Rant
At the website, Love Isn’t Enough, there’s a post entitled “Race Is Not an Issue for the Young?”, in response to a CNN news story discussing transracial adoption and the public reaction to Sandra Bullock’s adoption of an African-American baby. The commentator at one point observes that transracial adoptees may experience confusion as children but grow up to say, “Thank goodness someone saved me!”, and the white psychologist being interviewed made statements that “adoption is colorblind,” “I think race should really only be examined if you’re over 40,” and that “I happen to have biracial children; they don’t self-identify as black or white.”
Here’s the comment I posted:
Although I could only get my laptop to stream part of this clip, I found the first half of it infuriating, on so many levels. I feel anger as I struggle to find the clarity to express what feels so wrong about several statements in the clip.
My husband and I are white. Our daughter, now 24, is Korean. (We also have a white son by birth.) If our daughter, as the commentator suggested an adult adoptee would, ever uttered the phrase “Oh, thank goodness, someone *saved* me!” I would be appalled, and convinced that I had done something wrong as a parent.
Our daughter’s adoption was not a “rescue” of some poor thing in need of being “saved.” It was a complicated negotiation to make the best of a tragic human situation by placing an infant whose young mother could not care for her and whose father didn’t know she’d been conceived with parents who dreamed of adopting her. The result is a family in which all of us are deeply blessed and enriched by having each other.
But all of us also recognize that our daughter’s adoption represents tremendous losses: of the family, culture, language, and country that should have been her birthright. We have all done well at holding onto all we can of her ethnic and cultural heritage (I grew up in South Korea and speak fluent Korean). We have supported her through stages of grieving and exploration. But none of this is the same as being raised Korean by her Korean family.
We have understood connection to Korea and education about racism – our own and our daughter’s as well as her white brother’s – to be as essential to her health and wellbeing as a vaccination or teaching her to brush her teeth. She is simply our *daughter* – not our “Korean daughter” – but we celebrate her Koreanness as we do all of the particular aspects of her singular personhood; to overlook it would be to deny one of the gifts of who she is, a disrespectful diminishment of the complexity of her whole self. It would also represent abdication of one of our chief responsibilities as parents: to equip our children to live and thrive in the larger world – as it is, not as we wish it would be.
The white psychologist’s characterization that adoption is “colorblind” and that “race should only examined if you’re over 40” is chilling. Imagine what happened every time her biracial children noticed race: their mother, who didn’t think it was a necessary topic for children, must have deflected, denied, and suppressed their curiosity, their questions and their confusion. (Given young children’s intuitive ability to pick up unspoken cues, the curiosity, questions and confusions may have never even been voiced.) Of course her children don’t identify as either white or black – racial identity is formed by the mirrors that people hold up for you when you are young. If their mother’s statements are indicative of how she raised them, the mirror in which her children saw themselves reflected rendered their race invisible.
The ignorance represented by this approach is an expression of unconscious white supremacy. (It’s also a handy dodge: avoiding the examination of race spares us the discomfort and sometimes real pain of acknowledging white racism and white privilege.) Race invisibility is an aspect of white conditioning; because we are the majority and the dominant group, we see ourselves as the norm, essentially as raceless. One way white supremacy operates is when we assume that what is true for us – the racial “pass” – applies to everyone else as well.
Because this psychologist, as a white woman, has the privilege of ignoring race without cost to herself, she presumes the same for her children, as if her willful obtuseness could give them a cloak of invisibility.
But whiteness with all its power can’t erase the race of transracially adopted children. Just because their mother refuses to acknowledge the reality of her children’s skin color and racially-defined features doesn’t mean society will be so blind. And her children have been given no tools to stand strong in their knowledge of who they truly are, no connection to the black people from whom they were birthed, no claim to that part of their cultural and racial legacy. With no affirmation of the beauty and significance of their blackness and their whiteness, as well as every other aspect of their identities, they will face uninformed and undefended a world that is all too quick to label and diminish them based on race alone.
Read More
Catching Up
A short break from the focus on white conditioning to share some recent happenings in my publishing life:
1. NEW BOOK!
Read More
What Will You Be, Sara Mee? by Kate Aver Avraham, was released in February from Charlesbridge. In it, six-year-old Korean-American Chong tells the story of his baby sister’s tol, the traditional celebration of a child’s first birthday.
I got a lot of help with visual details from my friends here in Portland, Won-Bae and Ip-bun Park of Sun Oriental Market, and their son Se-jong and his wife Ji-yun, whose daughter Chae-hee was the model for Sara Mee. Yesterday I took copies of the book to the Parks. Chae-Hee, now three years old, instantly recognized her baby self , and her six-year-old brother Tae-soo clasped the book to his chest, claiming the book as his own.
I’ll be mailing out a copy this week to my friend Noah in Michigan, who was the model for Chong. In June of 2008 I spent a week with his family in Flushing, MI, while presenting at the Korean Culture Camp of Eastern Michigan.
Last month, the book was awarded the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold Seal Book Award.
2. After Gandhi: One Hundred Years of Nonviolent Resistance (Charlesbridge 2009), which my son Perry and I wrote and I illustrated, has been getting a lot of wonderful recognition, including:
– CCBC Choices 2010 – Historical People, Places,
and Events
– The Maine Literary Book Award, Children’s/Young Adult Category, from Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance.
