Ben Harper + four

As if we needed one, yet another reason to love the multiracial musician Ben Harper. He was included on the cover of Outside magazine as one of the “Nine Icons Who Rocked the World“.

In his interview, Harper has this to say:

To the people who say “What the f*ck is he doing on the cover of Outside magazine?” let me say this: First of all, I’ve got four kids. Four kids is an extreme sport, period. So let’s get that straight.

Here’s to the 24-hour extreme sporting life.

Life Links 3

• I have been waiting for this new documentary film about Operation Babylift. . . ever since I saw the frightening newsreel clip at the beginning of Daughter from Danang (another must see movie for all internationally adopting parents).

• A powerful (and almost humorous) look at race and White privilege . . . an excerpt from the essay Crazy Sometimes by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

• More beautifully articulated thoughts on race and adoption (and an underlying current of class) . . . from the Daddy Diaries.

• National Hispanic Heritage month began September 15th (which I learned from My American Meltingpot) . . . and my children’s manatee calendar has informed me that this Friday, September 28, 2007, is Native American(s) Day. (We just get one day? I think there will be more on this later.)

• An article about 2 transracial adoptees . . . one who wrote a beautiful essay (as a teen) about growing in her family.

• Last week, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights re-examined race in foster care and adoption . . . they were re-assessing the MultiEthnic Placement Act (MEPA).

• I can barely absorb that this is a mainstream perspective . . Bill O’Reilly’s comments about having dinner in an (primarily/traditionally) African American restaurant–and some bonus quotes.

• Another pro-international-adoption newspaper article . . . and the companion commentary (In the interest of the child?) from Resist Racism.

Which belongs?

My son was writing in his ‘workbook’ the other day. We’re homeschooling in the eclectic-semi-unschooling-style; the workbooks have been around for over a year–my kids think they’re fun. The books are actually a great distraction for a cranky kid who is not going on the errand with Dad. So, the workbook . . . this one came home with Rico from a trip to grandma’s house. It’s a general preschool-skills book. I’ve been happy with it so far (multiple races of kids; both genders) my only complaints are the coloring-in busywork (which he generally skips) and the staying to stereotyped gender roles–even for the anthropomorphised animal characters.

Rico is starting to read, but he doesn’t sound out multiple unknown words on his own. So he asks me to read the directions at the top of each page. He turned the page, called me over, and I saw this picture:

The directions said,Which puppies belong to this mama? Draw a line from the mother to her puppies. I paused. I had to think of alternate directions. “What does it say?” Rico asked.

“Uh, it says, ‘Which of these puppies looks like their daddy? Draw a line from the Daddy dog to the puppies that look like him.’”

I get it. It’s a ’sorting’ skill. But the matching and the ‘which one doesn’t belong’ games bother me; it’s all a matter of perspective. In their workbooks, my kids cross off items that would be graded ‘wrong’ in school. They X art supplies and sporting equipment off the toy shelf, and leave the cowboy hat and the violin–because at our house the basketball lives in the shed, the paints are in a downstairs cupboard, and the dress-up clothes and musical instruments are with other the inside toys. My kids find connections between all sorts of random pairs–a dog goes with a piano because they both can make a really loud noise. Okay. I value the creative thinking over the ‘matching skill’.

I found myself singing today. Remember this Sesame Street song?

Three of these things belong together.
Three of these things are kind of the same.
Can you guess which one of these doesn’t belong here?
Now it’s time to play our game; it’s time to play our game.

I know a mom (who has two White bio kids and one adopted child of color) who was posing for a photo with her husband and children at a large family gathering. This mom’s brother–her children’s uncle– started singing, “One of these things is not like the other . . .”

Society, school, and parents are passing down to the next generation arbitrary rules about what ‘goes’ together. Apple + Orange + Banana = FRUIT. Mother + Father + Baby = FAMILY. Today, the baseline assumptions about what a family looks like are the same as they were fifty years ago in the U.S. At best, elementary school curriculum offers a unit on, or at least a nod to, ‘different’ kinds of families. That ‘traditional’ family–1 mother, 1 father, and 2 or 3 children, all the same race–plagues all of us who fall outside that model.

