I decided to interview myself after I saw on my WordPress tracking device that more than 1,000 people have tuned in to read my recent blog post, “Same Story, Different Decade,” which is by far the highest number of hits this blog has ever received.
So now that I’ve got your attention (it’s kind of too bad I still have to tap into my Angry Adoptee voice in order to be noticed!), I thought I’d try to contextualize that blog post by asking myself some questions. Here, for what it’s worth, is my interview with myself in 4 parts. Also, the first question was posed to me recently by my friend and comrade, Steve Kalb, a Korean Adult Adoptee…
Q: What keeps you going?
Meeting other adopted people is usually a treat. I love hearing other stories and finding the similarities and differences between their journeys and my own. Lately, I have been meeting people who were adopted from other countries. It still amazes me how similar their journeys have been to mine, since for the most part they grew up as the token kid of color in their otherwise all-white communities.
Q: Or the social space you have referred to as “Whitesville.” Do you hate white people, John? Have you ever left what you describe in the film “Struggle For Identity” as your “anti-white stage?”
You know, it’s kind of funny that you should ask me that now. Recently, I have had a resurgence of strong emotions towards white people in general. The catalyst was attending an adoption conference recently and listening to the heartfelt testimony of a 17-year-old youth who was adopted from Latin America. His testimony sounded eerily similar to the way I spoke and felt as a teenager over thirty years ago. It made me both sad and angry to realize that he is living through my experience in 2009! We KNOW better than to do that to children, yet he has been forced to endure strong racism directed towards him as a lonely child of color in an oppressive, overwhelmingly white environment.
But I wouldn’t characterize my strong emotions as hatred. Most of my family is white, as are some of my best friends-seriously! It’s more that I feel deeply disappointed and sad. Sort of depressed, actually, to see so many white people acting as if racism is over, as if they can simply live out their lives without recognizing the way they continue to benefit from racism. And white adoptive parents who still think they have the right to ignore race and act as if racism doesn’t affect the children of color they’ve adopted. They seem willfully and blissfully ignorant of the realities that people of color still experience, and willfully in denial that their children are, in fact, people of color.
Q: Is it only white people who act as if racism is over? I see lots of people of color behaving the same way. Especially middle class professionals who have made it. Many of them appear to have accommodated themselves to at least acting as if racism were a thing of the past…
You know, that’s actually very astute. Just the other day, I had a shocking reminder of my own blissful fantasy about being further along as a society than we really are. I was talking to my graduate students in a course I teach called “Education in a Pluralistic Society.” I was sharing with them my thoughts on the controversy surrounding gay marriage, and trying to explain why, as a gay radical, I actually oppose gay marriage. And then I was explaining that, regardless of those of us who oppose it on principle, gay marriage IS going to become more and more prevalent in our lifetimes. As evidence, I offered what is happening throughout Europe, as well as the history of anti-miscegenation laws that were on the books in half the states when I was a kid, only to be struck down by the Supreme Court as recently as 1967. I drew a parallel between the way racists back then used Scripture and the “it’s not natural” arguments to denounce interracial marriage and how nowadays the same arguments have been resurrected to quote unquote defend heterosexual marriage. I said something like, “Just as white supremacists have been marginalized, and most people would no longer denounce interracial marriage these days, I predict that my grandchildren will look back on the gay marriage controversy from the turn of the century and shake their heads in disbelief that it was ever a big deal.”
The shocker came when a brave out-of-state student got up the nerve to challenge his professor’s opinion. He spoke eloquently in his Southern drawl about how he comes from a part of the country that makes Lincoln, Nebraska look like a hot bed of liberalism. As he spoke about the opinions held by some of his family members and neighbors, it dawned on me that the narrative I take for granted, coming from the deep blue state of Massachusetts as I do, is hardly the narrative accepted and believed in many other parts of our huge and diverse country.
I really thought that most people had gotten over their strong aversions to interracial dating and marriage. Yet listening to this student describe how many of the people he knows do not share my perception and acceptance of inter-racialism burst my bubble and brought me crashing back to reality. Just because I happen to move in social circles where I know many individuals who are in interracial families and transracial families does NOT mean that that is a commonly accepted experience. As another white student who spoke up in class said—and she has been married to a Latino immigrant for more than ten years—“My own father thought it was wrong for me to marry my husband. People in my community still ask me why I married this Latino man, as if ‘because I love him’ isn’t enough of an answer.”
Q: So if can risk offending you and push you on this a bit more, is it safe to say that privileged people of color who reach certain positions of power may actually be helping their white colleagues and associates to bolster their denial? By assimilating somewhat in order to achieve a certain degree of success, these professionals of color apparently forget where they came from, and otherwise propagate the myth of the meritocracy. Your own success in earning a doctoral degree and becoming a professor at a research institution reflects this, no?
Which is precisely why I feel obligated to remind anyone who will listen, especially people in the adoption community, that we still have a long way to go in terms of embracing anti-racism and multiculturalism. I recognize that my privileges come at the expense of other people. I try to be cognizant of how my success and privileges actually disadvantage people who are less fortunate than me. I try to remember the thousands of adopted children and adult adoptees who never make it through high school, let alone college and graduate school, who never get to tell their stories publicly, who are never asked to speak on panels or lecture or keynote at adoption conferences or appear in films about transracial adoption. Not to mention the silenced birth mothers and extended birth families who have lost their children, or the orphans and foster children who never get adopted. I realize that in many, many ways, I have been very fortunate—and even with all those lucky breaks, I have experienced deep hurt and psychological trauma, just by having gone through the foster care system and the experience of adoption.
Q: Adoption remains a paradox, as you have written. It’s simultaneously a blessing and a curse. Can you talk more about how or why it feels like a curse?
What people seem to forget is that adoption by itself is a response to a crisis. Adoption becomes possible because some parent or family is facing an overwhelming crisis that makes it seem as if relinquishing their child—their literal flesh and blood—is the only solution. Of course, this applies only to voluntary relinquishments. I’m not even talking about how most children end up in foster care, which is by being forcibly removed from their homes and families by child protective services.
As a crisis intervention, then, adoption is hardly something to celebrate. It would be like celebrating suicide prevention or abortion. Those are not interventions to be celebrated. We view them as sometimes necessary interventions that attempt to resolve a personal crisis. This is why I cringe at “Adoption Day” celebrations and songs, or whenever I hear agencies and adoptive parents talking about bringing their little darlings home through adoption, as if they weren’t home BEFORE being ripped away from their birth families and cultures.
Don’t get me wrong, adoption does change the material conditions of many children’s lives. But at what cost? What I and many other adult adoptees are asking the field to consider are other perspectives, other ways of thinking about the costs and consequences of adoption. It’s not only about parents getting a child, which is understandably exciting and seen by receiving families as a blessed event.
As an adoptive parent myself, I am acutely aware that while I was thrilled beyond belief to earn the privilege of becoming a father to two boys, they each nevertheless experienced trauma before they got to me. I try to remember that they have a right to their feelings about those traumas. AND I understand that their birth mothers and extended families most assuredly miss them and feel their profound losses just as I feel gratitude and profound joy. So I don’t celebrate adoption per se, but rather understand it as an overall unfortunate event from which I personally benefited, as a parent and as a fairly lucky adoptee who did get a loving family and a second chance in life.
Q: Even if you did have to endure decades of navigating through racist Whitesville before you could reap the rewards.
Even if I had to endure living in Whitesville!
Next: So what’s so wrong with Whitesville? How do you respond to the question about ‘Would you rather have never been adopted?’
