I have never been in Billings, MT but I've seen pictures and it looks like a fine city surrounded by great nature, a city that seems rightly nicknamed Star of the Big Sky Country. I wouldn't mind living there. The same counts for small, but sweet Douglas, WY, home of the mythical Jackalope and host of the annual Wyoming State Fair in August, "not to be confused with Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo held in late July."
The two towns meet here on this page because of two recent similar pieces on transracial adoption in their local newspapers, the Cut Bank Pioneer Press and the Douglas Budget. Both stories deal with white people adopting black children: a contentious, widely discussed and researched subject in adoption and child welfare circles and -- where it concerns black kids -- in the African American community.
Let's start with the first piece for which white single mom Stephanie Montour exposed her saga to the Douglas Budget. Journalist Jen Kocher writes in an admiring crescendo about Stephanie's journeys to, in and from the Democratic Republic of Congo to bring her adopted daughter Bella to Douglas: "[T]he orphan who had once been found abandoned underneath a bush, caked in mud and teeming with ants, has finally been united with a mother who fell in love with a girl she knew only through a picture, but who ultimately risked her heart and fought like hell for two years to bring her home." The photo of Bella was shown to her by friend Sarah "who is active in saving the staggering number of orphaned children in the DRC." The piece brims of "subtly" played down heroism, with battles against the savage natural circumstances in Congo and against its corrupt bureaucracy.
Stephanie is well aware of the adoption corruption and fraud in the DR Congo, which led recently to the temporary or maybe even definitive closing of the country for international adoption, an ordeal she -- being early in the game -- was able to avoid. "Though Stephanie sees the merit in cracking down [on corruption] in general, she doesn't understand why it should apply to cases like hers that have met all the requisite criteria and time-consuming hoops, including tracking down Bella's birth mother to get her to sign off on the adoption."
Excuse me? Did I read correctly? "Tracking down Bella's birth mother"? So Bella is not a poor orphan, "caked in mud and teeming with ants," "abandoned under a bush"? She still had a mom! Did Stephanie meet all "requisite criteria," but missed the most important one? Friend Sarah happens to be Sarah W., who is not only the child savior from the piece, but as the director of an adoption agency working in Congo and Niger, a "child catcher" (a great term coined by Kathryn Joyce) as well. I not only see, like Stephanie, merit in cracking down on corruption in "donor" countries, but also in investigating the ethics of international adoption in 'receiving' countries.
Whatever the case with this adoption may have been, Bella is now in Douglas and she has to grow up there. Douglas counts 6,120 inhabitants and 0.3 percent of them is African American. That is a tough call for a black child, who is, whether the white mother likes it or not, a member of the black community in the U.S. I will not quote from the literature on transracial adoption, by, for example John Raible, Beth Hall, Darron Smith, Rhonda Roorda, Susan Harris O'Conner, Joseph Crumbley and Daniel Ibn Zayd to name just a few, to make the point that for the healthy development of a black child it is important to be able to identify with black people, to have significant black role models and friends. Instead I will cite from recent blog posts by Sarah Heslin Woods, an adoptee who went through a basically all white childhood in an all white world.
Writing about her summers in Rushford, NY (0 percent black people):
"[This] thing about summertime as a child was probably the most significant. It was my chance to finally spend time with some people who looked like me. My family hosted Fresh Air kids from NYC for several years. My parent's hosted kids that were the same age as their older children. One year, they hosted a girl named Robin who was my age. Robin had beads and braids in her hair and I remember being dancing red by her hair. One of the girls tried to braid my hair once, but it was too hopelessly matted. [...] After the Fresh Air kids stopped coming, it would be years before I spent significant time with anyone else the same color as I was. Summers were increasingly spent with my fitness and classmates from school which made me feel popular, yet highlighted our differences all the more."And about her first two years at elementary school Heslin Woods writes:
"[T]his was the beginning of internalizing beauty standards that would take years to overcome. I remember really wishing I had long, straight hair like all the other girls. And since I was starting to get chubby, I wanted to be skinny. I don't necessarily equate this with a race issue. Although I will say that when I became part of the Black community, I learned that body size is not as much of an issue as it is in the White community."In high school Sarah's situation becomes even more daunting:
"This was a time when boys and beauty become something important to girls. I could no longer be the tomboy I had been in my younger days. I wanted boys to like me and notice me. But this was an impossible dream. For the next six years of my time in Rushford, I never dated. Not because I wasn't allowed to and not because I didn't want to, but because no boys from my town would have ever date the Black girl. But instead of thinking there was something wrong with them, I took this to mean there was something wrong with me."Billings, where the second newspaper piece was published has just some more African American people amongst its citizens, not 0.3 percent but 0.8 percent. In a population of 104,170 one might see some black people. The Newman family, who is in the process of adopting a child, is white: a white mom and a white dad and four white boys. Mom Amber is instrumental in the path to adoption; journalist Linda Bruch writes: "[F]or a few years now, Amber had some strong feelings that something was missing in her family. That thought had her thinking about adopting a child, a little girl, one of African-American descent. She even told a friend, 'I wonder if God isn't going to ask us to adopt. I feel like sometimes those feelings are getting stronger.'"
