Purple Boots, Silver Stars ... and White Parent
By FRANK LIGTVOET
October 13, 2013
“WHEN
I wear my cap backwards, don’t copy me,” our 8-year-old son says to his
7-year-old sister. “O.K.,” she answers, “I will put it on sideways.”
Recently our African-American daughter, Rosa, had gone with an older black friend to Fulton Mall, a crowded commercial area in our Brooklyn neighborhood, where the shoppers are mostly black. Fulton Mall is not only about shopping, it’s also a place to flirt, talk, laugh and argue, and to listen in passing to gospel, soul, hip-hop and R & B.
Rosa had seen some purple canvas boots with silver stars and lost herself in an all-consuming desire to have them. Immediately. I bought them, a bit later. A day later. And to be “fair,” I bought our son, Joshua, who is also African-American, a pair of black and yellow basketball shorts. Pretty cool as well.
The next day they want to show off their new stuff and, somewhat to my surprise, they decide to do so at Fulton Mall. I am their white adoptive dad, and by now, at their age, they see the racial difference between us clearly and are not always comfortable with it in public. But they know they are too young to go alone to the mall. Before we leave, Rosa, who had always seemed indifferent to fashion, changes into tight jeans and a black short-sleeve T-shirt. Joshua twists his head to see how he looks from behind. He pushes his new shorts a bit lower over his hips, but doesn’t dare to go all the way saggy. And then — after they have their cap conversation — we go.
They walk ahead. I am kept at a distance, a distance that grows as we get closer to the mall. I respect that; I grin and play stranger.
Joshua walks with the wide, tentative yet supple steps he sees black teenage boys make, steps he has practiced at home in the mirror. I realize that this is the first time in their lives they are asserting their blackness in a black environment, maybe not in opposition to but in conscious separation from the whiteness of my male partner and me. And we are a bit proud of their budding racial independence, since it comes after years of their having expressed feelings that ranged from “I don’t want to be black” to “I hate white people.”
Being black with us was safe now. Being black at Fulton Mall was sort of a test of how safe it was out there in the world. I take a picture with my phone to catch this moment, which they hate. Of course.
In “Far From the Tree,” Andrew Solomon’s book on families with children who differ profoundly from their parents, he developed the idea of horizontal and vertical identity. Vertical is the identity you inherit from your parents, like race and religion, and horizontal is the identity that comes with your difference. The horizontal identity is a centrifugal force: it leads the child to look for “fellow travelers” outside the family to find support and culture, or subculture. To fathom how strong that force can be, picture a transgender child in an Orthodox Christian family.
In the case of transracial adoption, there is the force of horizontal identity, where the child looks for others with the same experience of being adopted, but the vertical identity is complicated as well. When we wake them up in the morning, our kids don’t see parents who look like them. For many young transracial adoptees, every time they look in the mirror it’s a shock to see that they are black or Asian and not white like their parents. (In most transracial families, the parents are white.) The children have to grow out of their internalized whiteness into their own racial identity. Some fail and suffer tremendously.
It’s not just physical; the cultural vertical identity is at stake as well. By adopting children of another race or ethnicity we cut them off from the world they were born in. The National Association of Black Social Workers declared in a resolution in 1972 that transracial adoption was cultural genocide. The wording was, and is, cruel, but it is hard not to see its deeper truth: a Korean or black kid raised in a white world has lost his or her culture. An open adoption, as we have with our children, where we stay in close contact with their first parents, may take away some of that loss, but not all of it.
Black (or Guatemalan or Chinese) kids in transracial families belong to that family and also to the black (or Guatemalan or Chinese) community. Even if the white parents don’t like that idea — and there are too many who don’t — they will be confronted with it anyway.
Our daughter once threw a tantrum on a crowded street on the way to school, and the only way to move forward involved dragging. It was not a pretty sight, and a black woman who had witnessed the scene came up and, bypassing my partner, who was doing the dragging, addressed our child: “Is this your father? Is this your father?” She was claiming our daughter as part of the black community.
It was a painful and, for our daughter, a scary situation, but it came out of deep concern. To see a white person boss around a black human being, especially a small black human being, may have triggered a lot of bitter historical and socioeconomic connotations for this woman. I cannot blame her.
Sometimes those claims are friendlier. Advice about hair and skin care is common. And from black friends you get advice about racism. When I heard President Obama talk about his experiences as a black man in his comments on Trayvon Martin, I heard our friends.
It is obvious that race and adoption define transracial adoption. Even if adoptive parents started out naïvely — as we did, more or less — as a white family with kids of color, many of us end as a nonwhite family. Or in the terms of John Raible, one of the leading thinkers in the field of transracial adoption, a transracialized family.
Raising kids of color by white parents is not just a matter of love; it requires a racial consciousness that is common in families of color, but rarely developed in white families. And it needs an understanding that one’s family is not only challenged by the centrifugal force of the adoptive identity of the children, but also by the tensions of their broken cultural and racial identity. These fractures cannot be fixed, but need to be addressed with empathy by competent parents. We cannot take away loss, but we can teach our kids and ourselves to learn to live with it, and to live good lives with it.
