Mock interview, part 2

Q: I frequently hear you reference the fact that you grew up in a place you call “Whitesville.” What was so bad about Whitesville? Why do you even call it that? If you’d had a choice, where would you rather have been raised?

I guess I feel like in the best of all possible worlds, children would grow up in communities more like Sesame Street. Or the East Village, or Oakland. Neighborhoods where people of different colors live side by side and get along despite their differences. Where people treat each other with respect, are basically nice, and are genuinely comfortable with diversity. I talk about Whitesville as a way to point out the overwhelming whiteness of the social environments I grew up in. Having chosen to live as an adult in communities with much higher populations of people of color, I notice the difference that makes in how I feel, day to day.

To speak of Whitesville is to remind people, especially adoptive parents, that they have CHOICES. The problem of living in Whitesville, as I see it and as I experienced it in childhood, is that it can lead easily to ethnocentrism, to a false sense of superiority, as if the way that white people live is the best and only way to live. Whiteness then becomes the norm against which all other cultures are judged. Whiteness becomes the preferred race, the better race. Whiteness defines safety, health, security, education, civilization, culture.

As a child of color who was reminded constantly that I was not white, how do you suppose that made me feel? Everywhere you look, all you see is white people. I hate to be the one to point this out, but that’s not normal. There’s actually something UN-natural about that, given the way the world looks. Meaning that given that one out of four humans on the planet is Chinese—and that the vast majority of people worldwide have skin the color of mine, perhaps a shade or two lighter or darker—it doesn’t make sense to allow children to grow up thinking that whiteness is the norm, let alone the better race. That is, if we are truly educating the next generation to become global citizens and to share the planet’s resources equitably and responsibly.

Q: But surely you’re not saying that white people as a whole are evil or unnatural?

I’m saying that moving through a social world surrounded by, and consisting almost exclusively of, white people when the world is so much more multicultural than that, leads children to develop an incredibly skewed sense of reality. For me as a child who was clearly NOT white, even if people didn’t know for sure what I was, meant that I never fit in. I never truly belonged. I was never quite good enough, or white enough.

The history I learned, the TV shows I watched, the movies I went to, the magazines I was exposed to in the doctor’s office, at the dentist’s office, in the school library, mostly depicted the world as it is seen, experienced, and owned by white people. I’m talking about a sense of balance, a sense of proportion, and a sense of fairness. I’m talking about reality. Whitesville does NOT reflect my reality, or the reality of most of the world’s people.

Q: But to play devil’s advocate, can you see any benefits at all of living in Whitesville?

Of course. Clean streets, for one thing. I mean, really, the trash was collected reliably and on time. There was an overall air of safety and calm that hung over the community, for the most part. But the older I got, I learned the harsh lesson that the police hired to protect the good citizens of Whitesville were there to protect them from so-called bad people—and I found out the hard way that the police assumed that those bad people looked like me.

Q: How about good schools? Is it fair to say that you received a good education in Whitesville?

I was fortunate to land in schools with teachers who were reasonably qualified and motivated to do their jobs, as teachers go. I had classmates whose parents believed in the schools and who assumed that the school had the children’s best interests in mind. For the most part, there was congruence between the language and culture of home and school. The teachers understood the students, overall, rather than fearing them. These are clear advantages compared to what many students have to contend with nowadays, particularly students of color and those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

But thinking more deeply about the KIND of education I received, it was incredibly Eurocentric, meaning that it glorified and celebrated white history and denigrated or ignored completely the rich, complicated histories of the Third World. Not to mention women. We learned essentially that white men created civilization and invented pretty much everything important. We were brainwashed to see life through the lenses of heterosexual white males. All the greatest authors, thinkers, scientists, politicians, artists, musicians, poets, presidents, generals, journalists, doctors, professors, writers, film makers, and at that time, even the greatest athletes, were white guys. What’s more, our principals were white men ruling over our white female teachers, just as in the quote unquote typical American family, white husbands governed their wives and children.

In a nutshell, Whitesville was Leave It To Beaver land. Then came the 1970s, when the picture of Whitesville shifted ever so slightly and became more like the Brady Bunch, and then, in the 1980s, it was Mr. Drummond with his adopted black sons Arnold and Willis. No wife, mind you, the writers killed her off, but the family was served by a crazy but lovable white female housekeeper.

