Transracial Adaption

As a white family deciding to adopt transracially, you are no longer a “white” family.

By deciding to adopt internationally, you are no longer an “American” family.

But you are white-centric, American-centric.

And the kid did not decide to make the trip. In a confluence of effort, from the child’s birth relatives to two governments, adoption agencies and your own desire for a child, a kid of another race and another culture has now been transplanted into a white family in America.

You have so much love to give.

You have resources and a quality of life far beyond that offered by an orphanage in the child’s home country.

You will give your child the benefit of an intact, stable, loving, supportive home.

You may have saved your child from disease, poverty, indentured servitude, war, famine or an early death.

But, as a necessary by-product, you have also placed the child into a new culture and a new environment.

This is the first decision of many, as it will by your decisions and your attitudes that will determine the culture of your family and the experiences of your child. Even as your child develops some autonomy (getting spending money to spend on music, movies and books, determining his or her own friends – the scary thought of having a car!) your decisions will still affect your child’s experience. For example, it’s hard to make black friends if there are no black people in his or her school, or your church or your town. You may have attitudes about music, movies and other cultural influences that constrict your child’s experiences. You may express attitudes and opinions that the child will internalize and/or mirror.

Your family is not a "multi-cultural family" in practice, the way a family with one white parent and one black parent would be. Your family – whether it is headed by a straight/gay/lesbian or TG white couple or a single straight/gay/lesbian or TG parent – is a white family with black kids. The power and authority of the family lies with whites.

By adopting transracially, white families have also assumed the responsibility to shape and form how the child feels about his or her own racial identity (and, for international adoptees, the child’s feeling about his or her native culture). The responsibility exists whether the adoptive parent chooses to acknowledge it or engage the issue. Doing “nothing” is also a choice… and one that may be disastrous for the child and the family.

Inaugural Post

As a white guy who is in the middle of an international transracial adoption, I'm looking to do everything possible to do right by my child.

I hope this blog will serve as welcoming nexus for a number of voices, allowing us all to learn, share, be challenged and grow.

The blog is born from nagging questions I have:

What can I do to prevent my adopted daughter -- who will be a black, Ethiopian-born girl raised by two white, American parents, in a family with two white, "bio-kid" (dislike that term) brothers -- from feeling alienated and isolated when she grows up?

How can I ensure that she is secure in her (multiple) identities -- as an African-American woman, as an Ethiopian-born woman and as a loved and cherished daughter?

How can I prevent her from feeling cut off from her roots and missing a piece of herself?

How can I prevent her from being too "white" for the black community, but, obviously, by virtue of being black, not feeling accepted by the white community?

How can I prepare her to confront racism when I have never been the victim of racism (but have been the de facto beneficiary of racism)?

How can I honor that which makes her unique in our family without also making her feel like an outsider?

How can I help her to cultivate her own sense of identity without inauthentically appropriating it myself?

I sometimes read blogs of white adoptive parents, and find them naive -- shocked by racism that I don't find shocking, hopeful in the face of that which I find worrisome. I also read the work of some adult transracial adoptees and feel very inadequate in the face of primal psychological issues of identity. Through this blog, I hope to find some middle-ground, between "no effort to address identity required" and "no effort to address identity will succeed".

In this blog, I would like to encourage PARTICIPATION. This is one blog that will only be as good as the comments posted.

Thanks in advance.