EmbraceRace: Not
surprising given our interests that this issue of Transracial Adoption is a big deal for us at EmbraceRace. In thinking about this topic I read a couple of things that I had not read before,
namely that transracial adoption has increased substantially. And our guest,
Gina, will correct me if I'm wrong about this - but
transracial adoption has increased quite a bit over the last decade or so. And also that the majorities of Black children, Latinx kids, or Hispanic kids,
multiracial kids, and Asian American kids who are adopted are transracially
adopted. So, for kids of color, at least, adoption is largely a transracial
adoption phenomenon. We at EmbraceRace are very interested in race
and children and racial learning and culture, so transracial adoption and transracial adoptive families are a really important place to look and see the
range of challenges and opportunities that are presented in all of those
arenas.
So... Thank
you so much for being here, Gina.
Gina Miranda Samuels: Thank
you for having me.
EmbraceRace: So,
Gina, I know that you're a transracial adoptee yourself. I wonder if we could
start there, and you could share some insights about your experience as a
transracial adoptee.
Gina Miranda Samuels: Sure.
The short version of my story is that I was placed into adoption, into foster
care at birth. I have a single parent. My mother, my biological mother, was
young, just turning 20, and had decided to give me up for adoption. So this was
in 1968, and I've since met both of my biological parents. So I have more
information now. Were we talking maybe five or six years ago, my story would
have gone something like, "I'm not really sure exactly what my story
is." There's not a lot about race in my case file. I was entered into
DCFS, the Department of Child and Family Services, into foster care for nine
months because they weren't certain about my race. So, at that time, the
transracial adoptions weren't prevalent, and they didn't want to place me in
the wrong home and find out that I'd gotten darker than what I looked at birth.
So I was in foster care waiting to see what was going to happen as I got older.
In
that meantime, while I was darkening up a bit, my mother adopted me as a single
parent. She was 42 at the time and was a social worker working for DCFS,
actually, in another department. And two years after she adopted me, she
adopted my sister. She was not biologically my sister. We left Chicago area
when I was five to live in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which was quite a shift of a
place to arrive to. So all of my growing up was done in OshKosh B'gosh,
Wisconsin, a town of 50,000, and my summers were spent even north of there in
northern Wisconsin at my grandmother's in a town called Ladysmith, Wisconsin,
of 2,000. So I have many stories about that, which I may or may not share
depending on where our conversation goes today.
So I
grew up in Oshkosh, and I completed undergrad in social work and moved to
Madison, Wisconsin where I, after finishing my MSW, came out and practiced. As
a young person, I pledged I would never be a child welfare worker, I would
never be that social worker that I had grown to have pretty strong opinions
about as an adoptee. And lo and behold, long story short, I became a child
welfare worker and found myself in the very position of having to make
decisions about placing young Black and biracial children into foster families
that were predominantly white because that's what was available in Madison,
Wisconsin. So I have that as part of my experience, as well. A lot of what I
talk about both comes from a personal experience but also from a professional
experience of having been the caseworker and being on the other side of that
and working with families who were making decisions to be foster parents of
children of races that they did not share.
From
that, I went off and taught for a period of time, did some other things, and
then went back and got my PhD and started studying transracial adoption and
multiracial identity development. So...
EmbraceRace: Gina, yeah, that is quite a journey.
Transracial adoption is a big space, and we
know that you do other research, as well. I wonder if you
could say more about what kind of research you've done on transracial adoption.
And I wonder, maybe as a preface to that, if you wouldn't mind... You said, "Oh, I'm not going to be a child
welfare worker," and then you became a child welfare worker. But are
you willing to say anything more about what made you pivot?
Gina Miranda Samuels: I
guess I'll answer the second part first. So what made me pivot? Really just a
random occurrence ... I was working three jobs all at once as a young person and paying off
debts and various things that one does when they graduate from graduate school
at 22 years old. And I had to become a family caseworker, and I honestly didn't
know that that was going to be a county social worker and a child welfare
worker. So it was sort of a serendipitous life choice that I, in my early
social work career, was really enjoying working with families and kids. I was
directing an after-school program, an Afrocentric school program at the Urban
League in Madison and left there to become a family caseworker. It was only
after I had taken the job that I discovered that I was going to be a caseworker
and do child welfare practice all the way starting from taking emergency
custody of children, all the way through foster care and through termination of
parental rights, and transferring children to placement workers in the adoption
wing. So it was planned arrival to child welfare practice, but I oftentimes
joke with my students that it's a profession that found me as much as I found
it. And once we connected, it was love at first sight. I can't imagine starting
anything else, but I certainly did not start my career with that intention.
I came to my research also from a place of not planning that I was
going to end up being a researcher and thinking that I was going to get my PhD
to teach, teach social work. I decided to do my dissertation on something that
I felt, when I was a child welfare worker, there wasn't a lot on, that I was
only speaking from my personal experience and wanted to read about what experts
were having to say about my experience and was deeply dissatisfied, oftentimes,
with what I read about transracial adoptive families and the need to either
make them seem that everything's perfect or to say how awful it is, and we
should never do it. And my experience was all of that and none of that.
So I
decided to do my dissertation on transracial adoption and particularly focusing
on people who are multiracial. I went about interviewing adults from the ages
of 19 to 35 who had as their personal experience being adopted somewhere around
infancy by white couples or single white parents, and asked them questions
about that: what that was like, what they learned, what parents did that was
helpful, what parents did that turned out to be not so helpful. Much of the
things that I write about in the trainings that I do now come from that early
research and work around exploring issues of identity development, and identity
as a lifelong path.
EmbraceRace: Mm-hmm, right. Yeah, lots of follow-up questions, but I'm just going to
sort of go into the general first. I'm wondering if you can give us a broad overview of the transracial adoptive
community in the U.S., what it looks like today and if there are any trends we
should be aware of?
Gina Samuels: I
think usually when we talk about transracial adoption, I think the saying that
comes most to people's mind is a Black kid with a white parent or parents. And
that's sort of captured the public American imagination about what we are
talking about with regard to transracial adoption. While that's certainly an
experience that is real, my experience, increasingly the transracial adoption
community is deeply ethnically diverse. There's many pathways to adoption. Most
people who are adopted are not adopted through agencies and are adopted
privately through arrangements that are arranged through biological parents, an
attorney, and prospective adopters. So all of the statistics even that we have
on transracial adoption are not fully accurate because there's so many routes
through which people become adopted that we don't have a national system for
capturing all of these and regulating them, counting them.
There's
a pathway to adoption that happens through foster care. I talked about my own
story earlier, and in that pathway, most of the children who come into foster
care will never be adopted and will return home, as we hope that they should.
That's the purpose of that system, but some children don't return home. And
those children then become available to adoption, and they're public adoptions.
And many of those adoptions are subsidized adoptions.
Then
there are adoptions that happen with other countries, and those are
international adoptions. Many of those adoptions happen through private
agencies, and some of them are transracial adoptions. All of them are
transnational and bicultural adoptions, but some of them are transracial
adoptions. Most of those adopters are white adopters, and some of the places
that adopters adopt when they become transracial adoption placements are China,
Korea, etc. And those make up a huge portion of the transracial adoptee
population, even though I think most people still think about transracial
adoption as a domestic adoption issue. Then there are private adoptions that
are domestic, and those include children who are U.S. citizens whose parents
are oftentimes voluntarily surrendering them at birth but don't go through the foster
care system, are privately arranging through an agency for adoption.
So
the adoption community is made up of all of those pathways of accepting
children and building families and making choices. And for many adoptive
parents, those can be very overwhelming choices to choose among.
EmbraceRace: Wow,
yeah, that piece about private adoption actually outnumbering these other
routes, I had no idea that was true. I'm just curious. How do we even... I
imagine that it would be very difficult to track, as you've said. How could we
know that that route... that more transracial adoptees travel that route than
through foster care, etc.?
Gina Miranda Samuels: Mm-hmm. Sort of through backtrack ways. Census data started collecting
data about adoption. So that gives us a little bit of an idea about how
families are being formed, and actually, there's a study that was just
put out in 2017 by the Institute for Family Studies that did a survey of
kindergartners. So it's sort of a post-adoption way of capturing who is
adopted. In surveying kindergarten classes and understanding what are the
proportion of kindergartners in 2017 who are adopted, what is their situation,
what is their race, and what is the race of their parents, we can kind of
backwards map.
We
can't always know, necessarily, the way in which they were adopted, but it
gives us some insight into, outside of the routes that are more tracked like
foster care or like international adoption, what really is the diversity of the
adoptee population? And what we're learning, at least from that study, is that
among adoptees, for example who happen to be Asian, 90% of those adoptees who
are Asian are also transracially adopted. Similarly, with multiracial adoptees,
so adoptees who are mixed-race, of those adoptees, 64% of them are also
transracially adopted. And 62% of Hispanic adoptees are transracially adopted,
and 55% of Black adoptees. So, to the point that you were speaking to earlier,
in terms of increasing transracial adoption, it's still the case that most
white adopters adopt children who are also white. But it's also true that, of
kids of color who get adopted, they tend to be transracially adopted. So it's
this weird juxtaposition of who's available for adoption, who's adopting, and
how that plays out for different communities, communities of color versus white
adopters or adopters who are...
