For those who didn’t get a handout at my workshop session at the North American Council on Adoptable Children conference, you can download a PDF version of the article that I distributed in Ottawa.
Basically, this piece talks about my notion of transracialization as a better approach to racial integration, whether in schools, families, or elsewhere in society. I believe that all of us can benefit from making the effort intentionally to cultivate friendships and relations of mutual caring with individuals from different racial and cultural backgrounds. But to do this effectively, we must overcome social conditioning of superiority and paternalism in order to enter these relationships from a place of humility and genuine openness.
Such an approach goes against the more typical approach to integration that seeks essentially to remove individuals of color from “bad” or negative circumstances by lifting them into “good” or improved social contexts (e.g., “better”, whiter schools or families).
Click below to download the handout:
