Beate asked:
"...do you feel like talking about the challenges of raising a transracial family specifically in a Midwestern college town?
Okay.
Let's imagine social life as a series of concentric circles. Let's say the outermost of the circles is people you see at the grocery store, the next ring is people who live in your neighborhood, then people you see at work and know casually, then people from more intimate places (for me that would include church and my new mother's group) then there are the people you'd call close friends, then people you'd call family.
In our current life, the grocery store ring is mixed, racially, probably about 70/30 white/black. But that is only if you count the workers at the store (mostly Black) and only one of the three stores I go to. It's the big box cheap store. I also go to a smaller, independently owned health food store where the mix is closer to 85/15 white/Black (and the Black part is almost exclusively shoppers, not employees who tend to be hippy student-types).
In the neighborhood ring, it depends. We live on what is literally the transition block, really, between a mostly white, mostly middle-class, mostly owner-occupied neighborhood and what is a mostly Black, mostly working-class, mostly rental neighborhood. So if I turn the stroller in one direction, I will encounter about a 10/90 white/Black ratio as I walk down the street and if I turn the other it's more 50/50. We live about three blocks from a nice-sized park with a playground and fountain and though it is in the white direction, it attracts kids from all over the area. It is used as a play space by the mostly white preschool kids from the church across the street and as a PE space for the mostly Black high school kids a block away. So when we go there, it can be 50/50 or it can tilt in one direction or the other depending on who's around at the time.
When it comes to the work ring, Cole does a lot of work for and with the African American Studies department, so she has lots of professional acquaintances and a couple closer friends from work who are Black, which is a natural way things have fallen for both she and I for years, based on our areas of study. While I don't "see" the students I teach online, they are about 90% Black, as I've been teaching African American literature for an institution that draws a lot of its students from the same population I taught in the D.C. public high school. So when we do professional things we are sometimes in a 50/50 or majority Black group of people. But Cole works in other departments as well, and one she recently left had only one Black member of the faculty--strongly recruited in fact, by Cole--and he was their first ever in the department's history. So it's not like "A Different World" or anything at the U. over here. I imagine folks here who don't "do" African American work could pretty easily spend a lot of time on campus without ever talking to a Black colleague.
Then there are the closer social circles of acquaintances like church and the mom's group. Well. There are only two Episcopal churches in this town and one (sadly the one with a 15 minute later service and only three blocks from my home) has exaclty zero Black people in the congregation from what I've been able to ascertain in about three total visits. But they have this bulletin board with polaroids of "our church family" and it's solidly white. I've never taken Nat there and probably never will. It's not my favorite church in other ways too, but it's not totally evil or anything. Just not exactly my cup of tea. The church I do take Nat to (and where she was baptized) is slightly better on the People of Color to white people ratio, but I'd say it's around 15% nonwhite. Most of those are Black--some African American, some Afro-Carribean, some African--but some are South Asian or South American. Here, I compromise. There isn't a Black church in town where I feel comfortable theologically and politically and as a lesbian all together. And those are actually pretty darn important to me when it comes to church. If I couldn't find them in a blend I felt comfortable with, I'd probably skip church altogether. My hope is that by the time Nat is school-aged, we'll be living somewhere with more churches to choose from. I can think of three, off the top of my head, in D.C. that are majority Black, where I'd be perfectly thrilled to attend. Here, I compromise with the knowledge that few though they are, the Black members of my church are high-profile. They serve in leadership roles that put them in the eye of the congregation. So they sort of over-represent, if you will.
As for the mom's group, I don't know for a fact, but I don't think there is a single Black mom in the group. When we go to playgroups, though the kids from the group tend to be white, we are often in public parks and...
hey, funny story:
Last time I went to one of these playgroups in a public park, I chatted and all with the moms that came, but it so happened that a Black woman with an in-home daycare and about 6 little (Black) kids just Nat's age were all there (at the park, not with the group) too. So I ended up spending a lot of time playing with those kids (as did Nat) and talking to the woman caring for them about our family. I think the other moms from the group I was supposedly with thought I was just that much weirder as a result of this dissident behavior. But anyhow, it wasn't just race, but age. Those little ones were right with Nat developmentally and she had a great time hanging with them.
