Should You Consider Adopting a Child of Another Race or Ethnicity?

Should you adopt a child of a different race? What things should you consider? Join our conversation with Dr. Gina Samuels, an adult transracial adoptee and a Professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago. She is also the Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. Her scholarly interests include transracial adoption and mixed-race and multiethnic identity formation. We are honored to have Dr. Samuels as the Chair of the Creating a Family Board.

In this episode, we cover:

• If you are a White parent, are there different issues you need to consider depending on the race of the child you adopt?
• Some families prefer to adopt a bi-racial child rather than a child who is all Black or all Latinx. What are the issues to consider?
• Is there a difference between transracial and transcultural adoption?
• What does it take to raise a child to have a healthy self and racial identity? How do they differ? 
• Unconscious overlap between self and racial identity for White people.
• What are some of the issues parents should think about to determine if they are a family that should adopt across racial or ethnic lines? 
• What should parents be prepared to do in order to help their children develop a healthy sense of self?
• Adoption is a family affair, so how should prospective adoptive parents prepare their extended family members for the adoption of a child of a different race or culture?
• How do you protect your child from family members who may not approve or are racist?
• What to do if you have someone in your family that you fear will not be accepting or will not treat your child fairly or is a racist?
• How do you find role models that racially mirror your child? 
• Politic of transracial adoption in minority communities. 
• What does the research show on how transracially adopted children are doing?
• What issues may come up with open adoption when adopting across racial lines?
• Preparation for transracial adoption goes beyond hair care; hair and skin care are important. What should parents know?

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Dawn Davenport  0:00  
This is Creating a Family. Talk about foster, adoptive and kinship care. Welcome back to our regular listeners. I truly mean that we would not exist without you guys. And a special welcome to our new listeners. We hope that you will become a regular so stick around. I'm Dawn Davenport. I am the host of this show as well as the director of the nonprofit creating a family.org Today, we're going to be talking about, should you consider adopting a child of another race or ethnicity? We will be talking today with Dr Gina Samuels, who is an adult transracial adoptee and a professor at the crown Family School of Social Work, policy and practice at the University of Chicago. She is also a faculty director of the Center for the Study of Race, politics and culture at the University of Chicago. Her scholarly interests include transracial adoption, mixed race and multi ethnic identity formation. We are also honored to have Dr Samuels as the chair of the creating a family board. Welcome Dr Samuels to creating a family.

Unknown Speaker  1:07  
Thanks. Dawn, it's great to be here.

Dawn Davenport  1:09  
So we're talking today about families who may be considering trans racial adoption. So if you are a white parent, are there different issues you need to consider depending on the race of the child you are going or considering adopting. I

Speaker 1  1:27  
would say yes and yes and no. I think you know to ask yourself, what is it about transracial adoption that you imagine? How many other families do you know who have done that, or parents who have been through that, that you have maybe talked to? What are you worried about, and what are you assuming? And so I think there are different assumptions that, just generally in society, that we have about how different racialized groups experience race, experience racism, what's the big issue for them? And I think this comes to a head mostly with regard to Asian kids and biracial kids for whom, I think a lot of white people think we don't really experience the same amount of racism, perhaps as people probably automatically assume that maybe black people do, and that just is not true. And so I think a lot of the ways in which white parents or prospective parents understand how race and racialization operate for different communities, can really show up in their parenting, and what they imagine they have to prepare their kid for, and what they think they might not have to prepare their kid for, and therefore the experience or difficulties or ease with which that child then is prepared for going out into a world where they'll be racialized.

Dawn Davenport  2:43  
Is there a difference between trans racial adoption and trans cultural adoption?

Speaker 1  2:50  
Yeah, I would think yes, because those words are different. So even though, in us ways of talking, we oftentimes mix and match things like race, culture, ethnicity, nationality. And so there's a sloppiness with which we, you know, oftentimes I'll be asked, like, What's your nationality? I'm like, American citizen. We are, all of us citizens, and all of our nationality can be American, but we all are different with regard to our cultures and with regard to our ethnicities and with regard to our race identities. And so getting really clear about like nearly everyone here who has been here past two generations is probably multi ethnic. Most white people are multi ethnic. Certainly nearly all African Americans here whose families have been impacted by legacies of enslavement are multi ethnic, and likely multi racial. And so just how we think about how race and culture are not the same thing, nor are the same thing as ethnicity has shows up also in parenting. So I think for a lot of black people, we think about race, and for Asians and Latinos or Latinx populations, even Native Americans, we think in terms of culture. And so all of us have a race, all of us have a cultural orientation, all of us have ethnicity, certainly as part of our backgrounds. And so there are differences, because it shapes then what we prepare people for, what we think people need. You know, culture is about language and foods and esthetic and what you find funny and just kind of your view of the world. And race is not that thing. Race is something that we've created to divide people up based on appearance, but it's something also that based on a person's appearance, you are stigmatized for you can be separately stigmatized for culture. You could grow up saying you're black but have no connection to black culture. You could grow up saying you're Chinese, but you have no connection to Chinese culture. So these things are very, very, very, very different, and operate always in our families, in our adoptions, and then also in terms of how we experience the world through a racial versus a cultural lens. So that certainly is then also true in adoption. Yeah.

Dawn Davenport  4:59  
Steve, let me interrupt shortly to ask, did you know that we have a podcast every Sunday, a different podcast every Sunday called weekend wisdom, where we answer your questions. Please send in your questions, and this is a short form podcast, well in five minutes or there about attempt to answer your question. So send us your questions at info, at creating a family.org. Most parents would say that they're hoping to raise a child to have a healthy self and racial identity. How do they differ our self identity versus our racial identity? Seems like there would be a fair amount of overlap as well.

Speaker 1  5:42  
I thought, I think for many people of color, there's a lot of overlap. I think for a lot of white people, there is an unconscious overlap. But certainly for you know, seeing yourself, race is a one part of that, just like gender is a part sexuality is a part class, religion, region, these are all parts of how we are located in the world, and therefore, then how we experience ourselves and how other people experience us, what's a possibility for us. And so I would hope that most parents come to understand that for people of color to be racialized is a huge part that is put on us that's not voluntary, and that is a part of how oftentimes we see our larger selves, sometimes in not so good ways, that much of the stereotypes around many of the stereotypes around race, have prescribed understandings of who your self is. You know, racist ways of sort of understanding that if you're black, you're supposed to know how to dance, or if you're Asian, you're supposed to be good at math, all these kinds of stereotypes that we essentialize speak to not just what your race means, but also who you are as a person and your capacities. And even though we know that is wholly scientifically untrue, many people still believe these things and hold you to these expectations. And so society

Dawn Davenport  7:02  
believes these things sometimes totally, and that influences what we believe,

Speaker 1  7:06  
right? And so then you have people going around thinking, not only am I maybe not Asian enough, black enough, Latinx enough, but like there's something wrong with me as a broader person, not just my race or not just my culture, but that as a human being, I have this deficit because of how other people are interpreting my appearance.

Dawn Davenport  7:28  
You mentioned that white people, and in this case, parents, there is an overlap between a white person's self identity and racial identity, but it's unconscious. What do you mean by that.

Speaker 1  7:40  
So I think part of you know, living in a society that centers and privileges whiteness is that one of the privileges of it is that you don't have to think about it. The whole world uses white people, white skin, white esthetic as the default. Princesses are just white. Kings, queens are just white. Fairies are white people. There's the all the futuristic kind of portrayals of where we're going in the future are predominantly white. And so it's not brought to your attention all the time in the same way as is for those of us who are not white or who are in bodies that are not racialized as white. And so if you ask your average every day, not academic person who hasn't been invited to consider this a lot of times, how that will show up as white people say, Well, I don't think I, you know, I just am normal. It's like, yeah, that's the point, though. Just normal. Like, what the what are the rest of us? Not abnormal? And so it's an insidious part of white supremacy that what's endemic to it is that white people get to operate and move through the world, wholly unconscious to the ways in which the whole entire world is structured, that they are the default normal for everything. Much in the way that you know, the male body has oftentimes been the default way of talking about medical circumstances and diseases and all these kinds of things we do this, not just with race. So I think that that's a that's a blind spot for a lot of white people, because their whole life has given them a disability to be conscious to the whole rest of the way them, which the world operates, for an increasing majority of people, I think one of the biggest challenges for those of us who operate in this space, to try to work with white parents and just white practitioners, or white people generally, to really sort of convince people that there is this other world and so that part of that unconsciousness is also an over generalization, that that normal is true for everyone, that that's relevant to everybody in it. Why can't you just not make race important like I do, and it's like, well, but part of white supremacy is that I don't get to do that you do. And so it's this weird sort of circular logic that you have to break through with many white parents and just white people, often many who are very well intentioned and would not identify themselves as white supremacy. This, that we all operate in this world, and that white people have been harmed by that, by the ways in which their childhoods and developmental circumstances and their environments have not called attention to, the daily ways in which they are, at best, not harmed and possibly advantaged, quite probably in unknown ways even to them just because of the skin they're in. And

Dawn Davenport  10:22  
why is this important for a white parent who is considering adopting a child of color, why is it important for them to realize that they're unconscious of how race plays out in their own life?

Speaker 1  10:34  
Because they're raising a child for whom their experiences are relevant, and they're raising a child for whom that child's race is going to constantly be brought to their attention. It is constantly going to be a feature of their life, and that is actually going to potentially bring harm. And so if you're unaware of that, you put your child out in a world that is going to experience, a world that is not always a safe place where you are not entitled to safety, where you are not entitled to a lot of the privileges that I think white people take for granted. You do not get to be an individual judged on your merits. And so it's actually, I would argue, a form of neglect, of parental neglect, to not consciously think about, How do I prepare my child in the same way as we you know, in different periods of our society have done stranger danger, and how do you, you know, protect your child from other harms that any parent would want to protect them from. That racialized trauma and racism is another kind of harm, and it's real, whether a white person or parent has ever seen it, ever experienced it. It is real, and it happens to all of us. It happens way younger than I think a lot white parents expect it to happen from very close up, oftentimes from our own relatives and friends and pastors and all kinds of places that are really close up. And if you're not ready and haven't prepared your child for it, the hurt is a lot deeper. It's going to hurt anyway. You can't prevent it, but there's ways in which, then, if you've not prepared your child, they're out there doing that by themselves, without your protection, which I would imagine most parents don't want to have happen.

Dawn Davenport  12:15  
If you are enjoying this podcast, you will love a free guide that we have at creating a family called strengthening and supporting your trans racial adoptee. You can get this guide by going to Bitly slash trans racial guide. That's B, I T, dot, l, y slash all one word together. Trans racial guide. It is a terrific resource, and I think you won't really like it, so check it out. What are some of the issues that parents should think about to determine if they're the right family that should adopt across racial or ethnic lines? Yeah, yeah, I think,