EmbraceRace: Thanks
for that, Gina. And one of the points you lifted up as you were talking about
what the session might look like is this issues of policies and practices, right ....
Gina Miranda Samuels: Mm-hmm.
EmbraceRace: ... that
shape transracial adoption, and you've already alluded to some of those,
including when you were a baby, you had this issue of how people feel and how
adoption agencies, for example, feel and social workers, I think, at the time,
felt about transracial adoption's importance. I think... I want to say it was
especially for Black children being adopted by African American or Black parents
to the degree that that was possible. That makes me... I want to offer sort of
a two-parter. One is, again, what are some of these big policies and practices
that are shaping what transracial adoption looks like now? But I'm also
wondering about transracial adoptees and what feels like an increasing
political identity. I feel like there is... Again, this is just my... doing
EmbraceRace work and certainly having more and more contact with transracial
adoptees, that there is more advocacy, right? There's more advocacy by
transracial adoptees themselves and sort of the politics around it. Just wonder
if you can say a bit more about those things.
Gina Samuels: Sure.
So adoption and social work in our history in the U.S. and worldwide around
race kind of implicates adoption pretty egregiously. So our early practices in
the U.S. with racism and white supremacy, slavery, and Indian genocide all
intersect in adoption and placing of children in families as ways of
reconciling difference in culture. In the U.S., you have two major streams that
implicate adoption, one being the placement out of Black children, and then
also the history of Indian boarding schools and the placing out of Indian
children into residential boarding schools and adoption literally explicitly for
the purpose of eliminating culture. Those are these beginning politics.
Then,
out of that, in the '70s, you start seeing advocacy from particular groups,
ethnic groups that are attempting to try to remedy some of this, of: What are
the rights that communities have in this nation to be self-determining to
decide the best interests of their children? So you see, in the early '70s, the
National Association of Black Social Workers making a statement about the best
interests of Black children being with Black families and in the Black
community. You also see similar advocacy happening during the same time,
articulating statistics and consequences of forcibly removing Native children
from their homes into boarding schools. But two very different pathways
happened there, and they're much a story about rights of sovereignty that are
different between African Americans and Native Americans.
In the Native American case, laws were able to be established that now we
understand as the Indian Child Welfare Act, which gives Indian tribes the right
to determine the best interests of Native children and children with any kind
of Native heritage. So what that allows is for, any time the system is aware
that a child has American Indian heritage, there is a procedure that gives
rights of the tribe to make first determination if there's anybody, family or
anybody within that tribe or anybody of Native heritage first to be considered
before that child is then allowed to be considered to be adopted out by anybody
who's not Native.
In
the case of children of color who are not Native, however, in the early '90s,
there were a series of legislative acts that addressed this understanding that
the thing that really was trapping kids of color, particularly Black children,
in the system were social workers who preferred same-race placements and were
sort of sensitized by the NABSW statement in '72, that they were reticent to
then place Black children in white homes and that this was the cause of Black
children languishing in foster care. So, in an attempt to eliminate that as a
potential barrier, the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act and, a year later, the
Interethnic Adoption Provisions were developed that state that no one can use
race or culture as a reason to delay or deny adoption, primarily to white
people but really to anyone. And it uses civil rights law to be able to protect
those right.
There's
been a lot of debate about whose best interest in that policy and whether or
not that really was the barrier. We still have children who are over the age of
five and six who are African American, particularly Black boys, who continue to
languish in child welfare systems across our nation. So it's a complicated
condition in foster care that we find ourselves in to do to address racial
disproportionalities that particularly affect Black children in that system.
But we do have these very interesting and diametrically opposed policies that
message to social workers what the importance of race is in decision-making
about families.
EmbraceRace: Thanks
for that. And I guess we have a lot of questions coming in, and people
really... a lot of parents who transracially adopted or people who are
considering it or people who have kids, adults in their lives who've
transracially adopted and need support still. We want to get to all that. But
I'm wondering what transracial adoptees and families experience in the U.S.
today, as in: How are they received? How are they perceived?
Gina Samuels: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it really varies. I think one of the things that I
hear, at least, a lot in talking with parents today of really young kids is,
"Well, things are different now," and this was more prevalent of a
statement prior to our current president. But even now, I will hear people say,
"This is a different world. Things are different now. Racism isn't as
overt." But I have to say, in my 51 years, I find myself saying the same
things. I find myself hearing the same things as when I grew up oh so long ago.
Things have changed but have not changed.
So I
do think there's some differences in terms of there's now a generation or adult
adoptees, you all mentioned this earlier, in terms of it's becoming a political
identity. So some of us has grown up. Some of us have gotten our degrees and
studied this and can speak as experts on our own experience. We don't all speak
with the same voice, and we all have very different opinions, and I think
that's good. So you're seeing a lot more of that, of adult adoptees engaging in
these debates and defining and redefining what the issues are.
I do
think there are some common experiences that actually distinguish our community
a little bit from, say, interracial families or interracial couples or places
where families are living multiracially, but it's not because of adoption. And
I think one of those things is where we tend to live. There's an interesting
article Krieder and Raleigh write about understanding census track data as to
where adoptive families tend to raise their children (Residential
Racial Diversity: Are Transracial Adoptive Families More Like Multiracial or
White Families?). Are they more like
interracial couples in terms of choices they select in terms of diversity of
community? Or are they more like white families? And what ends up coming out is
that actually they're more like white families, and if they adopt Asian
children, they live in whiter spaces than even white people do of similar
economic background.
So,
what that tends to mean for the transracial-adopted person is that we're
growing up in spaces where we're sort of by ourselves integrating all of these
spaces on our own, without communities of co-ethnics or other kids and other
families and neighbors to look at. It's a deeply diasporic community where
you're growing up without a community of people who kind of get what it's like
to have two white parents as opposed to multiracial kids who might have one of
each parent, assuming that they are growing up in a heterosexual family where
they were birthed. I think that's a common experience when I talk to a lot of
transracial adoptees, which is kind of growing up in this sea of whiteness and
having to navigate that with parents that are kind of secretly hoping and
wishing that racism really isn't going to happen and that that's something that
maybe happens to everybody else except for them.
I guess that then brings me to this other piece of what's oftentimes common, is
this idea that white privilege or that a parent's adoptive white privilege can
be passed on to their child and that, by virtue of adopting a child into a
white family, that somehow you'll be able to prevent racism from coming to your
child. Sometimes that comes with adoptive parents in the form of
colorblindness, but in general, it is a way of doing difference that oftentimes
leaves kids on their own to figure out race, to make meaning of what this means
to have two white parents, whatever their adoption story is, and whatever skin
they're in, to really take the lead in doing that. And sometimes parents will
wait for their kids to ask questions about adoption or wait because they're not
sure what age they should start those conversations. What oftentimes ends up
happening unintentionally is it can teach the kids that this
isn't an okay thing to talk about because we're not talking about it all the
time, anyway. So, when you wait, it sorts of sets a context of leaving the kid
alone to figure it out, or for it to be a really big deal when it didn't have
to be, and it could've been something small.
EmbraceRace: Just
something very much along... a question, really, along those lines, Gina, which
is: Both over time and across groups of transracial adoptees, I'm wondering
about what you can tell us about really the colorblindness trend? There's some
trends. So my sense certainly is that when a lot of Asian American, I think
especially Chinese, not really Chinese, East Asian babies two generations or
more ago were being adopted significantly, certainly the conventional wisdom,
my understanding is that the white parents who typically adopted them very much
had a colorblind approach. Certainly my sense is that that's changed. I don't
know how much, that in general more white parents... And transracial adoptive
parents are typically white. That's fair, yeah?
Gina Miranda Samuels: Mm-hmm.
EmbraceRace: Right,
so that more white parents now, and not surprising that we see quite of a few
of these folks in our community, are trying to be more sensitive, attentive to
racial identity, perhaps cultural identity of their children and thinking about
implications, trying to be conscientious about that. But I'm thinking there are
probably quite strong patterns between whether the white adoptive parent has a
Black adoptive child, Asian American, multiracial, etc. So both of that respect
and over time, what can you tell us about what we're seeing in terms of those
parents' sensibilities?
Gina Samuels: Yeah.
Yeah, I think there's great diversity. This is another space where that diversity
in terms of the path that you find yourself on in coming to transracial
adoption oftentimes says a lot about who are, how you understand difference,
what kind of kids you're open to adopting, what kind of kids you're not open to
adopting, how close or far you want to be from the biological family, a nation
away, a world away, or a neighborhood away, a block away. And all of these
things sometimes then sort families and parents into where they are themselves
with being able to be close up to difference and deal with that in a way that
can be erased or not. Our own understandings, I think, in our society about, Do
Asians actually experience racism? People have a lot of stereotypes about that
Asians don't experience racism. It's not as bad, or that Black people
experience the most racism, or that light-skinned Black people don't experience
racism, or that biracial kids will only experience half-racism or something
like this.
All
of these sort of imaginations that white people have about what other people's
experiences are then cause them to show up in certain ways to their kids in
terms of their preparedness and what they anticipate is going to be the normal
race experience for their child. And I would say colorblindness still is a very
big narrative among a lot of white parents and a lot of white people in terms
of how they do race. I think it can sometimes, in the adoption community,
manifest in a little bit more Pollyanna way of referring to us as rainbow
children or rainbow families. So there's still a lot of family organizations
that evoke those kinds of images about race that are not what I would say are
brave ways of engaging race, but rather sort of recognize it as something
that's flowery.
