Family Extends
On my patriotic leanings:
I'd rather live in a country that bankrupts itself to help people who cannot meet their own needs than one that grows rich on the backs of those very same people. I'd rather live in a country that seeks justice than one that is only concerned with what it deserves. I'd rather have less so that others have enough than have more and cause others to go without.
***
On racism:
I taught a humanities course that focused on race in America several years ago in Milwaukee, a place that has been referred to as the second most segregated city in the United States. About halfway through the term, in the middle of a discussion of the writing of James Baldwin, one of my students leaned back in her chair and sighed.
You know, racism is only a problem because we keep bringing it up, she said. If we’d just stop talking about it, we’d see it’s not a problem anymore.
The girl next to her shook her head. I used to think that way until my dad told me about what he goes through being black, she said. I guess I just haven’t seen it as much because my mom’s white and people don’t assume I’m black too.
The first girl stared at her for a full minute after the conversation moved on, replaying everything she’d said about race that semester, if I had to guess what she was doing. I can’t recall her saying anything else aloud for the rest of the term. Her retreat into silence still grieves me.
On a related note, I was recently told, anonymously, by a student in my world literature class that I need to “stop white shaming” my students. Weird given that I am, in fact, white.
Make of those two stories what you will.
***
People ask me about adoption pretty regularly. Sometimes they want to hear my family’s story. Sometimes they want to talk about being a transracial family, though they rarely possess the term transracial to describe us. Sometimes they want to ask questions about blackness they wouldn’t think to ask a black person. Sometimes they want to ask questions about adoption they shouldn’t say outside their heads. Sometimes they want to ask if I think other people should adopt, which is so often code for asking whether of not they should. Sometimes they want to pin a medal on my chest I didn’t ask for and don’t think I deserve. Sometimes they want to accuse me of some kind of racially or nationally or religiously or socioeconomically privileged agenda in our choice to adopt. Sometimes they want me to speak for adoptive families I am not a part of. Sometimes they want me to make our adoption a bumper sticker of affirmation.
They never ask me those questions about my biological children. I hope it occurs to them that my daughter realizes this, even as I’m pretty sure it does not.