Speaker 1  12:52  
and I think that's hard because it's different for all families, but I would start with you know, like, why do you want to do this, what about you and your life and your lived experience suggests that you have the resources and the capacities to raise a child who does have an entirely different racialized experience than you. And I don't think that means that the answer is always that you don't, or just because you're white, you don't but I think being willing to ask some of these hard questions of yourself, asking some of your friends what they think of you, your child, should not be the first whatever in your life. I oftentimes say, you know, so if you're looking around and you see that your church or your social situations and not I'm talking not about like who your barista is at Starbucks, or who is the you know person who is your doorman or woman in your apartment, but rather, like you're really close friends, or the people that you would call if something really awful happened, or the people that you call when something really great happens, if There is no diversity or really limited diversity in that friendship group, that might be a little bit of a flag for me, and that doesn't mean absolutely not, but that means that you know your child is going to enter into a social circumstance where they're going to be the only and that's a really hard life. And so if you are somebody who lives a pretty white existence if you do live out wherever, like I do in North Carolina, in my cabin, you might want to think about what would that be like for a little kid to be there? What will that be like for a teenager to go to that high school? And if some of the answers you're getting is like, wow, they would be one of two, one of three, one of four, then I would say maybe now's not the right time. It doesn't mean never, but now's, you know, to do that kind of assessment, I think is really, really important. If you feel like your family is going to be really reticent to embracing a child of color, that's a big deal to have a grandparent that won't acknowledge your child or be harmful. Means that then you're adopting not only a child of a different race that's going to have this as an issue that they're going to have to work through, and when they explain why they're dragging around white parents instead of parents that look like them. Now you're also have to make a decision about what you want your relationship to be with your own mother, your own father, your own brothers or sisters, your aunties and uncles, etc. So I I just think there's a really serious and sober assessment that needs to happen that is a downer when you're excited about being a parent, and it's not the thing that most people want to do, but I do think I would argue with any parenting you should be doing this, but certainly and especially adopting across race,

Dawn Davenport  15:37  
and I'm assuming that just because there are more bipoc children available for adoption. Is not alone that the right answer as to why you want to do this? No, that's not

Speaker 1  15:50  
the reason that that goes into kind of the white supremacist white savior I'm going to save and rescue. And then oftentimes, is more about the person who's considering adoption, rather than what it really is going to mean for this child, and so most of the children in foster care go back home to their parents. So that's a narrative that I think lives as a marker for excusing a thoughtful and careful decision. And even if it was true, it still doesn't preclude doing some really serious auditing, racial, ethnic and cultural auditing of your family as to whether or not you are that person who should be contributing to that or helping to you know, ameliorate that issue. And

Dawn Davenport  16:30  
the same would be said for domestic infant adoption. Yeah, absolutely. So What should parents be prepared to do in order to help their kids be develop a healthy sense of self and a sense of racial identity, as we've already mentioned, those two are intertwined. So you've talked about some of the questions that that parents should ask themselves to determine if they should be considering, what should they be prepared to do? If they think, Okay, I think I can do this, but I'm going to need to make some changes. Yeah,

Speaker 1  17:04  
well, a big one like, be prepared to move. Be prepared to move where you live now may be great and you may love it be really great for you, but it may not be really the best neighborhood or city or town for a child of color, and no, not all people can just move like that. So that could then loop you back to, am I the right person? Are we the right family right now in our life, where, where our jobs are, or whatever the situation is, but you don't want to get into a pickle where you know, of course, as a baby, if you're adopting infant, it's not an issue where you live, but in a couple years, it's going to be perhaps. And so how open are you to making that drastic of a move in terms of, literally, where you live, to kind of recalibrate now you're a multiracial family, and so where will be the most safe and nurturing space. And I would argue there really isn't any safe or totally nurturing space for multiracial families. There aren't multiracial sides of town and all that kind of stuff. But I think there are better places than others for kids to grow up, to see mirrors of themselves, to have access to all kinds of family configurations. So I would say, be prepared to at least talk about and think about, could you move and if you can't, then to think about like, what would it mean to send our kids to a different school than what we think is a good school? Like, how do we define a good school? You know, I think this is a big one with a lot of white people, and as an academic, it's a big one for a lot of people of middle class and upper middle class of any race is, how do you define a good school beyond just academics, and the number one thing that will tank your kids, even if they're really smart and academically inclined, is having a really crappy experience at school with all the social and emotional stuff that happens at school. And so how might you as a transracial adoptive family, if you're especially not able to completely move to a different neighborhood, perhaps need to consider a very different school than you otherwise would, so that that school contest can play a role as part of your child's community and access to kids teachers diverse, not just their own, but like ideally, wide spectrum of Folks, so that your child can have that as a lived experience. But I think the school thing and the moving, the residential thing, which, of course, are also connected if you're attending public school, are really interconnected churches, social groups, your friendship group. How much are you willing to expand your own friendship group so that your kid sees you having friendships and relationships with people on your own, with adults who look like your kid, and that it's not just you know, offerings to your kid as like here's a whatever for you to see, you know, but that these are like genuine friendships that you have with people that are meaningful for you as a. Parent, and so I just think pretty much everything is on the table. This is true when you parent, but it's also another lens that you look through in terms of race and racial safety and racial nurturing and cultural nurturing.

Dawn Davenport  20:13  
But then the more you diversify your life, the more likely you are to form friends of your child's ethnicity or race, absolutely, because that's how we find our friends, also seeking out professionals that you patronize, your doctor, your dentist, your dry cleaner, your whatever, the people that you do business with, making sure that that is also diverse. Absolutely,

Speaker 1  20:41  
the art in your home, if you're Christian, the sort of our ornaments that you put on the tree, the ways you talk about television shows, what you say is beautiful, who you go up to the store to ask questions when you're lost, who you naturally talk to as strangers out in your community, like there are just a billion gazillion things that if you're not doing these things naturally, you should ask yourself, why? And then think about, how do you shift? How do you really shift to operate more fully in the world with a fuller spectrum of people?

Dawn Davenport  21:15  
You mentioned this already, but adoption is a family affair, so how should a prospective adoptive parent prepare their extended family members for the adoption of a child of a different race or culture? And I guess a subsection of that question would be, how do we know if our extended family is willing and able to be a good grandparent, a good aunt, a good great aunt or whatever uncle for this child. So those are two separate questions. Let's start with the second one, which is, how do we know if our family? Sometimes we do know, yeah,

Speaker 1  21:52  
but sometimes it part of that white privilege stuff, of like you may have not really paid attention in the same way.

Dawn Davenport  21:58  
Oh, that's just Uncle Joe.

Speaker 1  22:01  
He just being ridiculous. He just says these things shouldn't take seriously.

Dawn Davenport  22:06  
Exactly nobody, you know, takes them really. He's not really gonna put on a, you know, a white sheet. Honestly, he's not, you know, that type of thing. Yeah. He's just joking that type of thing, yep. And

Speaker 1  22:17  
I think you know some of it is, some people really do know. And then you don't need to ask or have these conversations. You should trust your gut about this. If you think already that it is, then you're probably right. But if you really don't know, that's also part of kind of white privilege of that you haven't had to know, and your safety and your comfort hasn't been in survival hasn't required you to take seriously Uncle Joe, because Uncle Joe isn't going to do anything to you. You're white, but what is Uncle Joe gonna say and do in your child's presence? And so I think there's some of these things that you can just do as a scan if you're partnered, trust me when I say, your partner may be really clear, a little more clear about your family, and you may be a little clearer about partners family. So be open to that conversation. And if you're not partnered, or you just, you know, both of you are kind of like, oh, I don't know, then talk with them. Talk with them and say we were thinking about this. And obviously it's our decision, you know, it's my decision as a parent to adopt or not. So it's not my parents decision, but talk with them about, like, how would you feel about that? How would their friends feel about it, etc. It's just this huge conversation that I think it's important to have. And then I think with that, it's important to take people seriously. If you adopt and they're like, Oh no, it'd be really great, because I think these things change. If you adopt as a baby, it's different to, you know, have a little baby that's brown in the family, to then have an adolescent that is brown in the family that then is different when that adolescent becomes an adult and has potentially their own children and their own dating choices. I think a lot of people don't think about like, Oh, we're actually shifting the racial composition of our family going forward into generations, potentially if they have children. You know, so as much as you can, at least in the short term, have these conversations with parents, your parents, your extended family, your whatever, and then keep your ears open in a way that you didn't before. Don't dump that on your child to tell you that they don't like the teasing. Assume that that's not good, and be as protective of your child around racial jokes and race teasing and all that kind of racist stuff as you would if they called your child fat, ugly, stupid or anything else, that you would not feel okay for a person, any person, to call your child that joking about race is as hurtful, if not more hurtful because of the legacy that that has, and your child is watching you as to whether or not you are a safe person with regard to such a huge part of your life, and so you may need to be prepared to have a very different relationship with family members, which is really hard. But, you know, talk to adults who have parents who chose somebody else other than them as a child, once you become a parent, you can't choose other people over your kid. Can't. And when you do, there's consequences for both that child and the relationship that you have with that child going forward into their lives. And kids know whether or not their parent is okay to come and tell that they were hurt or harmed with regard to anything really, kids know,

Dawn Davenport  25:16  
yeah, it's something that I hear from transracial adoptive parents is the realization that they have to stand up to a family member that perhaps they've not stood up to before because it's not accepted to well in our family, would be mouth off, you know, I don't want a kid to mouth off to me, that type of thing, so it's not acceptable, and they have to be prepared to stand up to Uncle Joe, or, even worse, their own dad and say, You know what? That joke's not funny and it's not okay. I can't have you do that around my kid. And that doesn't go over well very often, and it's hard to do if that's not been a part of how you have interacted with your extended family or your parents?

Speaker 1  26:01  
Yes, absolutely. And there are times where this gets so hard that sometimes it could be helpful to see a therapist and work on what that issue is, because that issue is probably much larger than just about speaking up about race. You know, like oftentimes, the dynamics are much deeper and bigger and more extensive than just saying to your parent or whatever, brother or sister, whoever, don't say that in front of my kid. I don't like that, you know? And so, yeah, I think those are hard dynamics. It can sometimes be helpful to go seek professional assistance to think through, how do you operate in this family? What are the boundaries that you place with your family? When do you say this in front of your child and then maybe follow up later with the parent also and say, Look, you know, I'm not trying to embarrass you. This isn't about you. I'm trying to protect my child, and this isn't okay. And I know we've done this in our family before. We this is how Uncle Joe is, but it's, it's now not okay. And every time this happens, I'm going to speak up. I'm gonna speak up. And so, you know, it's not just a one and done thing. It's a kind of recalibrating all of our relationships and our family to make space, safe space for a kid of color to be in a white family that has not had that in them before. It so and

Dawn Davenport  27:18  
didn't ask for it, and didn't ask for family. Did not ask. This is uncomfortable for some extended family members, it's I didn't ask for this, and you're the one who did it. So and

Speaker 1  27:31  
so then you got to be prepared for, okay, you didn't. And so then what's the ultimate you know, if you get in that, there certainly have been families I know that they don't go to Christmas holidays. It's gotten that extreme, you know, and hopefully most families can work it out, and there are professionals that can help families to work this out. It's not immediate. These things are not fast, but in the meantime, while you're working it out, how do you make sure your child is not having to work that out with the family and be the target of harm like so what are you going to do in the meantime? What's the plan for what you're going to do in the meantime so your child doesn't have to sit there and take racial abuse while Uncle Joe is learning to be less racist, at least in front of your child

Dawn Davenport  28:13  
in front of you. You probably aren't going to fundamentally change, although sometimes, and this is not a reason to you shouldn't go in assuming this will happen. But I know so many occasions that people do change, it's all of a sudden, wait a minute, this is my grandchild. So the things that I've always thought this doesn't impact, this is not my kid, and my grandkid is not that way. My grandkid is quite a bit like me. And so it's not all bleak. In that sense, we do see people making changes. It's just that you can't give a guarantee.

Speaker 1  28:47  
No, you can't, and you have to insist that they change. So you also can't think that you can just do nothing, and it's going to magically, a light bulb is going to go off in grandma's head, and she's all of a sudden going to become multicultural like it takes work and vigilance, and in the meantime, as a parent, thinking through, how do I not ask my kid to be patient while grandma changes? It's

Dawn Davenport  29:10  
not the kid's responsibility to change. Grandma's responsibility

Speaker 1  29:14  
or to train the parents. That's not that kids responsibility to explain and justify that racism is happening. That's not your child's responsibility. And so I think you know, back to your question, like, who shouldn't? If you don't believe that racism is real, you absolutely should not be adopting the cross race. You just You shouldn't. If you, if you really do question that, that's going to be such an impediment to taking your child seriously. When they do come to you and say, this happens, that this is just probably not for you,

Dawn Davenport  29:41  
and that is true regardless of the race of the child you are adopting regardless, yeah, because I think that there is, we talked at the beginning, a belief that most people in the US would accept that black people are facing racism other probably people who don't believe that. But I think. There are a lot of people are more inclined to believe that. Yeah, are more inclined to believe that. But if you're adopting a Hispanic child or you're adopting an Asian child, those groups also they're the prejudices they face may be different. In fact, they probably are, but it's still impactful, absolutely. So how do you find as far as developing a healthy racial identity, we are told that our children need to have role models in their life that racially mirror them. How do we find role models that mirror our children? If that is so important,

Speaker 1  30:34  
yeah, yeah. Well, I think this goes back to the question of like, what are you prepared to change that this shouldn't be first, you adopt the kid, and then you go out shopping for people of color, you know, like, that's as a person of color, that's always offensive when people are like, Hey, will you come meet my kid? And I'm like, That's so weird. No, well,

Dawn Davenport  30:53  
yeah, will you be my friend? I need a black friend. Yeah. I

Speaker 1  30:57  
mean, it's just weird for everybody involved. It's especially weird for the kid. It's weird for the person of color, because it's like, okay, your kid isn't going to automatically like, like me, and, in fact, might reject me, because they're going to know what you're doing. Because this is all of a sudden, like some brown person that's come into their world for no reason whatsoever and doesn't even really know my parent. And so I think a better way of thinking about it is like, how are you committed to really shifting how, as a white person, you feel comfortable in spaces with a whole lot of different kinds of people, race, racial groups, ethnic groups, cultural groups, age groups, and that you know your kid as a kid who's going to be trans racially adopted now, needs to be able to kind of see mirrors in a whole bunch of communities, you know, like they're growing up, not in a family of color. So they need to be around and see adults who are trans racially adopted, and see that we turn out okay, that many of us are really all right. And, you know, be able to have elders that are adult trans racial adoptees to talk about, because that's the closest experience that they're going to have as a person of color to what their experience is like. They need to be able to see adults who are their racial ethnic group, but we're not trans racially adopted, so that they can get a sense of, oh, if I wasn't adopted, this might be somebody who I could have related to in terms of their family experience, and I might want to learn culturally things from them that my parents can't teach me. There can be all kinds of other ways in which your kid needs, you know, mirrors of same age, both of kids that are similar races, but also who are also trans, racially adopted. So I think it's just really blowing up this idea of, like, what are the mirrors? And there are, when you're trans racially adopted, there's like, a bazillion more mirrors that you need and of many versions, so that kids can also figure out, oh, I can be myself, and I am transracially adopted, and I am these races, and I have a variety of ways in which that could happen for me. And I think what parents oftentimes do is we, you know, have one black person here, one black person here, one Korean person here, and there's not a lot of versions of that for a young person. And so they're kind of like, well, I can't be this I'm not going to be this person. I don't really feel like I could be this person. And it creates all these unnecessary problems. And so I think parents need to think so much more diversely and complexly about what those mirrors are, and also present different versions of whiteness to their kid by being that themselves. You know, white people have the capacity not just stay in white bubbles and not stay in their comfort zones. And what does that look like for you? How willing are you to be the only in a place? How willing are you to not have to drop your I talked to somebody the other day, and they're like, oh, they they don't want me to drop them off at school, you know. And I said, Well, that's actually probably healthy. A, because they're a teenager, and all kids are kind of that way. But B, because they're trying to, they're trying to do their thing, you know, without you ruining it. And I think it's hard for white people to think that their presence anywhere could ruin anything, and so to recognize that, that for your kids, healthy racial identity, having a white parent is a liability

Dawn Davenport  34:16  
our transracially adopted children. I call it the umbrella. I didn't come up with that, but they're under the whiteness. They're under the umbrella of our family, yeah, and the circles when they're younger, the circles we walk in and we move about in. Everybody knows that's Billy. He's Dawn's kid. Yeah, he's Dawn's kid. But as our children start aging, then all of a sudden, they have a life outside of us, and it's really hard when you are thinking of adopting a baby or a toddler or even a preschooler to remember that, because you think, well, as long as I'm around, but you won't always be, because they start joining a sports team that does, you know, and then when they're young enough that you're still a part of it. But as they get older. Or you're not as much a part of everything, and especially when they go to college, and we hear of adoptees telling us that it's weird that they have pictures of their family, and then all of a sudden, and adoptees saying sometimes I don't want to explain. I don't want to be the transracial adopted kid, so I take the pictures of my family down from my dorm room, because when somebody sees it, they go, Oh, wait, who are those white people? Yeah. And then it just changes everything, yeah. And I don't want to have to deal with that right now, yeah.

