Considering a Transracial Adoption?

You are waiting to adopt a child and your heart is soaring like an eagle. If you are a white person and if you are living in a predominately white community, the moment you make the decision to adopt a child of color it's time to build a multi racial family lifestyle. While it’s important to till a love of the ethnicity and the people our children are born from, we don’t always have local access, and a lot of living gets postponed. Any ethnic community you feel drawn towards is the right place to begin. 

 Get off your beaten path. Become the minority. Locate the ethnic community and neighborhood you most want to absorb. Find the city library. Go back week after week. Keep an eye on the bulletin boards. Attend community events in the area on a regular basis, and allow yourself to soak up images and impressions. Is there a barber, and a market in an ethnic neighborhood you could begin to frequent? If you are ignored, show kindness. Being ignored is what it often feels like to be a person of color. 

How then do we go deeper? By participating regularly and steadily. The difference between embracing and exploiting a culture and its people is that when we are authentic we feel ethnicity in our bones; it feels calm, safe, centering. It’s listening process, more about seeing and feeling, than it is about thinking. Let the changes take place inside of you. Don’t look for success and don’t quit. That’s how a multi racial lifestyle is built. Some of the best things in life take a long time to achieve. 

How do I know? My earliest memories encircle me; watching Grandma sew beads on Uncle Elmer’s deer skin leggings. Realizing I’m white and Indian and what that meant. Listen to my mother and you’ll hear stories about me in diapers moving to the heartbeat of the drum. Talk to me and I’ll tell you that fusing a multiracial way of feeling and being does not happen with a few social outings; it’s a life process, a series of small steps gained over years. It is challenging at times, and requires us to use the same perseverance we needed in the adoption process that brought our children to us. 

I believe the single most significant thing we’ve done is the comment to racial diversity my husband and I made early on in our relationship. The moment we decided to become parents we began working towards building the kind of multiracial lifestyle we wanted our children to be surrounded with. This along with the prep work and preparing we began the moment we realized that it wasn’t going to be easy. 

My husband remembers how uncomfortable he felt when he first met me and found himself the only white man among American Indians. I spent my growing up years in a mixed race family and in a mixed race community in Los Angeles, and my husband had grown up in an all-white family in an all white community. Blending our lives allowed us to realize we each needed to give ourselves the opportunity to be in frequent situations where we would be in the minority race and culture. 

We built new friendships within our local Korean community around a campfire, maintained them by hosting gatherings in our home. These relationships grew over late night bowls of naengmyon noodles and were strengthened when we let down our guard and allowed ourselves to be absorbed, supported when our teenaged son was diagnosed, then died from a brain tumor. Anglers of every race, in every culture, will always find each other, thus my husband continues to find his connecting point on the ocean, fishing, grieving, and making friends in the process. 

We had three kids, two adopted transracially. Our children’s childhood ran through our fingers like water as we lifted our hand to capture a moment with the camera. Turn around; they are adults, miles and miles on their own. Will the foundation we built support them on their journey in an integrated world? 

Our culture and our identity comes first from the family and community we are raised in. And while those who are white cannot ever know what it feels like to be a person of color, the choice can be made to live diversely, with the freedom to ingest the beliefs that shape the perceptions of groups of people whose racial heritage is not the same as our own. 

But is ethnicity important only for people of color, or for those who have adopted transracially? I believe ALL families benefit from a wide scope of ethnic diversity. When we spend most of our time in wholly white enclaves with little or no access to mingle within ethnic communities, or are too threatened by its values to explore it further, we are coached to feel safest within the confines of a Caucasian boundary, and then we develop all sorts of silly notions that will keep us locked even further away. 

Life is not orderly. It’s a bit scary at first to traverse into unexplored racially diverse territory, but it’s not impossible. Wherever we are is a good place to begin, starting in this moment— stretch. 

First published in Adoption Today. Reprinted by Tapestry Books and in a number of other venues. 

Copyright © 2004 Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

Race, Ethnicity and My Face

As a mixed-blood woman of Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German descent, I came of age understanding that I'm not totally a Native person, and I’m not a white person. I'm a border woman dwelling between the boundaries. 

I have light skin, light enough that some people think I’m white. My dad, a Native man, and my mother, a white woman, had me when they were teenagers in 1953. 