Well, God asked her to adopt that little baby girl from African American descent: "I have always had a huge admiration for the African-American people. They are absolutely, stunningly, beautiful people," Amber said. "We asked the agency [in Georgia] to focus on finding an African-American mom who would be willing to let us adopt her baby and choose that for an option over abortion."
So now the Newmans are raising funds for the costs of this adoption by selling T-shirts on a website. There, Amber waxes again about black people: "[A]nyone that [sic] knows me well knows that I have spoken of my adoration of African American people for YEARS!! I find them absolutely gorgeous and intrig[u]ing. I don't mean that in a bad way I truly love seeing them and always have."
Not once in Amber's naïve and patronizing adoration does one see an inkling of any understanding of the issues that come with being black in America, of the issues of white people adopting black kids, of the issues of raising a black child in a white family and community. She truly loves seeing "them"; I am pretty sure she doesn't know one of "them."
Shaaren Pine, a dark skinned Indian adoptee wrote very recently in the Washington Post a personal and honest essay on her experiences as a transracial adoptee. Shaaren's words can be read in confrontation with Amber's. She writes about being brought to the U.S.:
"At 4-months-old, I was flown from my orphanage in India to my adoptive parents in Groton, Mass. I would never say I didn't have a good childhood -- I did. My life was enviable in too many ways to mention. But what's also true is that adoption is a traumatic, lifelong experience that is rarely recognized as one. Unfortunately, there is no way to convince a non-adoptee that adoption is hard and that its effects continue into adulthood unless that person is willing to hear it. And in my experience, few have been."Even more hard hitting:
"For me, being an adoptee is like getting into a horrible car accident and surviving with devastating injuries. But instead of anybody acknowledging the trauma of the accident, they tell you that you should feel lucky. Even if the injuries never stop hurting, never quite heal. Even if the injuries make it impossible to feel comfortable in everyday life."Groton, MA is another gorgeous place in the U.S., where I, as a white man, wouldn't mind to retire. But also here: the black population consists of 0.35 percent of around 10,000 inhabitants. This is how Shaaren Pine felt about that:
"[..] I was carrying the weight of growing up in an all-white town in an all-white family, unbearably alone and hopelessly on display. It was impossible for me to embrace adopted-ness, or brownness or Indian-ness. And there was no space for me to be confident or beautiful because I was too busy wanting to be white or petite or not-adopted, like my friends."African American adoptee Rebecca Carroll was raised in a white family in Warner, NH with a black population of 0.4 percent of the total population of 2,883 souls. It is a lovely New England town which hosts Columbus Day weekend the annual Fall Foliage Festival. Rebecca wrote recently two pieces, one on the site XOJane and one in The Guardian. Both are just must reads for people who think about adopting children of color or have done so.
Here's a quote of how Rebecca, now a mom of an 8-year-old, experiences her family, her white parents versus her black son. In a context of a family gathering she sees her son walking towards her (italic emphasis my own):
"[T]he very sight of my son's face and skin, his brown hands and resolute pull toward me, crystallized how significant the subject and experience of race is and has always been for me. And too, as an adult and now a parent myself, what I believe white parents are signing up for when they adopt a child of a different race. My parents had parented and cared for me, and I always knew they loved me -- but my son feels like family in a way that they do not."And about visiting Warner over the course of years she writes: "[My black] son started to get bigger, and the whiteness of the town where I grew up began to feel like an assault every time."
Like Stephanie and Amber, I am the white parent of two black children as well and I and my husband have come a long way to fully acknowledge and fully understand the eminent role of race in transracial adoption. We were helped by adoptees of color as friends or through their writings, by the first families of our kids we are in touch with, and by black friends. We think we know now relatively well how to parent our children in Brooklyn, NY, where 35.8 percent of the total population is black, while still realizing that our whiteness will one way or the other stand in the way of their full development.
Raising kids of color is an enormous responsibility for white people. And to raise them in our day and time, where parents have access to a wide range of adoptee voices and to lots of recent research, to raise them naively in white families, disregarding these voices and the research, must be qualified as child abuse. But, to quote Rev. Wright: the chickens will be coming to roost. The disrespect of Stephanie for her child's first mother, who comes as an administrative afterthought in her heroic quest, and her condescending neo-colonial do-gooder attitude toward the Democratic Republic of Congo, will probably come to haunt her in the pain and confusion her daughter one day will feel. And one doesn't have to be a prophet to see the issues Amber's daughter will have once she grows up and breaks out of the chains of her mother's racially insensitive fantasy of the black baby doll.
If we are seriously listening to the voices of adult adoptees, we adoptive parents have to make sure that transracial adoptions will be dealt with in a more profound way. We have to change the ways parents are vetted and trained, and be checked on before and after an adoption is finalized. A black baby doll may break and be discarded, not a black child.