Speaker 1  35:32  
And I think people got to be okay with that's that the moment of that is healthy now. That's not okay to stay forever, you know, in that space. But I think there's such politic in communities of color well everywhere about transracial adoption that it's hard to explain to somebody who's white how good that feels to be in a space of people of color and be accepted on your own terms as fully a person of color, and to want that and to want to have friendships with people that start from that place before you complicate it with you have this other story, I think is a healthy thing initially. I think there's many of us have gone through that, and I I just, I guess, I wanted parents to hear that there's aspects of that that are incredibly healthy, no matter how much that might hurt you're

Dawn Davenport  36:22  
not there to try not to take it personally. Yeah. Can you talk a little more about the politics of transracial adoption in minority communities? Yeah?

Speaker 1  36:32  
Well, you know, transracial adoption has explicitly been used to displace children of color out of communities of color, so particularly in the case of black people and in case of Native American people. And one might even argue in the case of international adoption that there's just a lot of harm that's happened by using adoption and out placing of children to resolve racial difference in our nation and to try to ameliorate that. And so those legacies of the use of children and removing of children and the lack of power and sanctity of a family's right of a community's right to protect their own family as a family unit and hold that together, has been so violated in our country by the use of adoption and the relationship of taking children out of homes, that that's a powerful understanding of what adoption is about. And when you are from one of those families, even if that is not specifically your story, even if the parent chose you as a, you know, as an open adoption and the biological parents chose you as the family they wanted their child to be a part of. You still have to be ready for now. You've become part of a intentional or unintentional community of people who wear the label of, you know, cultural genocide, displacement of children of color, etc. And so that oftentimes gets visited, not on the white parents involved, but on the kid. And so when you say you're trans, racially adopted, I mean, some of the things that I've been asked when I was much younger, you know, things like, Does your mom make you do the laundry for the family? And I'm like, Well, yeah, that's my chore, yes, but not because I'm a slave, you know, but because in my family, children aren't special and precious, and you're expected to, like, chip in and do the work. My extended family came from farming, and that was just the culture of it. But you know, the way that my black friends heard that was my sister and I are doing laundry for our white mother. Yeah, yeah. And so how do you argue that they're wrong in that without them seeing like you've been bamboozled and whitewashed into thinking that your enslavement in this family is something you do by choice? So I just, I think a lot of white people just have no sensitivity to all the spaces and places that we go and have to explain our families and both perform racial consciousness and awareness and talk about racism, and be able to talk about racism, and also hold this very intimate relationship that we have to whiteness, sometimes through our extended own extended families, biologically, for those of us who are mixed race, but also certainly from our adoptive families. And how do we, how do we hold these two realities in different communities, and how you talk about your family in ways that aren't, you know, naive

Dawn Davenport  39:32  
or perceived as naive, or perceived as naive? Yeah, let me pause here to remind you are to tell you, if you don't know about it to begin with, that we have 12 free courses supported by the jockey being Family Foundation, and they're on the creating a family online education center. They're one hour. They're self paced, so you take them on your own. You can get a certificate of completion if you need it. If you don't, you can just take. The course and learn something. The topics are all directly relevant for those who are actively parenting. I think you will love them. You can access them at Bitly slash J B F support. That's Bitly slash J B F support. So you are a researcher, and creating a family is certainly a research based organization. So what does the research show on how trans, racially adopted kids are doing?

Speaker 1  40:30  
Well, I think you know, some of this research is complicated by the fact that we have no way to track who all is adopted. So it's sort of in a possibility to do research in other ways that maybe a public health scientist might, or a sociologist might, or somebody who has access to demographic data, there's such diversity and how people become adopted that some of this is tracked. Some of this isn't race recording is very bad. So I just want to say that before I go spouting off about the research, to say that all of the research is done in the context of incredible limitations to really knowing even what the full universe of adoption looks like, how many transracial adoptions really are there? How many same race adoptions really are there? We actually don't know that exact number. So I just want to say that for your listeners, it's

Dawn Davenport  41:16  
amazing people don't believe me when I tell them, but we can make a guesstimate on just how many adoptions take place in the United States. We know from foster care, and we know from international and that's both of those are tracked. But for domestic infant, it is not. It is not.

Speaker 1  41:30  
And so if you're adopting domestically through a private agency, or you're adopting which is increasingly true independent of an agency, and it's just a brokering of it, of an adoption attorney, between a biological parent or biological parents and an adoptive parent, that that's not recorded anywhere, so we have no way of knowing, and that's a huge slice of the pie of adoption. So I just want people to know that as I'm talking about research, all of this is research that's been done on smaller samples of voluntary folks that are involved in adoption, either through being the adoptive parent or being the adopted child. There are really only two attempts at truly, truly national studies. One was the survey of adoptive parents that was done by Evan B Donaldson quite a while ago, and one that recently was launched by a colleague of mine, Holly McGinnis at VCU, who is attempting to do a national survey mapping adult adoptees, which is the first ever of its kind. Most studies of adoption stop in childhood, as though, somehow, when we, you know, are 18, we age out of adoption. And it's nice being all

Dawn Davenport  42:39  
the issues or anything completely gone are really gone.

Speaker 1  42:42  
And so I'm really excited to see what Holly's work renders, because I think it's a really important look at what does, what does adoption look like in your 50s, in your 60s, in your 70s. I think it's just going to provide some really important and critical insight. But what, here's what we know that there are some things for which adopted children look very much the same as children who are not particularly children who are adopted young and stay within that adaptive home, you know, in terms of school achievement and socializing and bonding with parents and All these other sort of basic child developmental outcomes that they oftentimes don't look much different. It is around these issues of identity, racial identity, depression, etc, that we start seeing some differences. So children who are adopted, whether trans racial or same race, have a higher incident of suicidal ideation, mental health, particularly internalizing behaviors.

