I have to confess - I did not know what we were doing when we accepted the placement of our soon to be permanent baby girl in 2008. We knew we were accepting a child that was African American and we were white but we did not know the official term.
When my husband and I were discussing growing our family through foster care and foster care adoption, we spent about 15 minutes talking about race. We both completed the classes through Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) to get licensed as Foster Parents and sat through sessions of challenges that we would face concerning fostering children but I’m not sure race came up in those sessions or specifically trans-racial adoption. I wonder now if the other parents in the room or the teachers just assumed everyone would have same race placements. That seems kind of odd to me. What I have learned since going through the child welfare system is that in fact it is actually prohibited for race and ethnicity to be part of the preparation of families adopting transracially. I know it is different when the adoptions are coming through private adoption agencies because they can set their own curriculum and adoption requirements.
When my husband and I discussed what type of child we would accept, we both felt it would be wrong to put limits on who might fit best in our family. We asked each other if the sex of the child mattered, (it didn’t) the age (wanted a younger child, to maintain our son’s birth order) and race? (It didn’t). We discussed race and ethnicity and felt we would love any child regardless of color if that child needed a home and it would be up to our higher power to make that choice. We talked a little about diversity in our neighborhood and checked out our statistics. We thought that while it wasn’t great, our numbers in our little town of LaGrange
Our phone didn’t ring off the hook with placements. We wondered if it was because there were just not children in our zip code or school district that needed foster care. That was true for the time period we were open to placement. What about children younger than school age? We found out that because we did not speak Spanish in the home it would limit any Spanish speaking foster children being placed with us. But we wondered, what about all the African American children who need homes?
The majority of children in foster care are not white. And the continuing reality is that there are not enough African American foster parents or prospective adoptive parents to care for these children. When children in foster care cannot be safely returned home to their parents or members of their families, they need to find the love and support of adoptive families. My husband and I both agreed that when there is a child that needs placement, it is in the best interests of that child for it to be a same race placement if possible. But when that is not possible, and it so very often is not, we thought we would be the next best choice. Isn’t it better for a child to have a loving adoptive home than languish in a foster home? We answered that with a yes and in October 2008, our baby girl came to live with us.
It is true that after that first meeting we didn’t see her in color. We just saw her as our special baby girl. I knew we had a responsibility and took on the learning process as our mission. I read all the books— Black Baby, White Hands by Jaiya John, Growing up Black in White by Kevin Hofmann Brown Babies Pink Parents by Amy Ford, Inside Transracial Adoption by Gail Steinberg and Beth Hall and the absolutely wonderful trifecta bible of books by Rita J Simon and Rhonda Roorda In Their Own Voices:Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories (2000) and Reflections on Raising Transracial Adoptees, In Their Parent’s Voices (2007) and In Their Sibling Voices(2009), and anything I could get my hands on for adoption and then for transracial adoptees. Between reading those and rereading my entire collection of parenting books (it had been 8 years since we had a baby in the house), we’d collected so much information our heads were spinning!
Friends who had adopted warned us about the attention our family would receive when out in public and I thought that they were being overly sensitive. But we quickly began to notice that whenever we went, people had to remark on our child and our family. Our daughter gets so much attention (although she is that cute) but I have to think that it has something to do with the color of her skin as well. People ask personal questions which now in time I have gotten much better side stepping. For example, where is she from? (Chicago
As time went on and I became more and more color conscious, I’ve thought of us as a biracial family. I joined the Chicago
When my husband and I first started talking about race we were more in the color blind camp. That was the ideal that race was presented to us. Do not judge a man by the color of their skin and that under God’s eye we are all the same color. We thought with enough love and our lack of prejudices that we would teach her and our son that color does not matter. That it is the soul, the heart, the mind and the actions that make up a person. Not the color of their skin. ( Love knows no color etc). However, from my research, I really do like the alterative thought of the salad. If a salad is just lettuce, how boring that would be? It takes all the special ingredients in a salad to make it the salad truly great! So while there are more and more colors as our races and cultures blend, it is still important to savor our unique flavors and not all taste the same. So we need to work hard on teaching our baby girl the pride in her culture and in her color. This is the prevailing thought process today on the importance of maintaining a culture, an ethnicity.
Many parents have adopted internationally or from Native American tribes. As a result of some of the implementation of the Hague Convention, we know the importance of keeping a child exposed to their native cultures and not stripping them of that experience. Unfortunately, there is not that same attention given to African American children adopted from foster care. There are no “culture camps” for our daughter but there are so many opportunities for us to teach her culture right here every day. We do not take that responsibility lightly and would not trade it for anything in the world.
So I pressed on for more information that was directly related to my family’s experience. I started finding more and more current research findings about transracial adoptees. As I kept reading, I noticed contradictions in the literature. For example, some adoptees felt stripped of their culture having been raised by white parents in the 70s when race was not really discussed and the family did not understand the importance of educating the African American child about their culture. Other adoptees told of having the best experience, the best of both cultures and thought that while their parents really couldn’t give them the black cultural experience they were seeking at home, they were ever grateful to have been given the chance to grow up in a loving environment. And yet other adoptees, didn’t like having to always talk about being different and discuss race all the time in their home.
Also, we don’t know today exactly what the experience of a child born in 2008 and beyond will mean versus a child who was transracially adopted in the 70s, 80s or even 1990s. The world is changing very fast and the acceptance in today’s society of all sorts of different families is so strong right now. We have to be careful not to put the sins of the past onto our children of the future.
However, even with that thought, parents adopting transracially need to be prepared to help their children learn their culture more than ever. The leading schools of thought all point to a better preparation of the adoptive parents to expose their children to their own respective worlds of culture and race. I have had the benefit of having heard author Kevin Hofmann speak and he speaks to the Transcultural 10 (Tips for Transracial parents to consider while parenting their transracial adoptee) and he talks about preparing for the probably while praying for the possible. This means that the way the world is today there is a high probability that your child will be treated differently because of the color of his or her skin. You need to prepare them for that.
Love and information from books is just the beginning.
Seek out opportunities to expose your child to children of their color and culture as much as possible. Obviously the more you can do this, the better for the child. If you can live in an integrated or a community of color so much the better. If that is not possible, then seek out ways to find enriching cultural experiences. For us, our son is very much ingrained in our community and a move is not possible at this time. But we have set the groundwork for a possible move when he goes to school and our daughter is entering elementary school. In addition, we are researching preschools and summer camps in African American communities that we can commute to.
As earlier stated, we have joined adoptive family groups to find other special families like ours.
We are lucky that we live very close to the city in Chicago so we can go into areas and she can see and be with other brown faces. We can go to African American cultural events where we are the minority which is a great experience for us to walk in her shoes as well as her older brother.
We are finding great books on great people of color. We are reading her books about her history written for young children. We are hanging pictures of famous people of color in our home as well as making sure our angels and Santa’s at the holidays are not only white. We are growing with her and trying to be more conscious of color to prepare her for life as much as we can.
I am learning to do her hair and make the effort to drive to the city every two weeks, ½ hour each way and sit in the salon for 2 ½ hours while some very capable mothers of color “do” her hair in these beautiful braided hair styles that click when she walks( which she absolutely loves!) And I learn also while I sit there, getting great unsolicited advice from these moms who want my little girl to have the best of her culture!
Our circle of friends reflects more than one color and culture and we hope that will naturally continue to expand. I am seeking to find ways to introduce her to people of color so that she can get to know the people and I am putting myself out there in looking for new friends for my family. I will look for a strong African American woman to be a mentor for her.
So, our journey continues to unfold and our family is so grateful for this experience that has truly helped all of us grow in love and strength. I will continue to seek out opportunities to learn and relish each step as our baby girl grows up. I know we have so many more challenges facing us as she enters into each of her stages into adolescence and adulthood but also great joys await us on our journey! And for now, I am just talking about the potty training and surviving the terrific two’s!
