a girl like me - race matters

A powerful video. My heart broke at the end of the "doll test" from the 1940's. There is much work to be done.

book: inside transracial adoption

I am reading a new book titled Inside Transracial Adoption by Gail Steinberg and Beth Hall. I'm only part way through but I am quite impressed with the content. This is from the inside cover:

Inside Transracial Adoption provides creative, confident, pro-active, and provocative guidance for parents who are experienced veterans or who are considering transracial adoption for the first time. Whether through domestic or international adoption the authors offer direction for building close, loving, and very real families consisting of individuals who are proud and culturally competent members of differing races.

In the first chapter The Challenges of Transracial Adoption the authors cite what they believe to be indisputable principles of transracial adoption:

• transracial adoption is more complex than same-race adoption
• visible differences between parents and children increase challenges to their acceptance as a family unit
• there are predictable developmental stages for transracial adoptive families which are different from those of same-race families
• issues regarding racial or ethnic awareness and development of positive racial identity must be addressed

In a larger context, what makes these core principles indisputable are these broader truths...

• adoption is a response to a life crisis
• race matters
• transracial adoption issues are not easy or comfortable subjects to discus
  
• adoptive families need to develop the desire and capacity to help themselves
• families built by transracial adoption can let challenges beat them down or they can embrace their issues - a process which only builds strength

Lastly...

If we are successful at giving transracially adopted children all that they need, we will raise adults with a unique ability to understand and interact with white-dominated society, while retaining proud membership in their own racial community.

I like this book.

talking about race

I recently saw this video about how to tell people they sound racist posted on A's blog A+A adopt a baby. I posted it here for your viewing pleasure as well.

race preference test

The article that I linked to yesterday cites the Implicit Association Test from Harvard which is intended to test race preference between European Americans and African Americans. I took the test. Give it a try, it’s quite interesting.

black kids in white houses

Last weekend I came across this article titled "Black Kids in White Houses: On Race, Silence, and the Changing American Family" which was posted on Harlow’s Monkey. I read through the entire article (it’s long) and it brings up some excellent points related to transracial adoptions and parenting. Bottom line, we can't be silent about the issues that arise in transracial parenting and adoptees must have a voice.

After all this time, there are still things we don't talk about. It’s a century and a half after Emancipation and a year before the election of America’s first black president. This is October 2007.

The door is closed. There is a black woman at the front of the room, near the blackboard. She is facing a black man who is sitting down and talking fast. He keeps talking for a long time, as if he has been waiting a while to say this to someone. The police, but not only the police, treated him like he was a criminal. His parents, who are white, didn't believe him when he told them this, or if they wanted to believe him, they still just didn't know what to say. Why would they? They were adopting a black child, they thought—not a black teenager, not a black man.

When he finishes, there is quiet in the room, as if everyone is giving him his due. A young Korean woman goes next. She says she has tried to find her birth mother, but the Korean authorities have stopped her. She says she is working to end all adoption from Korea.

There is a young Korean man. He is gay. He is also transgender. He grew up in a white Christian family in a white Christian town. He had to escape. For a long time, he didn't talk about it. He knows he should be grateful, but here, among like-minded peers, he feels like he can really talk about it for the first time.

This workshop is called "Race and Transracial Adoption Workshop with Lisa Marie Rollins." Rollins is the black woman at the front of the room. She says that a social worker labeled her Mexican, Filipino, and Caucasian because people didn't want black kids. But she looked more and more black as she grew older. Her parents still said she wasn't black. She was. Finally, they admitted it too. Then once, as an adult, visiting home, she found a mammy doll in her mother's kitchen, in among the other knickknacks. That's the end of the anecdote. She's still basically speechless about it.

She says it is time to watch a video called "Struggle for Identity." In the video, people tell their stories, stories like the ones in the room. A black woman who was adopted by white parents boils it down: "Don't think you can make black friends after you adopt a black child. If you don't already have black friends, you shouldn't be adopting a black child." Then the lights go up. There are several white people in the room who have said they have already adopted black or Asian or Guatemalan children, or that they are right now waiting to leave for Ethiopia to pick up their adopted children. All of those people —the white people—are crying.

They are crying because they have heard things they did not want to hear. But there is more to it than that. They are also crying because they do not know how else to respond to the great, big cultural silence that has been broken here. Continue reading...

stereotypes

I saw a short video clip this past weekend that made me very uncomfortable. The clip was about giving money at church (this does not make me uncomfortable!) and the concept of it was quite humorous. A football player tackles people who aren’t giving any money or little money. However the football player was portrayed as a stereotypical Black man using ghetto type language and everyone else in the video was middle/upper class white.

Why did the football player have to be Black? Or why were no other ethnicities shown in the video?

I bet that most people in the video and the makers would argue that they were not intending to be discriminatory. This goes to show how discrimination in whatever form can be so subtle. If it weren’t for me thinking and researching about being a future transracial family I likely wouldn’t have picked up on the stereotyping of Black people in this video clip.

Even positive stereotypes can hurt. Like assuming every Asian kid is a math whiz or every African American kid will have rhythm or grow up to be a sports star. Positive stereotyping can also place limitations on a child, taking away his or her right to be perceived as an individual.

This has me thinking about the stereotypes in adoption in general. The birthmother is seen as uneducated, living in poverty, and unloving because she "gave away her baby." Adoptive parents are seen as saints and saviours because they "gave a baby a better life." And adoptees are seen as angry, bitter, and ungrateful to their adoptive parents if they even entertain thoughts about their first families. Check out this document for other adoption stereotypes.

Stereotypes are dangerous.

how to be an anti-racist parent

I found this document online a while back but finally had the chance to read through it. I think that most parents (whether adoptive or birthing parents) desire to raise their children to be anti-racist. This short e-book provides some great tips on "how to be an anti-racist parent" that anyone would find useful.