Then
I would say the next phase that I've observed us going in as a community is
trying to figure out: How do you deal with racial socialization, cultural
socialization in what I would call It's About More Than Hair? So I think the
next stopping point phase is like, "Oh, Black children's hair is
different, and you need to figure that out." And while that is really
important, I stand here before you as a Black woman telling you hair is really
important, so please don't misunderstand me in diminishing that as importance,
but it's such a starting place. It really is just symbolic about the degree to
which a parent has on their radar an understanding of just how big the
difference sometimes can be and what you're going to have to learn to do. Hair,
dolls, culture camps, transracial adoptee camp, all of these things are
important but are so deeply insufficient to really launch somebody with a sense
of belonging and a solid, experientially-grounded sense of self racially,
culturally in a community.
So I
think we're still... We've got a long way to go in helping people understand:
What does it really take to feel a sense of confidence, especially when you're
going into communities of color dragging two white parents behind you. That's
not always a ticket to belonging immediately, and acceptance. It's just not. So
how do we help white parents be confident about that and figure out how to
navigate that as a family? I think that's our next frontier as a community.
EmbraceRace: Yeah.
Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, one piece of advice for people on their webinar to
join the EmbraceRace community. We have a lot of discussions about various...
It's just very complex, right?
Gina Miranda Samuels: Mm-hmm.
EmbraceRace: And you
have to be on the journey and willing to learn about many different... It's not
one and done, right?
Gina Miranda Samuels: Yep.
EmbraceRace: Okay.
Gina put together some great resources for you all, and I'm going to put them
in the chat window, as well. That study of where families
adopting transracially end up living... That's really fascinating.
Gina Miranda Samuels: And for people who are interested and nerdy, the U.S. census has all kinds of reports on families and special reports on adoption and multiraciality. I would encourage people to do that. And then also, in my book with Kelly [Faye Jackson, Multiracial Cultural Attunement], we also have, after every chapter, "Learn more" and "Know more" [sections]. So there's also resources in there that I would encourage people to check out.
EmbraceRace: There's
a question here about the role of white saviorism in transracial adoption and
the impacts it has on adoptees. Hopefully, adopting as a white family transracially
doesn't make you someone who engages in white saviorism, but are you seeing
sort of a connection?
Gina Miranda Samuels: Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's an identity path that most white people, especially liberal
white people or Christian white people or white people generally have to
reconcile in their own identity around power. What does it mean to do good for
others that are then oftentimes portrayed as needing help from others? I think
that that's a natural thing that all people need to work through and certainly
then comes to a head because the world engages adoptive families in this way.
The world will come up to a white adoptive parent and say, "Oh, my gosh,
you're so amazing. You're such a good person. You've done such an amazing
thing," and oftentimes aren't fully conscious of what they're doing. And
sometimes that's a thing that is rejected by the parents.
So
the parents have to learn how to talk other white people through that way of
gushing about what they've done, but also the way that that then lands on the
kid that's sitting there thinking, "Wow, I was a piece of garbage that
somebody picked up, and this other person is getting all kinds of accolades for
being brave enough to do something so difficult and hard and unusual as to want
me." The people who say those things are
never intending to say something that hurtful or harmful to the child. But from
a child's perspective, to be the person that is the recipient of the saving
oftentimes leaves you, as an adopted person, with a lot of identity work around
trying to understand: Who is your birth family? How do you feel good about
yourself when the world understands your birth family as something that you
should've been rescued from, or your birth community or country as something
that you should feel lucky to not be close to anymore when that is oftentimes a
loss that is deeply invalidated for most adoptees?
There's
a really good quote from the Reverend Keith C. Griffith, and he says, "Adoption trauma is the only trauma in the world
for which everyone expects the victim to be grateful." So I think that
savior way of engaging transracial adoptive families often does that kind of
invalidating of that loss and also the invalidation of the complexity of the
communities to which the adopted person comes from and belongs to and could
potentially belong to. But it complicates it and adds incredible baggage to
understand adoption as the rescuing of someone.
EmbraceRace: Super
thoughtful answer, thank you so much. I have a very thoughtful question here
from Mary, who wants to be pointed, it's another resource request, to good
resources for extended family, that is grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. And
one reason I and we love this so much is because, as we said, EmbraceRace is
first and foremost for parents, but we always super mindful to talk about
caregivers, meaning not only family members but pediatricians and child
therapists, all of these adults, coaches in the lives of children who very
often don't see themselves. Parents and teachers, obvious, but lots of other
adults have a role to play, sometimes a significant... Certainly grandparenting
now can be major, as well as aunts/uncles. As Mary suggests, I know that there's
certainly some adoption agencies that even specialize in transracial adoption
or have transracial adoption as a significant part of their work that try to
provide at least some guidance to adoptive parents. But if you're talking about
a white family and an extended family that is perhaps exclusively white, all of
these other folks don't have, didn't make the choice, and don't necessarily
have any kind of preparation but can play a significant role.
