Parenting Across Race

A new essay I wrote,"Raising Yunhee," on transracial adoption and parenting across race, has just been published at Korean American Story.

"Adopting Yunhee was one journey; raising her was another. My own passion for Korea, which became my second homeland and the source of my second culture and second language, made me determined to give Yunhee a sense of her birth legacy. But how does a white American, even one who grew up in Korea, raise a Korean American - on an island in Maine?"

 

Yunhee was the model for Brianna in Brianna, Jamaica and the Dance of Spring

 The essay examines how we attempted to give our daughter not just a sense of where she came from, but also encouragement to voice her experience of growing up as an American of color, and the challenge that posed for us as white parents:

"Talking about race gave Yunhee permission and language to unpack her own observations and experiences, and a structure for understanding the nuances of racial identity in America. At various ages and stages, it helped her find her voice to express her grief, her rage, her confusion (at age six, "Why couldn't somebody in Korea take care of me?")... It was essential for me not just to convey that all her thoughts and feelings were welcome, but also to become aware enough of the filter of my own white and non-adopted privilege that I could respect Yunhee's authority in naming realities as she perceived them. I had to work to not inadvertently discount her observations and difficulties just because I wished they weren't true."

Korean American Story is building a fine and useful archive of narratives across the spectrum of Korean American identity, a significant contribution to exploring what it means to be American.
Go take a look.

Voices of Adoption

Anyone connected to adoption from any angle should check out the first issue of a brand-new magazine, The Adoption Constellation. It will be a quarterly print publication from Adoption Mosaic, a website which seeks "to create a safe space where adoption community members can voice their experience, dialogue about issues, and learn from one another."

I'm honored to have been invited to adapt my "White Mind" columns, directly addressing white adoptive parents of children of color. Many of the articles in the magazine touch on aspects of transracial adoption.

(Sketch of young dancers at a New Year's celebration sponsored by the Chinese & American Friendship Association of Maine, 2010)

Becoming the parent of a child of color is often (and should be!) a radicalizing experience of seeing the significance of race and racism, and of becoming committed to racial justice and awareness. Such families are often on the front lines of the discussion about the importance of diversity in children's books, seeking stories in which our children can see themselves reflected.

Dreams 2

Our daughter, the bride. photo by Angela Tran

Dreams Coming True

This week I'm transported with love, joy and wonder: Our daughter Yunhee married her beloved Josh (ours, too) on July 31. The night before we held a Korean ceremony complete with traditional wedding hanbok and ritual bows.

Tomorrow I arrive at Camp Sejong in northwestern New Jersey, where I'm the creative writing teacher for the Korean-born campers, ages 7-14, from both adoptive and Korean-American families. (For an account of my first year at Sejong in 2007, see "Hong Kil Dong Goes to Camp".)

We'll be creating vision maps, titled "A Bridge of Dreams," imagining their lives in the future and how they'll pull from the strengths of both their cultures. I'll be using Yunhee's wedding photos as an example of what that can look like.

Transracial Adoption & Discussions About Race

A few of our daughter Yunhee's thoughts (comment #11) in response to the same clip (see previous post) on not discussing race with transracially adopted children:

I struggled with identity, and the idea of why I was put up for adoption. I went through phases of sadness, anger, and every other emotion along the way. The idea of my parents telling me not to worry about it, because no one cares about race anymore is unfathomable! That would have destroyed me.

My parents were understanding, supportive and ALWAYS willing to talk about what I was feeling. That is how I moved through each phase into something healthier and happier. Not by them ignoring my questions, emotions, and pain. They nurtured both cultures in my life, and let me explore both. I have since found a happy balance between my two cultures, and I claim both.

...Children are very observant. It is why we watch our language and behaviors around them, because they will pick it up. Children are curious, observant and very, very, blunt. A child will notice if they are not the same race as their family, and even if they don’t notice, some other person will, and then that becomes the mirror for the child. And the people in the world are not always the kindest.

At one point I was at a holiday party with my parents and a woman saw me, and then stated to her friend loudly, “Yes, you have to be white to be American.” Those mirrors are there, they are real, and they are painful.

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.

Privilege & Pain Avoidance

Our daughter Yunhee was adopted from Korea as an infant, joining a white American mother, father and older brother, who was born into our family. (One of our oft repeated family jokes is the story of her middle school classmate who asked me, "Does Yunhee know she's adopted?")

Race was an often daily topic in our family. I'd had fifteen years of anti-racism education by the time Yunhee came home, not to mention growing up in Korea as a highly visible person of racial difference, so I was certainly comfortable addressing the topic. But I remember on so many occasions, when Yunhee expressed intense emotion about the subject (often as the result of a comment by a classmate), and even as I might be giving her my full, sympathetic attention, I was aware of a little voice in my head asking, "Can it really be that bad?"

Of course, as Yunhee's mother, I had many tangled emotions and longings as I witnessed her distress. I didn't want my child to hurt - ever, for any reason. I wanted her to learn appropriate social customs, which include containing and channeling the expression of emotion in consideration of others. But that little voice was a result of my own conditioning as a white American: racially, I have had it easy.

Without my having done anything but be born with this color of skin, I have automatically (and usually unconsciously) been granted a measure of status, advantage and influence. I have grown up surrounded by social structures, media, interactions and institutions which reinforce the centrality of my racial identity, so much so that I don't even notice them. I have never endured a steady barrage of negation about my race. In general, the experience of being white in the U.S. is comfortable, unchallenged, affirmed and taken for granted. It's no wonder that I don't notice it, and no wonder if I can't imagine what it would be like to be a person of color in this society.

Privilege plays out in many concrete ways, some explored here, but it's also pervasive as a state of mind. This diminishing of the experiences of people of color, as expressed by them, is one of its more insidious aspects. There are so many versions of this avoidance:

"Why are you playing the race card?"

"I understand your concerns, but I have a hard time hearing you when you're so angry."

"I know there are some problems, but we elected Barack Obama!"

In other words, "Please reframe that so that I can stay comfortable."

***

Because it can be really tricky trying to see my own invisible patterns, I find it useful to borrow some awareness from other aspects of my life. I can get a clue about privilege in thinking of my experience as a self-employed artist.

I'm often made aware of the fact that people with salaried positions, benefits and health insurance don't seem to be able to imagine what it's like to live without these. (I'm fortunate to currently have health insurance through my husband's job, but have gone for years without it when we were both self-employed.) I notice that salaried people frequently make requests for unremunerated services or time that show that they're completely unaware of what it's like not to have a steady income. For instance, teachers' conferences expect presenters to pay for the privilege of attending, assuming, I guess, the support of a school district to cover registration and travel. Most writers and illustrators don't have the extra resources for this, unless they have other jobs as well. The feeling I often have is that salaried people can't even imagine what the questions are that those of us who are self-employed have to ask all the time.

(This is not to suggest that self-employed people are the targets of anything, but merely to point out an example of privilege in the oblivion of people who are salaried about the lives of people who are not.)

***

Once I've identified that part of my avoidance around race, particularly my discomfort in listening to people of color express their feelings about being mistreated, is a privilege I no longer want to participate in, I've made a start.

The next part is a human one. Open my heart, and let it break.

And keep listening.