There are a lot of us post-traditional families nowadays. We are multiracial families, single parent families, two-mom or two-dad families. We are foster families, ‘chosen’ families, blended families, and families with 4, 5, 7, or 10 children. We are families headed by grandparents, aunts, uncles, older sisters or brothers. Each one of us, a unit of two or more people caring for each other, each is a family. We are connected through love, blood, promises, circumstances, court decrees, and the daily grind. We are all kin.

As parents, we must be careful how we teach our kids about the concept of ‘normal’, and what we model for them about the weight and meaning of this subtle and powerful word. I want my kids to know that what they are, and their family composition, is normal–because it is. They do not have to (nor should they) change any part of themselves to feel they belong.

Belong where? Belong to what? First and most importantly, I want my children to belong to themselves, to be comfortable in their own mind and skin with who they are. I also want them to feel they belong to our immediate family, our extended families, their birth families and ancestors, their local community, their ethnic communities, and the world.

When I look up ‘belong’ in my thesaurus, I find: feel right, fit in, integrate, go well with, blend in, assimilate. I want my kids to feel right, not to feel pressure to fit in, to feel integrated into our family and community, to find friends they go well with, to blend in with their classmates, never to assimilate (conform) into anything they are not. Once again, we are walking fine lines. I want to model valuing diversity in people and families, without implying one must be different from the majority to be significant. I want my children to be able to blend in (physically and socially) if they choose to, but never to suffer from personal, familial, or societal pressure to conform. I know we cannot escape from some of these pressures; I want my children to be strong and proud and even defiant in the face of the pressure to ‘match’. (I love my thesaurus; it took me from conformist to conventional person, follower, sheep.)

We are raising independent souls here, free thinkers who will decide for themselves who and what belongs, or whether the rules are bogus and everyone should decide for themselves. Who belongs? It’s up to them.

Life Links 2

• We all know about the Jena 6 by now . . . today is the rally and national day of action to show support.

• An educator, a poet, an antiracist philosopher . . . check out Race Has Nothing To Do With You.

• The truth about African American families and adoption . . . read Black Adoption Myths and Realities.

• The group I’m longing to find . . . soak up the atmosphere in The Difference from Resist Racism.

• The second in a series of three . . . In Their Parents’ Voices is now available, the companion book to In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Own Stories. (A book of the stories of the adoptees non-adopted siblings–bio children of their parents–is forthcoming.) Definitely worth a read for all transracially adoptive parents, and anyone working with adoptive families, adoptees, or in the adoption field.

• And finally, a follow up post from The Daddy Diaries about choosing the race of your child when adopting . . . More on Race follows a (hypothetical) situation that our family (in real life) faced, and comes to a thought-provoking conclusion.

First Source Information

At the official beginning of our first adoption process back in 2000, we met a young woman, an adult transracial adoptee. She was our age, mid-20s, and she was working as an adoption social worker at the time–which meant not only did she share her ‘adoption story’ with us, but we were also encouraged to ask her any questions we had. She had been adopted as a newborn into a family with other adopted children. She is biracial, Black/White, and identifies as Black. She has a very loving, open adoptive family who she was (and is) still close to. And she had been raised in an all-White town–all-White except for her family.

Her parents loved all of their children, cared for their hair and skin as best they could (there weren’t all the books about Black hair care that there are now), talked openly with them about lots of ideas. This woman attended an historically Black college where she felt like she was a child again (not in a good way) in her knowledge of (her) Black culture. She had preconceptions about who and what was authentically Black, and she wasn’t sure she qualified. Her racial self-identity dominated much of her teenage and early adult years. She had good parents, parents who loved her and had done everything they thought was best for her–including adopting her–but she still struggled significantly with self-esteem, which was connected to her racial heritage.