But really, they are all super nice people and I'm making some friends, but the moms' group is not the place to get your racial diversity around here.
Now for close friends: I'd say that if we have ten close friends, three of them are African American. But this is tricky for me, because close friends and family really overlap a lot in my world and in that case, I'd have to add Uncle Wayne, Nat's god father, who is Afro-Carribean-American (a recent citizen in fact!). Also, Cole has a couple of colleagues whom I've met plenty but don't know super well, who I think she'd call close friends and they are Black men (one African, one Afro-Carribean-British). Few of our close friends live near by, so when it comes to Nat's daily life, these folks aren't around constatnly, but they are important people who will persist in her life over time. (And the ones who do live close by are super busy and we don't see them often enough, you know who you are!!!)
Nat has been spending Friday afternoons with an immigrant family from Ethiopia (as I mentioned to you all earlier). The mom in the family, being just a bit younger than my own mom, has decided that Nat will have to be her grandbaby stand-in since her eldest (and married) son is not delivering the kids yet. Her 17 year-old daughter (who is the official babysitter) is just about Nat's favorite person besides Uncle David, or her moms, and the dad is usually home when Nat is there too, and she has him all charmed as well. Nat hasn't noticed racial difference yet. I don't know if she'll notice it earlier than most kids (when I taught preschool, it seemed the 2 year-old class didn't notice race or gender differences, but the 3 year-old class was usually starting to), but I'm glad that whenever she does, she'll look up and see at least some of her critical caregivers look like her.
As far as blood family goes, Cole and I both come from red-neck hillbilly stock from way back. Which means heaven only knows what our racial ancestry truly is. Certainly, our grandparents' generation would have sworn on a stack of KJV's to their white racial purity, but as a scholar of nineteenth century U.S. race issues, I can safely say that wouldn't amount to a hill of beans. My parents grew up in the same county where Nat's first mother's mother was raised. We're probably related one way or another way back there somewhere. But white. We all present white. With all the complex history of nonsense and downright evil that entails. The family that we actually engage with in real relationships are all into struggling with and learning about the baggage of that. But they are indeed what they are.
I won't lie to you, I'd rather we lived in a large city, on a coast--okay the east coast--okay, Washington, D.C.--where I imagined for many years raising my children and even raising Black children. (Which is another story, but suffice it to say I have had fostering or adoption in mind for a while and in D.C. that pretty much means having transracial fostering or adoption in mind.) But given that we are stuck here on the wind-bitten plains, I think we do okay. And we are always on the look out for ways to do better.
But here's something to keep in mind if you're a white person thinking about transracial adoption. This social makeup in our lives didn't happen over night. Most of it didn't happen in response to transracial adoption. Rather, to the contrary, we decided we could handle transracial adoption because of the racial circumstances of our lives. Cole chose to live here 13 years ago and she chose to live here because at that time, it was not the transitional block, but still part of the mixed-income, more Black, less white neighborhood and that's the kind of place she felt comfortable and at home after years of living in majority Black neighborhoods in LA during graduate school, for example. And the fact that we both studied different areas of U.S. culture that nonetheless involved a lot of Black/white race history meant we bumped into and thus made friends with Black people a long time ago.
I'm not saying that if you have zero racial diversity in your life, you shouldn't adopt transracially. But I am saying this kind of conscious race thinking preceeded our decision to adopt and if you didn't have it before you adopted, well, it might be a steep learning curve. We of course, continue to learn about the complexity of race in America every single day. Having Nat in the family teaches us stuff we'd have never learned otherwise and we're grateful for the opportunity to learn it. As she gets older, no doubt the challenges will get stickier. I worry a lot about basic freudian identification issues, for example. I know it's common for small children to wish they looked like their parents. So I am already laying awake nights fretting about how to drum it into her that she sure as heck doesn't want to look like me because she's ten times more gorgeous. And other things of course. It's just not easy to be Black in America. But I do think it's an incredible gift and I hope and pray we can raise her to really understand that.
Questions?