Dawn Davenport  43:45  
And by internalizing, you mean depression, anxiety. What

Speaker 1  43:49  
I mean is like, rather than acting out and saying I'm mad and it would be externalizing. So getting your feelings out, externalizing behavior versus internalizing behavior, you stay quiet, you don't say anything. And that oftentimes leads to things like depression, eating disorders, that sort of thing, and ultimately, oftentimes is a precursor or associated with suicide. So there is a study that folks did outside the US that followed adoptees starting from birth. Most of that sample was children who have been adopted before the age of nine months, and even later in life, into their 20s, they exhibited a more than 30% higher rates, three times higher rate than non adopted persons for suicide. And this only started to level out in people's late adulthood, meaning, like age 35 3040, so that's a long time to be developing and experiencing mental health risk and suicide risk. That sort of debunk some of this. Adolescence is the only big time for which there's turbulence in a child's life, but that there's also for, I think, for adoptive people, as you intimated. Earlier, whether it's college or just leaving home, but that kind of emerging adult period of 18 to 25 is another period of time where, for many of us, that is their first time to really, actually experience a context outside of the bubble that their parents have beautifully orchestrated for them. And a lot of things happen, a lot of identity stuff, beautiful identity work can happen, and a lot of very hurtful identity work can happen. A lot of searches for biological families happen during that time, and unfortunately, there aren't a lot of supports for adopted people to go to, to be held during those during those times. And so that there's also a lot of turbulence that can happen in the adoptive family. So I think that's one thing that comes out. I think the other thing that comes out really clearly is that as much as has changed, I think around white parents who are adopting children of color, and that there are, you know, there's this podcast, there are other podcasts, people who have written, those of us who are adult adoptees, have written things and are writing memoirs and documentaries. So there's just so much more than there used to be even just 30 years ago. So there's just so much more material culture, camps, etc, that still the issues that continue to come up with every generation kind of the same. It's white parents not getting race rice, white parents waiting too long to talk to their kids about race, white parents being insecure about open adoptions and relationships with their cultures and communities of origin, or literally, their birth parents. It's like these same kind of issues. So I think that continues to be true. Crider, and I'm going to forget the other name, but there was a I cite this in some of my work. Often, they did a study on the Census about our transracial adoptive families. More like multiracial families? Are they more like white families in terms of the choices they make as to where they live and that sort of thing? And what they found is that out of all the different configurations of family, particularly white couples who had adopted Asian kids live in whiter places than even white people do for the same economic, socio economic rung. And so this just sort of race to whiteness continues among a big group, a substantial group of white parents, still, even despite what we know in research that would suggest that delaying, denying or distorting in some way, the centrality of race in a person of color's life is developmentally harmful. We have all kinds of research, even on not transracial updates, but just research on child development, that suggests that positive racial identity, parenting and racial socialization is critical for children of color. And that doesn't go away when a child is adopted by a white person, and if anything, it becomes more intense, it becomes more more important, even. And so I think research suggests that we still have not done an adequate job by transracial adoptees in finding policies and practices that ensure that the families that they're going to grow up with get that and are prepared to do that kind of parenting, on top of all the things that parents also have to be attuned to.

Dawn Davenport  48:09  
I was glad you raised the issue of openness and adoption, and you were saying it not specific to transracial you were saying in general, adoptive parents struggling with openness. But what issues may come up with open adoption When you adopt across racial lines,

Speaker 1  48:30  
I think some of the ways in which white folks might think about a black mother or a black father, you know, there's racism oftentimes as a part of that, which is different than maybe the narratives we might use for how a white person becomes pregnant and decides to adopt, and so I think there's a lot of fear sometimes about who those folks are, especially among adopters that don't have friends and connections with people of color from their child's communities, that racialization and racism, of ways in which they think about adults from their child's community of color oftentimes shadow how they understand that biological parent before they ever know that parent at all or know what they're so there's oftentimes this heightened conversation about fear of like the person coming into The house or doing something dangerous. And so that isn't always quite so pronounced and palpable, I think, in oftentimes white families who are adopting white children and open to openness. So I would say that's the biggest one in terms of just openness. And I think that's why some people find international adoption really attractive, because there's less of a possibility of that biological parent coming from nowhere and find, you know, there's a lot greater distance there. So the boundary is is bigger, and it feels a little more protected in terms of the roles that folks will have. And

Dawn Davenport  49:55  
in some ways it gets confused, because there's also very. Often a socio economic difference, a class difference between the adoptive family and the biological family. And that interplays as well, and it interplays with race as well. And I think one of the distinctions is that families oftentimes just don't they don't know families of color, they don't and so what seems alien to them is just actually cultural, or that's where their family that's common in that family. And this is particularly if you're having an ongoing which is what we hope for families, an ongoing relationship through openness, where as the child ages, there is more there's more interaction, and it is other, and it feels other, yeah, and you have to make the effort to not view other as bad. Other is different, yeah, because

Speaker 1  50:53  
this other created your child. Yes, you know, like we know this with regard to research of a divorce, that it is wildly harmful for parents to pathologize the other parent with their child. It's just incredibly devastatingly harmful no matter how awful this person was to be partnered with. It is damaging to that child to hear pejorative things said about one of their parents, and it is the same thing for an adoptive child to hear horrible things about the people that created them, that where they are from, who they are biologically tied to, related to whether they ever meet them at all. And so I think it would behoove us to use some of the research that we already have about how children grow up in healthy ways when they come from complex family structures, of separation, divorce, even when there's been no marriage, like how what are, what is healthy co parenting, and whether you ever have an open adoption, literally, or you're just able to be open about talking about this other parent who you will never meet, there are ways that you need to think from the child's perspective of this is the person that they are biologically related to and this child will internalize everything that you say about them as potentially this is who they really are, whether you say it that way or not. And so to have incredible thought and care about how you are framing you can think whatever you think, but like how you're framing this to your child, this is their heritage that you're talking about, and they're a biological parent, and it has a proximity to them that I think a lot of adoptive parents may not be as sensitive to as they should be. The

Dawn Davenport  52:29  
last thing I want to cover is hair care and skin care, and that preparation for transracial adoption goes way beyond hair and skin care. I think that sometimes we do focus, especially in the last 10 years, there's been a tremendous amount of focus on that, and I don't want to leave the impression that that is the only thing that one needs to consider when you're considering whether you're the right family to adopt across racial lines. However, hair and skin care are important, and I think they're often very important, particularly in the black community, yeah, and so we do need to talk about that. So what does hair and skin care mean within and perhaps within other racial communities as well, but certainly within the black community? What place does that have and what does that mean? What should parents, prospective adoptive parents know about that?