I don’t want to tell my friend’s story for her. I am simply paraphrasing stories she has told us over the years, and some of her writing about transracial adoption. Several things she has said to us (or with us when we spoke together to pre-adoptive parents) have stayed with me, and here are two of them:

1. Pre-adoptive parents should not request only a biracial child. (We were in an ‘African American’ program at the time, so we were talking about children with one White biological parent and one Black biological parent, as opposed to a child with two biological parents who identified as Black.) A child with Black heritage is Black. They will not ‘feel’ closer to you because they are also ‘half’ White. (And I would add, how can a biracial child feel that their Black heritage is fully accepted by their adoptive family if the family would not have adopted a ‘full’ Black child. How will the family feel if their biracial child chooses to identify as Black?)

2. When pre-adoptive parents are filling out forms, they are presented with a list of physical, emotional, psychiatric, and learning disabilities; medical conditions; prenatal risk factors; and birthfamily medical and social history. Next to each specific item (some agencies have six pages of this information) the pre-adoptive parents must mark one of the following: (1) would accept, (2) may consider, or (3) would not accept. (Basically, yes, no, or maybe.) Our friend said, Pre-adoptive parents should consider transracial adoption, and the specific race of the child they may adopt, as carefully as they consider the most severe medical conditions of their potential child. This is how big an issue transracial adoption can be for a family, and how seriously adoptive parents should access their own abilities and situation.

Our friend’s experiences while growing up, and the speaking and writings of John Raible (another adult transracial adoptee adopted into a very loving, open, progressive, White family) have kept me thinking throughout the years (as have the responses from adoptive and pre-adoptive parents to my friend and John). I clearly support the idea that it is essential, if at all possible, for transracial adoptees to grow up in a community where there are other adults and children who look like them, who share their racial and ethnic heritage.

A lot of my writing about transracially adoptive families comes off sounding hard-core and angry. I am afraid my current perspective has been jaded by the community I live in, the vast majority of parents I am surrounded by, these parents’ attitudes about the importance (I should say non-importance) of race. The idea that today, in the United States of America, race does not matter, is a false concept fueled almost entirely by White privilege. (When I say race here, I am talking about the societal-construct of race, and the continuing fallout from generations of institutionalized racism.)

I am deeply troubled by all parents who have a great opportunity handed to them (in the form of simply being someone’s parent) to change the course of racism–and who choose to do nothing. I am personally saddened by all of these non-acting parents who are also White transracially adopting parents. That could have been my child; those children were my friends.

I believe that parents who choose to adopt–for whatever reasons–have additional parenting responsibilities that families formed through biology alone do not usually share. Parents who choose to adopt transracially have even more critical tasks in this already awesome job of helping another human being to grow–hopefully grow into a strong, proud, compassionate, healthy, happy, independent adult. In the case of transracial adoption, this is a path parents choose, and I agree with my friend that the choice to adopt transracially should not be made or taken lightly.

I’ve taken the stories from all the adult transracial adoptees I know well, the ones I’ve only met once, the ones who write articles and blogs online, the ones who’ve written essays. I put these lived stories together with my own experiences and my (albeit semi-accurate) attempts to see our community through the eyes of my children–all of my children. And I know we have to move. (This is not as hard a decision for us to come to as it is for other transracially adoptive families who have lived in their community for generations, or have landed the job of a lifetime. I am looking forward to moving for me-related reasons too.)

So, we forge ahead. This is why we pour over racial statistics of schools and neighborhoods and towns and counties on Fact Finder, research the percentages of individual elementary school students who qualify for reduced-price or free lunch, search for organic food co-ops, farmers’ markets, community centers, home-schooling groups, alternative currencies, alternative schools, science centers, art galleries, and antiracism organizations.

We want the perfect town (I know there’s no such place), a small college town with mixed-race neighborhoods, affordable housing, Black, White, Asian, Latino, and Native American populations, a funky, hippie, open-minded town where our son with his mohawk and our daughter with her cornrows (and the fact these two are siblings) will be accepted with a smile, instead of dismissed with a glare. We’re still looking, but we think we’ve found the place. I’ll keep you posted.