Frank Ligtvoet is the founder of Adoptive Families With Children of African Heritage and Their Friends, a New York City support group, and a member of the board of the New York State Citizens’ Coalition for Children.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/purple-boots-silver-stars-and-white-parents.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131014
Recently our African-American daughter, Rosa, had gone with an older black friend to Fulton Mall, a crowded commercial area in our Brooklyn neighborhood, where the shoppers are mostly black. Fulton Mall is not only about shopping, it’s also a place to flirt, talk, laugh and argue, and to listen in passing to gospel, soul, hip-hop and R & B.
Rosa had seen some purple canvas boots with silver stars and lost herself in an all-consuming desire to have them. Immediately. I bought them, a bit later. A day later. And to be “fair,” I bought our son, Joshua, who is also African-American, a pair of black and yellow basketball shorts. Pretty cool as well.
The next day they want to show off their new stuff and, somewhat to my surprise, they decide to do so at Fulton Mall. I am their white adoptive dad, and by now, at their age, they see the racial difference between us clearly and are not always comfortable with it in public. But they know they are too young to go alone to the mall. Before we leave, Rosa, who had always seemed indifferent to fashion, changes into tight jeans and a black short-sleeve T-shirt. Joshua twists his head to see how he looks from behind. He pushes his new shorts a bit lower over his hips, but doesn’t dare to go all the way saggy. And then — after they have their cap conversation — we go.
They walk ahead. I am kept at a distance, a distance that grows as we get closer to the mall. I respect that; I grin and play stranger.
Joshua walks with the wide, tentative yet supple steps he sees black teenage boys make, steps he has practiced at home in the mirror. I realize that this is the first time in their lives they are asserting their blackness in a black environment, maybe not in opposition to but in conscious separation from the whiteness of my male partner and me. And we are a bit proud of their budding racial independence, since it comes after years of their having expressed feelings that ranged from “I don’t want to be black” to “I hate white people.”
Being black with us was safe now. Being black at Fulton Mall was sort of a test of how safe it was out there in the world. I take a picture with my phone to catch this moment, which they hate. Of course.
In “Far From the Tree,” Andrew Solomon’s book on families with children who differ profoundly from their parents, he developed the idea of horizontal and vertical identity. Vertical is the identity you inherit from your parents, like race and religion, and horizontal is the identity that comes with your difference. The horizontal identity is a centrifugal force: it leads the child to look for “fellow travelers” outside the family to find support and culture, or subculture. To fathom how strong that force can be, picture a transgender child in an Orthodox Christian family.
In the case of transracial adoption, there is the force of horizontal identity, where the child looks for others with the same experience of being adopted, but the vertical identity is complicated as well. When we wake them up in the morning, our kids don’t see parents who look like them. For many young transracial adoptees, every time they look in the mirror it’s a shock to see that they are black or Asian and not white like their parents. (In most transracial families, the parents are white.) The children have to grow out of their internalized whiteness into their own racial identity. Some fail and suffer tremendously.
It’s not just physical; the cultural vertical identity is at stake as well. By adopting children of another race or ethnicity we cut them off from the world they were born in. The National Association of Black Social Workers declared in a resolution in 1972 that transracial adoption was cultural genocide. The wording was, and is, cruel, but it is hard not to see its deeper truth: a Korean or black kid raised in a white world has lost his or her culture. An open adoption, as we have with our children, where we stay in close contact with their first parents, may take away some of that loss, but not all of it.
Black (or Guatemalan or Chinese) kids in transracial families belong to that family and also to the black (or Guatemalan or Chinese) community. Even if the white parents don’t like that idea — and there are too many who don’t — they will be confronted with it anyway.
Our daughter once threw a tantrum on a crowded street on the way to school, and the only way to move forward involved dragging. It was not a pretty sight, and a black woman who had witnessed the scene came up and, bypassing my partner, who was doing the dragging, addressed our child: “Is this your father? Is this your father?” She was claiming our daughter as part of the black community.
It was a painful and, for our daughter, a scary situation, but it came out of deep concern. To see a white person boss around a black human being, especially a small black human being, may have triggered a lot of bitter historical and socioeconomic connotations for this woman. I cannot blame her.
Sometimes those claims are friendlier. Advice about hair and skin care is common. And from black friends you get advice about racism. When I heard President Obama talk about his experiences as a black man in his comments on Trayvon Martin, I heard our friends.
It is obvious that race and adoption define transracial adoption. Even if adoptive parents started out naïvely — as we did, more or less — as a white family with kids of color, many of us end as a nonwhite family. Or in the terms of John Raible, one of the leading thinkers in the field of transracial adoption, a transracialized family.
Raising kids of color by white parents is not just a matter of love; it requires a racial consciousness that is common in families of color, but rarely developed in white families. And it needs an understanding that one’s family is not only challenged by the centrifugal force of the adoptive identity of the children, but also by the tensions of their broken cultural and racial identity. These fractures cannot be fixed, but need to be addressed with empathy by competent parents. We cannot take away loss, but we can teach our kids and ourselves to learn to live with it, and to live good lives with it.
Frank Ligtvoet is the founder of Adoptive Families With Children of African Heritage and Their Friends, a New York City support group, and a member of the board of the New York State Citizens’ Coalition for Children.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/purple-boots-silver-stars-and-white-parents.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131014
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