I can
tell she feels that. So, yeah, anything you want to say about that in general, and any
particular resources aimed at these extended family members?
Gina Samuels: Yeah,
I think this is one place where we're really narrow at how we understand
adoption generally. It really is very myopically about placing this child with
these parents, and then we go away and think magic happens. Magic can happen,
but so does the extended family happen, and as you said earlier, they didn't
choose this. So sometimes, even when parents think that they've had these
conversations about how are people going to show up, when the thing actually
happens, and people actually show up, how they show up, I think there's a lot
of support that's needed for parents about: How do you navigate the racism of
your biological family or your family broadly? How do you do that? And for
extended family about how to show with a child of color that you may not have
imagined having as part of your family, but how do you think now? How do you
rethink about what a safe school is? How do you rethink about that family cabin
that you love so much up in norther Wisconsin where I had to go?
So it
requires the whole family to rethink, How are we a place that is nurturing a
child that might have a very different experience of our family and our family
traditions than we do, our beloved family traditions that may or may not come
off as quite beloved? And I think that that doesn't mean that families can't
change and that grandparents can't change. I hear a lot of people say,
"Well, she's old. She's grandma. She can't... I've seen people change in
amazing ways, even in late life. But it does require a lot of help and support,
and it requires parents to draw some pretty clear boundaries of safety around
their nuclear family should they have circumstances where their extended family
is not a safe spot for their kids in the meantime, while the extended family is
working out how they're going to engage with the child.
There
aren't a lot of resources that include or even consider extended family as
positive resources, which they certainly can be, or as potential sites where
racism and all kinds of other things can come in very intimate spaces and ways
to children, starting very, very young. So I would say this is one place where
there's not been a lot of work. I know my colleague, Kelly, has written a
little bit about the role of grandparents in socializing kids to their own
ethnic backgrounds in situations outside of transracial adoption. But in the
condition of transracial adoption, we don't have access to relatives who can do
that socialization in our extended family anywhere. Oftentimes, the work is
anti-racist work as opposed to helping us to make inroads into communities of
color.
EmbraceRace: Gina, you've prepared a list of resources on transracial adoption for us and even a tip sheet with guidance for what adults who have transracially adopted kids in their
lives should consider or people who are thinking about it. I wonder if you
could just, in a brief way, talk about: What are the things that parents
transracially adopting do that are most helpful or not at all helpful? Broadly.
Gina Miranda Samuels: I
think one of the really important things that transracial adoptive parents
either get really right or get really off is how to handle when their kid comes
to them with a situation that's likely about racism. And the helpful is to
connect on the emotional level and not spend a lot of time trying to figure
out: Was it racism or not? In a lot of the trainings that I've done, I find
that white parents sometimes spend an incredible amount of time wanting to
diagnose the experience and target and getting followed, and: Was that racism?
Were they really followed? Did that cashier really look at them oddly or ask
them for something? Was it racism?
Incredible
energy is spent in a way that myself and any of my other friends of color would
never spend all this time trying to figure it out, things that you may never,
ever be able to figure out. Parents who get it right are able to be in that
moment with their kid when this thing happens and connect on an emotional level
and be able to talk it through with them about how their child experienced that
and not spend time asking their kid to prove, Were they sure that it was
racism? or invalidate how their child is experiencing that.
I
think the other thing that parents can get right is that, when you're adopting,
this kid should not be your first person of color in your life. Unlike families
that find themselves parenting biracial children out of interracial union,
oftentimes parents who are adopting, this may be the first time they've had a
person of color in their intimate space. And when that's true, it creates a
very weird dynamic for that child to be that adult's first opportunity to see
the world in a way that that adult should be at least a little bit able to lead
a child through various communities and having had those experiences. So I
think, when I've talked to people and certainly in my own life, it's a lot
easier when a parent has already had friendships and experiences and a whole
history of connection in an ethnic community that that child that they're going
to be raising will also need to find their way through. And when that parent
doesn't have those kinds of relational anchors themselves, it's a game of
catch-up that sometimes is really hard for parents. And oftentimes kids outpace
their parents, and that creates really awkward role reversals for parents and
children.