Speaker 1  53:22  
Yeah, well, it's another way in which people from communities of color judge you. You know, it's just kind of, by looking at your kid, they can tell whether or not you're doing a whole bunch of other stuff or not.

Dawn Davenport  53:33  
Do you mean judging adoptive parents, or you mean judging each other, judging the

Speaker 1  53:37  
adoptive parents. So, you know, it's like, you know, when I used to interview people early in my dissertation, one of the very number one things that the adults talked to me about was hair care and how embarrassing it was for them to run around and when they pass a black person, the black person would either say something about their hair to their parents or roll their eyes or shake their head like, here goes Another one. It's really considered a forum of physical neglect to not have your child. It'd be like in the white community, never washing your hair ever, you know

Dawn Davenport  54:11  
Well, having having tangled and tangled and batted up hair that you never brush. Matted up hair, yeah, just unkempt hair. Yeah? Grooming neglect.

Speaker 1  54:19  
It's just unexcusable, and particularly now where there's so many YouTube videos and pair products, even in Target, there's just no excuse for kids running around with what we might call jacked up hair. So a and if you don't know, go to a beauty salon, a black please, a black beauty salon, and have people teach you how to do basic stuff and take your child to to a professional it's sort of one of those things where it's a marker in the black community for all kinds of other cultural disconnections, and you probably have. So if you don't have the hair right, it's kind of like you probably are doing all kinds of other stuff, or not doing all kinds of other stuff. But yes, just doing hair is not sufficient. So it's sort of like it's. Of those things that you just should be doing. It's not even something we should be in this day and age, even talking about anymore, ever. In addition to that, thinking through like, you know, how are you exposing your kids to all kinds of ways in which they can be engaging and developing friendships and participating in culture like culture of origin shouldn't be something that's an event in your family where everybody loads in the car once a year to go to African World Fest, or once a year you go to culture camp, but then the rest of your existence is in white land. Like, that's just the that's so imbalanced, it should almost be like the opposite to actually counter. That's like, much is needed to counter all of the whiteness that we all get exposed to daily. So it's almost like you need to overdo whether your kid likes it or not, and it should be natural. It shouldn't be like an event that everybody has to do. It should just be how you every day, and not a conversation, but just how you know, I oftentimes liken this to religion, like if you're a particular religion, you don't wait till they're 18 to tell them, you know, you

Dawn Davenport  56:08  
also don't just do it at Christmas and Easter. Yes, it's

Speaker 1  56:10  
the same thing. If you expect that your child is going to have a relationship to this, then you have to do it like that much.

Dawn Davenport  56:20  
And going back to Hair Care, let me mention that it's also possible. There is so much emphasis now and the transracial adoption community on you got to get the hair right, yeah. But you can also go overboard, and I will use an example of a mom of a I think her daughter was in first grade, and she had elaborate braids and was spending a lot of time, and her daughter hated it, and it became a battle. And one of this was in our online support group, and one of the black moms in the group said, Well, have you thought about just doing simple braids with barrettes at the end? You know, it doesn't have to be so, I mean, her, her daughter's the first mom's daughter's hair was beautiful, but it was very time consuming, and the daughter hated it, yeah, so I assumed that she then just kind of moved to a much simpler the first mom said, but the problem is, I know that everybody is looking I my kid has to have better. Everything has to have, you know, we can't run around with clothes with a hole in the knee, right? Because people are going to judge me, yeah,

Speaker 1  57:23  
and, like, some of that is true. I mean, black parents do the same thing about you know, you have to look better and be better and be smarter and work twice as hard. So I think you know there is truth to that, that people are watching, and you do kind of have to be attuned to that. And black parents tell their kids I was raised my white mother made it very clear to me that I would not get second chances, that I was not going to be given the benefit of the doubt when I showed up somewhere. I needed to look a particular way, because people probably weren't going to take me seriously anyway, and especially wouldn't if I showed up presenting myself in a particular way. And yet, there's also a way in which over indulging that can make for a very highly anxious parenting style and make for a very unhealthy way of moving through the world. So I think it's a balance of knowing that and making some choices, but not overdoing because at the end of the day, you're going to be judged anyway, whether your kids hair is perfect and you got the best braids or whatever, like, you're already going to be judged anyway. So kind of pick your battles and figure out what, what areas you're going to just be the queen of braiding, or whatever it's going to be. If

Dawn Davenport  58:33  
your kid hates it, do simpler braids. Yeah, just

Speaker 1  58:35  
simple braids. How about that? Like, you know you're going to be perfect. You just, you know, just your kid has to have their hair combed. That's That's all.

Dawn Davenport  58:45  
Thank you so much. Dr Gina Samuels for being with us today to help us understand what families should consider if they're considering transracial adoption. We truly appreciate your expertise.

Unknown Speaker  58:55  
Absolutely happy to be here. Don

Dawn Davenport  58:59  
before you leave, let me say one last shout out to children's connection. They have been such a long term supporter of our nonprofit and a supporter of this show, they have just been wonderful for us. I want you to know about them. They are an adoption agency, providing services for domestic infant adoption, placing babies throughout the US. They also do home studies and post adoption support for families in Texas. You.