next to him. It is full of White teenage boys. Two of them lean out the window and scream “Go, n—-r, go!” and speed off laughing. (My friend’s son was so scared.) Now I know this still, unfortunately, happens almost everywhere. But as the only Black boy his age in this community, this precious little guy has lived his entire life as a target for racist behavior like this.
This is one of the main reasons why we are moving our family. Like I’ve said before, I just want my kids to have the opportunity to be friends with (and eventually date) people of all different races and ethnicities, and that won’t happen here. Just as importantly, I want my visually-non-White children to have the opportunity to blend in, to not always be center stage, to not always be known because there are no other Black kids their age in town. I also want all my kids to have adults of color in the community as role models, mentors, and friends.
I understand you are making different choices. I don’t know anyone who has made all the choices I have. I just have my own experiences and those of my friends who were adopted transracially. I just think of where I’d want to grow up if I were a transracially adopted child with Black ancestry.
As parents, we all want to stack the deck in our children’s favor, give them every advantage we can so they will hopefully grow up to be happy, healthy, independent adults. Being adopted already adds one more layer of complexity to some of my children’s lives, transracially adopted a second layer. I am not comfortable adding ‘growing up in a White community’ as a third layer. That’s our family’s perspective, and I know there are many others.
Natasha Sky is a multiracial woman, a writer, an artist, and an activist—as well as the fulltime mother of four multiracial children all under the age of six. Two of Natasha’s children joined her family through open domestic adoption and two of her children joined her family through homebirth. Natasha created MultiracialSky.com, a website of resources for multiracial families. During naptime, Natasha writes about multiracial family life.
Natasha, great points as always.
I have stepped away from the issue for now as it has become very apparent to me that many but NOT all parents who have adopted transracially just do not want to hear from me (an African American parent of an Ethiopian child) or other African American parents who have adopted about the need for the children to exist in a non-hostile environment.
I believe it is a fine line. I never wanted people to feel I was telling them how to raise their families so I often focused on the issue of divisive distinguishing (between Ethiopians vs. African Americans), that I have witnessed from some adopting transracially. But many others were more vocal, making many of the same points you have made only to find their comments casually dismissed or ignored all together.
In the end, we all hope that the children will be okay. Whether that happens or not will be up to their parents.
It IS American consumerism at its best. A drop down menu of choices to meet our personal criterias. BTW, I am an Asian adoptive mom of an Asian child (same country of birth). It just never occurred to me add yet another layer of complexity to his history. I figured he would have a hard enough time coming to terms with the fact that he had lost his first parents. Personally, I think it’s the system that needs to be sent out for maintenance.
I am fairly new to your site and so far what I have read has been extremely enlightening for me. My husband and I are two white people getting ready to adopt a Chinese child. And I am scared and nervous because I know the type of life she will face growing up in a multicultural/transracial home.
I have a unique situation where I was adopted by a Chinese father when my mother remarried. I was a toddler then but I basically grew up in a Chinese family because my father’s family was so big and my mother didn’t have much contact with her family. I grew up being stared at, made fun of because of my last name, wondering if I was Chinese or white, having people make rude comments, etc. So, as a white person, I was put into the position that most people of color have been and I can truly appreciate their experiences.
I have always wanted to adopt a child of Asian decent. Adoption has been my first choice. And I want my family to be multicultural because even though I lived through all of the bad stuff of being different than my father, I feel like my life was made richer and fuller because of my adopted Chinese heritage. I guess to me, it feels right to bring a Chinese child into our home. But I know that she will be facing many if not more of the things that I faced. I hope to give her a fighting chance though. I hope that by becoming a part of our multicultural family, she will find that her life is full and content and that she can explore openly her feelings of adoption, racism, and other issues that she will face. We plan on surrounding her with people of all races and backgrounds and I am lucky we live in a city where that’s possible. Her heritage will be explored and celebrated. If she wants to search for her birth parents, I am all for that. If I can, I will leave information in her China files on how to contact us if the parents are ever able to do that there.
Anyway, I hope and pray that I will be doing the best for my Chinese child.
Dear Natasha,
I hear your sadness and frustration. I too have been in that conversation many times, even with good friends from our TRA group. I thank you for writing this post and above all, for moving for the sake of your kids. I hope you find a great new community.
Natasha, I hear you on this. The gender thing particularly irks me and is part of the reason we adopted boys from Ethiopia (at first we were open on gender, but we ended up choosing two boys from the waiting children program, so in essence we “chose”). And the “baby as young as possible” thing bugs me too, but, then again, we first adopted a 15 month old and then went back for a 4-5 year old boy. But I had to take that first trip to really appreciate how great it could be to adopt an older child. The required education can really scare people off from older child adoption, as it’s all about kids who have spent years in institutions, which is very different from Ethiopia.