And I
would say the last piece, which is an adoption issue, is just parents getting
around this idea that sameness is not the only space through which we can
connect to one another, and that difference can also be a place of really
profound connection interpersonally. But I think white people oftentimes don't
have these opportunities in their lives to understand that or to practice that
or to see that, especially with regard to race. So when difference, race
difference comes into the family, oftentimes parents try to minimize those
differences and maximize sameness as opposed to being able to do... seeing this
and difference together as both places of connection and appreciation and
authentic bonding as a family.
EmbraceRace: Gina,
thank you. I want to pull back and ask about this big question of expectations
of transracial adoption as as a sort of phenomenon and a growing phenomenon.
I'm thinking especially of transracial adoptees and transracial adoptive
families are one of those populations, along with mixed-race families in
general, multiracial children, of whom people sometimes think, "Oh, that's
going to save us from themselves," virtually speaking.
Gina Samuels: Oh, yeah.
EmbraceRace: The
browning of America, right?
Gina Samuels: Yes.
EmbraceRace: Not
only demographic change but the growth of these, again, mixed race identity
folks who arrive there from different pathways. What, in general, do you say?
What's your response? Can
you respond to that expectation ...?
Gina Samuels: Yes.
Yeah, I think that's crazy. I think there's no way that just because I'm
biologically multiple things that I have the answer to problems that we have
been struggling with as human beings for millennia. That's just ridiculous. I
understand why people would hope for that, but multiracial people aren't new.
Mixed race isn't new. We've been mixing for a long time as people. So we still
haven't figured it out, how to be together with each other despite our mixing.
I certainly think that there are opportunities when you embody something that
is seen as such polar opposite, that it does give you opportunity to see worlds
and try on different ways of being from that space from that space of
marginalization. But I don't believe there's any sort of evidence that, as
mixed race people or mixed race families, that we have any bigger share of the
market of utopia or an answer to problems. And sometimes we embody those
problems in our families and live them and reify them more than we do rectify
them.
So I
think we are as flawed as anyone else and as vulnerable and as hopeful and
strength-based and all of those things as any other family, and we do deal with
some things that are different and distinct in our particularity, but I don't
believe that just by virtue of putting people together, that we have some magic
that happens that we're going to rescue the rest of the world from racial
problems that we've created and continue to live. I think we're in, and we
should be part of the solution, and we're part of the problem, and we should
join together as a collective in finding a path forward. But I don't think
we're necessarily going to lead us out in some magical way.
EmbraceRace: Let me
do a little bit of devil's advocacy there to push it a little bit.
Gina Samuels: Yeah,
go for it.
EmbraceRace: So I
think what the people who take that stance are often saying is at least two
things sometimes not made explicit. One is that white... through, again, these
different ways of, as it were, mixing with or incorporating racial difference
into their own families or at least extended families, that that's happening
much more than it used to 50 years ago, number one. And two, that the mechanism
of change, really, is the effect of that on the white people in the families,
that if you have more and more... I saw one study, very hard to do this in a
way that would lend lots of credibility to these results, but one study
claiming that 60% of white people in the United States now say that their
extended families are multiracial. So if that's true and if this sort of
closeup encounter with, again, racial difference in the form of perhaps children,
most often children they love, gosh, does that collectively create some sort of
change in the sensibilities, perceptions of people who didn't have that kind of
compelling reason to change before? And you think no.
Gina Samuels: I
know... So you're a guy. You're married to a woman. Does being married to a
woman undo sexism in our country?
EmbraceRace: OK, point well taken.
Gina Miranda Samuels: So, I
mean, I'd like to say that, in this case, heterosexual men who have wives and
maybe have daughters, that that has a potential to open you up to seeing
masculinity and patriarchy and male dominance in a new way, but it may not. We
won't get into that.
EmbraceRace: Yeah.
Gina Miranda Samuels: But I
just want to just invite you to consider a condition that we've been living
with as human beings for a long time, and we still have sexism. We still have
misogyny, and many of these men who are the most egregious offenders of these
things are married to women and have daughters. So I think it's reasonable to
hope that, if we were to have these intimate relationships, that they would
undo some of the insidiousness of white supremacy and racism and eurocentricity
and monoracism, but it's not an automatic. It's a starting place for it to
potentially happen, but there's so much contentionality and work that needs to
happen for our undoing of all that we know. So we play those same hierarchies
and inequalities in our own families unconsciously and reproduce it as opposed
to undo it.
EmbraceRace: So,
again, lots of questions, we won't get to all of them. But what are the
differences between the experiences of multiracial children and those of
children of color who are monoracial when they are adopted by white parents or
white-appearing parents?
Gina Samuels: Yeah.