3. Earlier this month, Catherine Anderson,
wonderful writer, poet, mother, teacher, friend and co-explorer of the world of race, whiteness, and multiracial families, who posts at her blog, “Mama C and the Boys,” gave me a fabulous gift – a Beautiful Blogger Award!
I am belatedly completing her challenge to post this. The next part of my challenge is to find other bloggers to award it to. I’m on the lookout.
Connecting the Dots
In 1960, our family moved to South Korea, a country struggling to recover from a war that had devastated and divided the peninsula just seven years before.
Every time I walked the city streets or went to the market, I saw children my age, dressed in rags, begging. Some families, refugees from the north, were still living in mountain caves on the outskirts of the city. Nearly everyone I met had less than our family did. (Over the next twenty years, we witnessed South Korea’s rise, like a phoenix from the ashes of war, to become one of the world’s economic superpowers, but that’s another story.)
Read More
My parents were actively engaged in trying to relieve suffering through delivering medical care and supporting women’s groups. In fifth and sixth grade, I spent many after-school hours playing with the orphan babies who were patients at the hospital where my father worked.
Fast forward to my arrival at an American college campus, straight from the rural health care project my father directed on a remote Korean island. Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I was carrying some extra baggage along with my trunks.
I had deep and loving relationships with many individual Koreans and by then knew many who were well-to-do, but my early childhood experiences had ingrained within me the idea that the task of a privileged white American was to be a helper. The little I’d been exposed to of the experiences of African-Americans – mostly slavery, civil rights, and Martin Luther King – only confirmed my unconscious impulse to respond to people of color by trying to help.
It wasn’t hostile, it wasn’t hateful, but it was still a way of viewing people of color as less than. It made me see Them primarily as victims and myself as some kind of caretaker, which is a “benign” form of white supremacy. It caused me to behave oddly, especially around African-Americans: self-conscious, careful, effortful, earnest, overcompensating – twisting myself into a pretzel instead of just being myself. (Because of my comfort level and sense of belonging with Koreans, I was much more relaxed with Asian Americans.) I spent a great deal of time earnestly trying to prove how good I was, that I wasn’t one of those white people. None of this was any help at all in developing equitable, authentic bonds across race.
Fortunately, I had also gained some strengths from my upbringing, including awareness of race and knowing that cross-racial relationships were essential to me. So in spite of all the baggage, I developed friendships with black students and began learning. Watching myself repeatedly behaving in peculiar ways gradually brought me to awareness of the unconscious stuff, how it was in my way, and what I could do about it.
I share all this only as an illustration: In a similar manner to the work done by Adult Children of Alcoholics and other groups, we can examine the experiences of our upbringing to uncover the patterns we have formed around race. We can become witnesses of our own implicit attitudes, behaviors and actions, without judging ourselves, and ask, “Why in the world do I think/feel/do that?”
Once we see the patterns, we are freed to make conscious choices.
On the Path
Years and years ago, I asked a dear friend what I should read to get a true picture of the history of his people, the Lakota. He recommended Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
It’s more than twenty years later and I still haven’t read that book. Why not? Fear. Fear of knowing something unbearable.
I’ve tried to live up to a standard I’ve given myself: If they can bear to live through it, the least I can do is dare to listen to the story. But sometimes I fail to meet my own standards.
That’s the place to start on this path, the place where I duck, flinch, shrink or cower. Where I feel defensive. Where I resist. Where I have a thousand explanations, justifications, arguments and rationalizations.
The process of liberation from conditioned responses to race (or any other aspect of living and relating) is a path, not a destination. The first step can be paying attention. Discovering where I am, where the patterns I’ve learned are limiting my life (lots of tools for this coming up in the next few weeks). Looking at what I don’t want to see, what I can’t bear to feel.
The next step is to make one move, into the discomfort.
Pick up a copy of the book and read it.
Read More
Be the Change
I write this phrase every time I autograph a copy of After Gandhi. But Gandhi’s statement, “Be the change you want to see in the world,” is so often quoted that it’s hard to hear it.
What does it actually mean to be the change?
My early image of what it meant to fight racism was to work with people of color, being “helpful.” Realizing – with some reluctance – that the real work was in the white community, I tried to be a righteous warrior, raising awareness of how whites are implicated in institutional and personal racism. With people of color, I worked hard to prove that I wasn’t one of those white people.
None of this was very effective.
Finally, I was guided to turn the spotlight inward, on myself. What was my experience of being white? How has racism impacted and shaped me? I began a lifelong exploration of the veiled realm of my own unspoken thoughts, attitudes and associations.
The more I investigate, the more I discover, and the more I feel small knots loosening, little gummed-up places unsticking, muddied thoughts clarifying. The process creates a little more room to breathe, to see, and to be. As the unconscious becomes visible, I’m empowered to act based on my conscious choices, in line with my intention. Bit by bit, I am transforming myself. In subtle but significant ways, it has transformed my relationships, both same- and cross-race.
There’s another Gandhi quote that addresses this:
“The only devils in our world are those running around in our own hearts, and that’s where all our battles ought to be fought.”
I think both quotes are simple statements of reality: For things to change, we must change.