And the birth family thing is frustrating as well… we have made major efforts to locate one son’s first family, and we’ve been in touch through intermediaries, and meeting my other son’s first mom was an incredible gift. I treasure the photos I have of these women, who we talk about often at our house.
The only tiny thing I can possibly say in defense of this adoptive mom is that it gets really old answering the question, “Why Ethiopia?” Some people ask it incredulously, some people sincerely… but it gets old. It’s possible that this woman had answered this question so much that she was feeling defensive or ready to give you stock answers.
Last year, when we adopted our first son from Ethiopia, our real answer was along the lines of this:
1. It’s a country with a great need; the orphan crisis in Ethiopia is very tragic and very real. We didn’t want to “save” a child, but we also wanted to feel like we were adopting a child who really needed us, as much as we needed him.
2. We have fallen in love (from afar) with the culture [this addresses folks who can only think of famine when they hear of Ethiopia].
3. The fees are within a range we can afford [this addresses the question of wy not Guatemala]
4. The children usually are loved and cared for by their families until placed for adoption [addresses the question of why not Russia] .
But I doubt I would given this detail if asked at a playground by a stranger whose intentions I didn’t realize.
I do think there’s some hope for your acquaintance. Two years ago, when we first looked into adoption, I might have said similarly offensive things, and now I’m the one cringing when I hear stuff like that. So maybe hear views will evolve too.
I also think she won’t be able to walk away from a birth family meeting or Ethiopia without wanting continued contact and to travel there again and again.
One final note: in a few weeks, we are actually moving, for at least two years, to a country in Africa not too far from Ethiopia. I’ve always wanted to live abroad, but I know without my kids, I never would have looked seriously at this job, which now is a dream come true for all of us.
Wendy, thank you for your candor and courage to raise real parenting concerns.
I too am a multi-culti, transracial adoptee who planned to adopt. There are lots of adoptions in my family already, so it seemed to make sense.
But many other people seem to assume that if we have a multi-culti background, we can easily handle these issues as a parent. And initially, I thought so too.
But I’ll confess. It took me many years to admit to my fears about having biological children that wouldn’t look like me (black/white). When I married a white Latino, my neuroses kicked into full gear.
If they looked “white”, would they relate to me? How would they handle the “spotlight”? (As a kid, for me it was easy to answer the stare with, “I’m adopted – duh.”)
But the big fear – what if they look like complete strangers. What if they looked like those biological parents for whom I have only “non-identifying” informaton?
What if, what it, what if…
Anyway, long story shortened, I finally got over it (kind of) and Mother Nature threw a couple of curve balls.
We got twins. One looks “white” (straight blond hair, piercing blue eyes – supposedly both from my birth mother), the other looks “black of hispanic origin” (blend of me and my in-laws). And neither resemble their father.
Go figure.
Thanks again Wendy for sharing. It sounds like you’re off to a wonderful start.
Thanks BoMH-Mom. I have a lot to learn and by reading and visiting sites like this, I hope to gain more insight and a better understanding of how to raise my child.
To put it bluntly, I read somewhere that basically the concept of adoption sucks. When you think about it, yeah it does suck in so many ways. But, I hope to make it suck less. You know what I mean?
I don’t think the concept of adoption sucks at all. I think that the idea of children who have lost their parents finding a new family to become a treasured member of is a fantastic concept.
What I think DOES suck is that parents feel cornered into giving up their kids (I know that’s not the politically correct term, but many birthparents around the world do no “make a plan for adoption;” they give their kids to orphanages or leave them in public places because they have no other options and do not know about adoption). Whether it’s a domestic or international adoption situation, parents who feel they have no ability to parent their kids sucks. Parents who die while their children are still young sucks. Parents who are too ill, physically or emotionally, to parent their kids sucks. But finding them new families via adoption? Doesn’t suck.
Re: Does the concept of adoption “suck”?
I DO think the concept of adoption sucks–from this standpoint: in a perfect world, there would be no NEED for adoption because all children would be able to stay with the parent(s) they were born to.
The next best option would be for a child to be raised by extended bio family. And then we come to adoption. I believe it is tragic when a child must be separated from their biological parents and family. Non-kinship adoption is a response to the tragic events that have led to this separation.
Here are the pieces of adoption that *I* think suck:
(1) When birthparents are pressured to relinquish their children (ex: one child rule, unethical agency workers) or children are taken from their birthparents (ex: kidnapping).