I think some of it... Increasingly, the more that we have interracial couples
who have biological children, when you're light-skinned, and you're walking
around at least with one of your parents, it is a little bit more difficult for
people to understand. Are you adopted, or is it a biological child situation? I
think there's some level of outness that happens for kids who are not racially
ambiguous and identify as single race or are darker-skinned from their parent,
where there's automatically an assumption that you're adopted and that that's
how this all happened. As opposed to, for kids who are mixed race with white,
in particular, and with at least one white parent, that there's some other
biological story that could explain your racial difference.
I
think that's a... You stick out a little bit more when you're not mixed race
with white and who have white parents and have to understand and explain your
connection to whiteness. You know, "Why do you talk the way you do? How is
it that a Korean person talks like a white girl? What's that about?" And
how do you explain that to other Koreans who look at you and see you but that
the way you move through the world and the way you talk, culturally, is not
anchored in someplace familiar. I think there's ways of explaining your family
that are more socially-available narratives for people to understand if you're
mixed race and transracially adopted that if you are not mixed race and
transracially adopted.
EmbraceRace: I
wanted... Our time, unfortunately, is almost done. It went so quickly. This has
went fabulous. I wanted to share one quick anecdote...
Gina Samuels: Oh,
great.
EmbraceRace: ...
that so, I don't know, just opened things up for me with respect to transracial
adoption, this one particular person's experience, although, as she tells, it
definitely is not emblematic only of her experience. A short story, a woman,
Asian American, I think mixed race Asian, adopted by a white family becomes a
living organ donor for a distant cousin. They become very, very close, very,
very close, talking two or three times a day two years after. She has two young
children. He, the cousin, and his partner are very supportive, sending care
packages, super close because that's obviously an intense experience. And she
said that that experience and their relationship sort of lifted up for her this
concern that had been latent and intensified it, which was this: when my... She
said, "When my parents, my white parents, who are in their 70s, when they
die, will I still be a member of this family?"
Gina Samuels: Yeah.
Yeah, that's very common. That's very common. I just talked with a friend of
mine who's also adopted, and both of us talked about our parent dying, and we
felt like orphans. It makes no logical sense, but it's a strong emotional
feeling that kind of comes from your first abandonment. Yeah, very common, that
these are lifetime identities. You can have it all figured out and be a fancy
professor, and something can happen in your life, and all of a sudden, it comes
forward again for you to do some more identity work.
EmbraceRace: And I
wonder, Gina, in talking to her, I got the sense that what made this
relationship with this distant cousin to whom she donated an organ, part of
what made it so remarkable is, my sense was, that she didn't feel... She didn't
have anything approaching that relationship with other extended members of the
family. So it made it that much more pronounced. I wonder, is your sense
that... Is it just sort of a significant part of the experience of being a
transracial adoptee that, that aside, the nature of your relationships, the
intensity of your relationships with family notwithstanding, it's likely that
this is going to be a concern? Or is it fair to say that it might be greatly
exacerbated if, in fact, you don't have close ties with family members?
Gina Samuels: I
think regardless of your close ties, it's just an issue. It's just a thing. It
just is a fact of your beginning, and it doesn't have to be a devastating
thing. But the idea that being close to somebody undoes a trauma before is just
not... They're different things. They're related and tied to different parts of
you, and as you move through your life, they are like strings that get played
and get bubbled up for you. And it has nothing to do... My feeling that I was
an orphan had nothing to do with, and I don't think would have been made less
or more... I had a wonderful relationship with my mom. So it was, as it would
be for anybody to lose a parent who they are best friends with, it was
devastating. But as an extra layer of loss, when you recognize you've already
had a loss earlier that you are still kind of figuring out. So it isn't... I
don't think it's something that you can undo with love. It just is a part of...
It's an added part of who you are.
EmbraceRace: Mm-hmm. You just have to support your children in that feeling, let them
have the feeling.
Gina Miranda Samuels: Mm-hmm. Yeah,
this is normal.
EmbraceRace: Yeah,
yeah. That's great to single out. So, Gina, again, millions of questions here.
Thank you so much for this time and, everyone out there, thanks for your
questions. Gina, I said, provided a lot of resources, and some of these
questions that people had, some of them are more about talking to kids about
race in general, things that we really encourage you to go to EmbraceRace for.
And we'll certainly send Gina these questions.
Gina Miranda Samuels: Thanks.
EmbraceRace: We
won't have to answer all of them, but if there's something that's quick... So
thank you so much, everybody.
Gina Samuels: Thank
you.
EmbraceRace: Yeah,
professor and transracial adoptee, Gina Miranda Samuels, thank you, thank you,
thank you. I think you gave... The amount of insight and information you gave
in a very short time was amazing.
Thank
you, thank you, thank you.
Gina Miranda Samuels: Oh,
thank you.
EmbraceRace: Yeah,
we appreciate you.
Gina Samuels: Appreciate
you.