I grew up in Compton, California. The family next door was Bolivian and they loved me like a daughter. My best friend was Japanese and Mexican. Still, when I was 10 years-old, my dad sat me down to have “the talk” with me about race. He told me about how to navigate the streets, about how to stay safe. He also wanted to make sure I understood that in order to be accepted by certain white people it mattered who your friends were. 

By that point, however, I already knew. 

I had discovered that when I went to the houses of my white friends after school I needed to be aware of how I was holding myself at all times. I learned to stay alert and watch for clues: sometimes there might be an older brother who pulled his eyes in an upward slant and said something mean about Chinese people; or a father that casually spouted racial slurs at people of color, and made fun of Indians. When this happened, I knew I had to make an excuse to go home and I’d never go back. Sometimes I’d make up stories when asked about my darker skinned, mixed-race family in order to protect them. But if the mothers of my white friends didn’t feel satisfied with my answers, I wouldn’t be allowed to stay at their houses for long. 

Things would be different when I went over to the houses of my friends of color. Their mothers would always take me in without hesitation. And if there was a grandmother at home who spoke English with an accent, or didn’t speak English at all I could usually be certain they wouldn’t ask me if my daddy had a job. In their homes, I felt safe. 

As a child I had things all figured out. But when I reached my late teens and early twenties it became more complicated. 

Hanging out with my friends of color meant witnessing them get treated poorly and face multiple instances of discrimination by white people. Being out with my white friends, however, meant that we could expect to be given preferential treatment no matter where we went. When I began dating and went out with Native boys or other boys of color in my community, I was considered “white trash” by many white Americans. I could even expect to have a white man point to my date and ask me what I thought I was doing being with the likes of someone like him. But when I dated the first guy that was white, I was allowed to be white by association and had access to the privileges of white America because of that. In stores or restaurants, we were always served or seated first, before people of color. 

When we acted up or got into mischief in public, it was laughed off as opposed to being taken seriously with the assumption that we were up to no good like it is for teens of color. My early adulthood was charged with decisions to make: Should I mention my Native identity? Should I let white people I don’t know well and may not ever want to become close friends with, assume I’m white? Keep my racial identity private from employers and others who would discriminate against me if they knew I’m a mixed-blood Native American woman.With dark skinned family members and dark skin friends, and with strong ties to Native America and firmly rooted within a community of color. 

At age twenty-three, I found myself employed full-time in a company that was predominantly white. So white, that my intuition told me if my boss had known I was anything other than white, I would have probably not been hired. My white co-workers seemed to only accept people of color who adhered to white social norms and didn’t challenge their biases. They could not accept how vastly different the culture values, thought processes, and social norms of ethnic people were from white America. 

I wear the face of a woman with light skin privilege. While keenly aware of the advantage it has given me over my friends and family who are not able to pass, I always make the decision to disclose my Native identity. I never try to pass. Passing would mean turning my back on my Native family, my family and friends of color, and my community and my identity. 

Following my experiences working in a predominantly-white company at 23, I began to make sure that at each interview I had for a new job, I’d take a “racial temperature check” to ensure that people of color who looked like my friends and family were always welcomed. And I’d proudly list all the positions I’ve held within American Indian and Asian-American organizations on my resume. 

Later on in my life, I married a man who was white and we had a daughter together, before adopting two Korean children. Two of our kids had apparent ethnic features and their black hair and darker skin often caused people to mistakenly assume they were Native American. I knew that blending into white society would never be an option for them. So it was always a toss on whether they would be able to ride on the wings of my white privilege, or be subject to the racism that ruled America when they were out on their own. 

In turn, I did my best to connect them with their Korean roots by becoming deeply involved with the Korean community in our town. For more than four decades my heart and my soul was shaped by my connection to the Korean community for which I am grateful to be a part of. 

When people who do not know me look at my face, what they cannot see is that I have soul-deep ties to Korean ethnicity, and that my mother, who is white, grew up in a mixed-race family, and that I have cousins who are white mixed with Black and Mexican and Asian.

Now, in my 70s, my gray hair and wrinkled face reveal the many years I have lived. Yet what has not changed is what most cannot see: I am a border woman. Borders are set up to define or to separate, but I am neither part white, nor part Native. My blood is a mix between two worlds, Native and white merging together to form a third: a mixed-blood dwelling between the boundaries. 

First published in Santa Clara Review, vol 108 / issue 01. 

Copyright © Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.