(2) The market that is created by hopeful adoptive families for infants and toddlers, that leads to (1), and that allows the institutional conditions necessitating adoption to continue.
(3) Most birthparents are unable to choose the family that will adopt their child, or are unable to find a family that meets their most basic criteria (openness, race, ethnicity, religion).
I can’t imagine my life with out ALL of my children, but I CAN imagine how their lives could have been if they had not needed me –and for some of them, their life history would be a lot less complicated (and sad). I love my kids and my family more than I can say, but parts of the system that brought them to me (and having adopted, I am also part of that system) and the concept that this system is necessary, are sorrows that my kids (and I) live with.
Adoption always starts with a tragedy, and no adoptive parent should ever pretend otherwise.
But we’re not in a perfect world and we never will be, since such a thing does not exist. So to me, labeling our attempts to remedy the sad things that happen in life as “sucking” is coming at it backwards. The bad things themselves suck. The fact that my husband and my kids and I are now a family (even a family that is dealing with the losses my kids have sustained, even a family dealing with issues of race and culture that may never have satisfactory conclusions) does not suck.
“Adoption always starts with a tragedy, and no adoptive parent should ever pretend otherwise.”
I think it’s completely possible for adoptive parents to recognize that adoption STARTS with a tragedy yet not think that adoption itself sucks.
Dharmamama, I agree completely with what you are saying. I think it’s important that we as adoptive parents — for the sake of our feeling entitled to parent (vital in a healthy parent/child relationship), as well as for the sake of our children feeling some measure of contentment with their A-families (given the unavoidable loss and sadness) — be careful not to visit wholesale condemnation on the fact that our children came to us through adoption. I want to be truthful about all of it, learn to understand the wholeness of the experience — not bind it into the binary of “good OR bad”.
I don’t condemn adoption at all–I am a mother through adoption–but I think it’s so important to acknowledge the tragedy that brought our children into our families. Adoption is a solution to a problem, a major terrible problem. It’s brought me incredible joy and love, but that which has come following loss experienced by my children and their first families. It’s not either/or. All these things can be true.
And this is what I’m really stumbling over: adoption might not suck for the adoptive parents, but at some point, the first families and likely most adoptive will think it does suck. Best not to be blindsided by that.
Yes, at some points in time, being an adoptee sucks.
I see your point regarding the transracial thing: I always wonder how a Chinese girl would feel in a Dutch family (where I live).
But… why shouldn’t healthy adoptive parents have an option to chose healthy children? A healthy child is what biological parents aim for too, right? Most people adopt because they want to start a family, not as an altruist act to chase world peace.
Not everyone can mentally/financially handle a child that has been abused and/or has a handicap. It would be very unwise if these parents adopt a child that needs extra-special care.
And…
” [A] handicapped adopted child has no option to “pass” (…). They are stared at and asked questions about their handicap their life. When this is a child in a wheelchair and they grow up in an all-walking community, they can never blend in.
Every single experience in their life puts them front and center stage, whether they like it or not.
I know people in wheelchairs (now adults) whose personality would have had them center stage no matter what their life situation, and they generally fared well. And I know people in wheelchairs who were born shy, and the constant attention has made their life almost unbearably difficult.”
I’m sorry… but being an Ethiopian who grew up in America, I FEEL STRONGLY THAT TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION IS WRONG. The only case being, that one of the adoptive parents is the same race as the child. Most white people live in a bubble that is reinforced by the main stream media. They don’t think of their privilege as being the MAIN CAUSE for the destruction of the countries that these children come from, they can’t fathom WHAT REALLY america is doing in other countries, especially the CIA. They have no clue that their support of the DEMS or REPUBS (really different sides of the same Coporate controlled coin) is support of destruction of most so called third world countries. THEIR PRIVILEGE IS THE MAIN REASON for the cause of these situations to arise. Transracial adoption is usually.NOT ALWAYS, but usually WHITE GUILT manifesting itself SO WHITE PRIVILEGE doesn’t have to go away. I feel sick anytime I see a child with a family in which he/she is the only member who isn’t of their race. At least people who marry interracially, then adopt SHOW AN AWARENESS and UNDERSTANDING. I know this may be hard for some of you people who consider themselves LIBERAL, but I feel the REASONS should be addressed. But people of privilege don’t like to think they have a hand up, especially in a country that pretends to fain equality, but really doesn’t. That being said, I know not all white people are oblivious to their privilege, and I am not rude to transracially adopted children or their families. But, I feel the CHANGES NEEDED ARE MUCH GREATER THAN, removing children from their cultures and bringing them to the land of evil.