Q: And then there was Webster, with Emanuel Lewis being rescued by another wealthy white family… John, talk about racial integration in Whitesville. Not everyone thought the races should remain separate, or that Whitesville should remain exclusively white. After all, there was this thing called the Civil Rights Movement occurring, right?

And that was interesting to witness. Imagine, feeling, as a child of color in the 1960s and 70s, like THE diversity experience for my community, and effectively serving at school as THE representative and spokesperson for the entire black race (which I hardly knew anything about) and then suddenly hearing and seeing this controversy erupting about whites and blacks getting together. Should they or shouldn’t they? How soon? How many should Whitesville allow in? Who would get bused here? Who would get bused there? Whose advice about race relations should we follow, Malcolm X’s or Martin Luther King’s? Were the black social workers right about transracial adoption or were my parents right? Where did I belong? Who was on my side? Whose side should I take?

Q: Those are pretty heavy questions about loyalty and identity. How did you answer that?

And if I could just say, more than just about identity, they are questions about security, about safety. About who’s got my back.

I started to answer these questions by immersing myself in black culture as best I could, minus the black people. There just weren’t many around. So I read black books, I read Ebony magazine, I stayed up late at night tuning in black radio programs from colleges in Boston. I bought black music, even though very few of my classmates listened to it or appreciated it the way I did. I grew my hair out into an Afro. I took Black Studies classes and Multicultural Education classes in college. I started making black friends.

I also connected with Puerto Ricans and other Latinos, and Native Americans. Other people who looked like me, and who experienced oppression, and who had developed an analysis of white supremacy and strategies for decolonization. Living in Worcester, Massachusetts during high school, which at the time had a growing Puerto Rican community, I experienced anti-Puerto Rican racism as much or more than I got anti-black racism. I was called “spic” or more accurately, “fucking spic” a lot more than I was ever called “nigger.”

I was positioned and felt targeted as a Latino. So in high school and college, I gravitated more to a multicultural, what we called a pan-Third World political perspective ,much more than a strictly black one. I began to see the connections between colonization in the Third World and in the ghettos, barrios, and reservations around the United States. I learned to analyze the intersections between white supremacy, patriarchy, and heterosexism. In short, I began to correct the imbalanced worldview I’d been force-fed in Whitesville.

Q: And that’s how you ended up teaching on the Navajo Reservation and then in inner-city Los Angeles?

Exactly. I took my degree in Multicultural Education and headed west. As far away from Whitesville, literally and figuratively, as I could get.

Q: Back to the question about if you’d rather be raised in Whitesville, even with the limitations you described, or never have been adopted…

Oh yeah, about that. That is such an annoying question, if you don’t mind my saying so. It’s like asking a cancer patient to choose between a full mastectomy or the harsh pain of chemotherapy, when they’d really prefer not to have cancer in the first place.

Q: Or even forcing that patient to say which they LIKE better, focusing their choice on those two painful options, rather than on the disease that led to those so-called options in the first place.

Exactly. Nevertheless, I always say I am glad I was adopted and got a new family that loves me. And I do love my family. And yes, I am grateful for what they have given me. And at the same time, I do wish I didn’t have to live life as an adopted person, with its second-class status and life-long issues and challenges.

To be honest, even though I joke about the Angry Adoptee persona and play around with that voice as a writer and presenter, I’m really quite tired of having to think about sounding too angry. I’m also tired of people equating my anger with my status as an adoptee. As if I don’t have just as much to be angry about as an adoptive parent, considering what my sons have to put up with as survivors of a hugely flawed foster care system, not to mention being underserved by an unethical adoption industry that is badly in need of reform.

There’s plenty to be angry about, if you pay attention to what’s happening to kids—or NOT happening—for so many kids. It amazes me that more parents aren’t angry! Our kids are being mistreated by the systems supposedly designed to help them, and parents just seem to tolerate it, and trust that the system is working in their best interests. Or even if they do recognize how flawed it is, parents are still too set on receiving its benefits that they aren’t about to challenge it. Their sense of entitlement and loyalty to a deeply flawed system that continues to steam-roller over the lives of children and youth, not to mention birth families, prevents way too many parents from rising up to scream ENOUGH already. So I guess I’ll go to my grave being known as an Angry Adoptee, if it means that more people will listen and start paying attention.

Click here to read Mock Interview, Part 3.