We're All Good -- Getting Real About Racism and Transracial Adoption

Struggling, struggling. There's a perspective out there gaining momentum that adoption is bad. The more I read, the more the perspective seems to be that all adoption is bad. But adoption by white people of children belonging racial/ethnic minorities is really bad. And international adoption by white people is the worst yet.

People have been hurt. Very deeply hurt. White people have adopted children of color and raised them as white children, not realizing that their children would grow up feeling isolated from both white people and people from their birth culture. People of color can become comfortable with white culture, but white people will always notice that people of color are not white. And nearly all white people have been raised to value white culture above black culture and other minority cultures in the US. So a black person who acts white is often more acceptable to white people than a black person who acts black. Or a Korean person who acts Korean. Or a Latino who acts Latino. But a person of color who acts white stands out as different in both the white world and the world of their ethnic group. The adoptees raised this way are living with deep wounds.

Many white people grow up feeling guilty about the history of white colonialism. People my age -- I was born in 1963 -- were taught in school if not by our parents that racism is bad. If we are racist, we are bad. Under the skin we are all the same, right? We should strive to ignore race. But nobody actually ignores race. I have been learning that many white people tend to ignore black people -- perhaps because we when we see black people our minds go to uncomfortable places. We ignore race only by ignoring people of color. Bottom line, we can’t ignore race. We must continue our journey toward understanding and genuine caring.

Growing up, we may have been taught to value other cultures, but that may have meant other cultures in other places. Not minority culture in our own community. Not cultures that were built on a foundation of oppression. White people tend to associate cultures built on a foundation of oppression with crime and danger and poor quality of life. When black people act black, many white people feel uncomfortable. We may think we are good with brown skin, but we can’t be sure people of color will behave according to the values instilled in us by our white culture. So brown skin may immediately bring up feelings of discomfort -- does this person share my values? And because we have noticed over the years that black people aren’t totally cool with the state of race relations in the US, we may wonder, does this black person harbor resentments toward me for being white? Hey! It’s not my fault! I was born white! And we’re not going to talk about it because that would be really, really awkward. And scary. For both of us!

So, back to transracial adoption, white parents might adopt children from minority groups with the belief that if they pass on their middle class white culture, the children will grow up as virtual whites and be fine. They don't realize that their children will grow up acting white but not looking white. They don’t think about the fact that they themselves may not feel completely comfortable around black adults -- especially those who act black -- and may not even be comfortable with black children who act black, and that other whites may not be completely comfortable with their black children even if they act white. They don't realize how alone their children will feel. And the parents’ feelings of guilt over white colonialism and racism prevent them from talking openly about their discomfort. They may harbor negative feelings about black culture but may never talk about that fact. It’s okay because their children will be culturally white.

But in spite of all this, I tell you, we are all good. We are all obeying the laws of human nature. Prejudice is not about skin color. Prejudice is about difference. Prejudice is about the perception of safety. Prejudice lives in every cell of every body of every human being on earth. Prejudice exists in every human population on earth. As a species, long, long ago, humans learned that the people closest to us are most like us and most likely to be our allies in a dangerous world. The people who are different from us are most likely to be our adversaries and steal our food or kill us. People who are similar to us are likely safe. People who are different from us are likely dangerous. This lesson was so useful to us that, through evolution, we incorporated it into our DNA. But the human species has out-survived the usefulness of this coding.

Prejudice is a powerful force in human relations, and people are getting hurt repeatedly. It’s hard for many white people to fully comprehend the severity of the problem. Does that mean we should not adopt transracially? Is there a role for adoption at all?

In a perfect world, every child would be born to parents who want to be parents and those parents would live long enough to raise their children. And we can strive toward this. But it is a long-term goal. Reality: There are children in this world right now without parents who are extremely vulnerable. These children need parents to protect them. Adoption brings children who need parents together with adults who want to parent. In the world right now, yes, probably because of white colonialism, there are many white adults who want to parent and many children of color who need parents. The fact that -- at least in large part -- white colonialism got us here should not prevent whites from providing loving, safe, and secure homes for children of color.

I don’t want to ignore the fact that there are serious problems with international adoption that are separate from the issues I am addressing here. Those issues require a dedicated discussion and they need to be addressed. I’ll write about those issues in the future. I also don’t want to minimize the problems that I have just written about -- not at all! We need to problem solve. We need to help white parents learn about the reality of racism and learn how to both protect and prepare our children. Adoption meets an important need. Solving the inequities of this world -- inequities that result in parents dying in the most poverty-stricken parts of the world, leaving orphaned children who are unacceptably vulnerable -- solving these problems is a monumental task that will take generations. We must simultaneously try to solve these problems and match extremely vulnerable orphans with parents -- even if the children have brown skin and the parents are white.

It is critical that white adoptive parents of children of color learn how to raise their children in a way that meets the needs of the children. I will write more about this in the future. I truly believe we can do it.

I was excited recently to hear President Obama refer to one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” This is because, while we are coded for prejudice, we are also coded for love. Love is a powerful protective force. Love brings us together, and together we are stronger. Overall, across the human species and across the decades and generations, our drive for love is always a little stronger than our fear of difference. And so, ever so gradually, we progress as a species away from prejudice and toward love. As we progress, we must multi-task. Transracial adoption is one important tool for us to use.

I am convinced that we are all good and that through recognizing our essential goodness and by working together, we can help bend the arc of the moral universe -- toward justice.