Transracial Journeys

By Bear Howe

PART 2

This is part 2 of a two-part article written for the September issue of Transracial Journeys newsletter. Click here for Part 1: Walking Beside Our Children With Clarity and Confidence (Part 1)

(Part 1 explores the topics of personal work, allyship and parenting inside the home.)

4. Parenting Outside The Home

If we are the upholders of our children’s dignity, then we need to get really clear about the forces at play in society, in our communities, and in our families that will try to convince us that “being polite” is more important than untangling racism, that we should value comfort over discomfort. 

We should never share our kids’ stories, unless we are clear about who it is for. Early on in my parenting I often overshared about my kids. They were my everything, I just loved talking about them, and they have a complex history that was at times triggering for me and at times joyous for me. But, the central part of all of those situations was they were about me. I wasn’t being a good protector by giving out personal details about my kids to people who were simply curious and had no need to know them besides what really just amounts to gossip or entertainment.

Now, when I’m trying to figure out if a questioner is asking for too much personal information, I always ask myself this: Does answering this question directly benefit my child or the asker? Does answering this question protect my child’s dignity fully, or does it put cracks in it? Does my impulse to answer this question come from my need to not feel awkward or rude? What’s the worst thing that can happen if I’m perceived as rude? What’s the worst thing that can happen if my kids get to adulthood and realize people have been gossiping about them and our extended family through adoption their whole lives?

If sharing about your child will not directly benefit them, stop sharing it. It is their story. This includes photos on social media. They will be adults soon enough, and they deserve to have their stories intact to share themselves in the ways that they decide.

5. Connecting to Extended Family Through Adoption

The intersection of adoption is often ironically backseat to the transracial part of our family make-up. This is partially due to the history of erasure of extended biological family in adoption norms, which centered a narrative of a clean-slate “happy family built through adoption,” pushing all the messiness under the rug, and partially because for a lot of White people, our Black kids might be their first intimate access to Blackness. If that sounds icky, it’s because it is.

Our children have a whole other set of parents and extended families, whose choices, abilities, reputation and interactions with us will be held in our children’s nervous systems, minds and hearts until the day they leave this Earth. This constellation of people and how we engage is one of the major forces of influence on our children's inner self-worth and is as important as our own daily influence on them. It is important that our children see in action that we value our extended families through adoption because we truly care about them. In addition to this, because the American project of White supremacy that built our country’s systems still relies to this day on a cultural understanding of who is worthy and who is not based on how dark or light our skin is, among other intersects of identity, our care has even more implications discussed in No. 1B & 2.

6. Room for Grief and Hope at the Same Time

Our kids' separation from the parents who gave birth to them, their siblings and extended families will always be present for our children, and will show up how it shows up from one day and year to the next. It is our work to get in good relationship with hard feelings and keep space in our nervous systems and schedules for when our kids need a safe space to express their grief, confusion, questions and more. What we say, and allow others to say, about these extended families; how our kids are treated by these extended families; and how we interact with them will all travel inside our kids forever. 

It is important that our children can see that we care about who our extended families through adoption are, where they are, and what they're up to. Sometimes these realities are not all positive, but the truth still matters, and in age appropriate ways we need to teach them about the complexities of family, healthy boundaries and respect.

7. Interrupting

Growth mindset requires the practice of interruption—of our own thoughts, words and actions as we learn to do better, and of others in our communities when they step through our boundaries. Interruption is a complex skill. We’re trying to interrupt harmful behaviors while keeping important relationships and our own energy supplies safe. This is some of the hardest parts of being an effective parent and citizen because it requires us to be brave in new ways with people we know and love and work with and for. It requires that we may need to change who we are around if they can't learn to do better. And it requires that we can interrupt ourselves, too. It’s easy to go to a rally or a march or declare you are not a racist or a sexist and stand up to outright bigots. But most of our interactions in daily life are more subtle. Being an interrupter is the first part of being able to  teach new paradigms to our communities. And we need a new paradigm of how we see the major forces at play in our lives. We need to interrupt the status quo so much that it falls apart.

Parenting in this context is an enormous responsibility. The nuance of intersectional empowerment is at work in every daily interaction each of us has with the world. It takes a lot of work to maintain our integrity and show our values while bringing people into our new way of learning, interrupting, pivoting and showing up. Putting a few flags and yard signs up is not where this work stops. To be a real ally, we have to sacrifice our time and safety through concrete action.

Here are some examples:

• When was the last time you asked a friend or just yourself to stop talking crap about their body in front of your kid and explained that fat phobia or ageism is at play? If the people we are interrupting are important to us, we can offer some of our own vulnerability by opening up a conversation about how these things have caused harm to us, and the efforts we are making to interrupt ourselves when we catch ourselves thinking that way, too.

• When was the last time you interrupted a joke and explained that even though it was subtle there was ableism at play or that it objectified a whole gender into something to be consumed? We can offer up some of our own vulnerability and talk about our fear of being othered ourselves, or our fear of loneliness or being seen as less than, and that we are beginning to interrupt our own thoughts and words when we notice ourselves thinking similar things.

• When was the last time you interrupted a family member when they talked so broadly about the problems with welfare or immigration that they erased whole pieces of the historical record that explain how powerful countries systematically, intentionally created legislation that created the context in which those complex problems erupted in order to keep White supremacy alive? You can offer up your own fears around job scarcity or retirement, how exhausted you feel working so hard, and how you have been trying to interrupt your own anxious thoughts that cause you to oversimplify the matter by blaming a whole group of people for what is much more complex.

• What about a simple, “Aunt Linda, we aren’t going to answer personal questions like that, why don’t you tell us about your divorce from your first husband?” (Okay, so you don’t have to add that last bit if you don't want to, but I find a little humor in throwing personal questions back at people!)

• Are you keeping track of how often you are watching, reading, listening to and otherwise engaging with the voices of the global majority (non-white people), and adopted peoples’ voices to counter-balance the default we all get in our country and global community? Even for those of us who live in communities where representation is not as imbalanced, this comes into play because we all live global lives in our devices and who and what we choose to surround ourselves with.

There will be times when you have a gut feeling something is off about how someone is interacting with your child or family or about how something is written or framed in a group, and you can’t even put words to it in time to interrupt immediately—write those moments down so you can keep reflecting and looking for patterns. Practice what you could have said or done to end the conversation sooner or redirect or engage in education. Your voice will shake sometimes. You’ll feel absurd sometimes. You will get better at it. In art, I tell my students, “When you’re really stuck, go back to your references!” That applies here, too. We do not need to invent anything new to learn these skills because many generations of people have been doing it before us! We can read books, join a group, ask questions. When we give our time and mind-space to this work, and get comfortable with mistakes while engaging in targeted practice of these skills, we get better!

These questions aren’t meant to shame anyone who isn’t already doing these things, because remember Growth Mindset: “I’m not sure, let me learn more!” We’re all somewhere on this learning path that never ends, let’s link up and support each other like rollercoaster cars who are all going to the same place! If you have ever been in a situation where you knew you needed to interrupt, but you weren’t sure what and you froze, think about my friends question, “Who benefits by you staying silent?” Is your job to keep Aunt Linda comfortable, or to show your child that their dignity is important to you and that positive boundaries (and even a little humor) are available to them? Who benefits from you not causing a scene somewhere if you need to, and who benefits if you do cause that scene? Are you an ally to the status quo, or to your child and the justice, dignity and genuine active care that they need?

I realize you might be thinking—hold up I’m here to learn how to be a better transracial parent, not fix all this! Well, all this affects our kids, and our kids see how we interact with these things, and they internalize all of it! To be a better parent, we need to be getting better. All the internalized White supremacy we need to continue to dismantle in ourselves is the same that everyone in our lives (no matter their background) holds inside them. When we get better at interrupting it, we can also build skills for helping to explain it to those who are willing to grow, and develop more skills for creating better boundaries for those who are not. 

I know you might not have entered the role of parent with the goal of becoming a progressive activist, but it is my firm belief that every parent already is an activist of some kind, because kids are listening to and watching us as though we created the universe. As they get older and realize we are flawed, their nervous systems are still nonetheless tethered to that belief. They are watching and listening to us act everyday. If your life was a movie, what kind of character would be? What kind of character do you want to be?

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*When I use the term status quo, I’m referring to the project of White Supremacy, which inherently contains the intersections of racialized human value as well as how narrow and harmful concepts of gender, sexuality, nationality, class and ability are used to uphold harmful power structures. All of these forces are tangled up in each other, referring back to each other constantly like a pro sports team— this entanglement is called intersectionality.

**White supremacy is the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races. It also refers to the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races (merriam webster).This term is often used in the context of institutional and political legacies and continued use of practices that support maintaining wealth and power for White people over non-white people. In other words, one does not have to believe personally that White people are superior to other races to be participating in habits, behaviors, rules, norms, laws and systems that were created to explicitly keep White supremacy running, but that haven’t been updated fully yet.

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Bear Howe is a white adoptive TRJ parent.