Grafted Belongings: Identification in Autobiographical Narratives of African American Transracial Adoptees

This essay attends to cross-pollinations between traditional forms of African American life writing and the adoption search narrative in Jaiya John’s Black Baby White Hands and Catherine McKinley’s The Book of Sarahs, revealing how they challenge the common tangling of race and culture in public perceptions of the transracial adoptee’s identity.

Too often a perversion of caring for the world means that this care morphs into a violence based upon caring for these children, or for ones who will be like them. . . . For that, these children must more or less literally put their own lives on the line.

—Vikki Bell, Culture and Performance

Even though according to Albert E. Stone “nearly every segment of black life has found a voice through the art of personal history” since the publication of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn and Richard Wright’s Black Boy in the 1940s (171), narratives of African American adoptees raised by Caucasian families in the second half of the twentieth century remain relatively unknown to the public. Around twelve thousand transracial adoptions¹ of African American children that took place between 1948² and 1975 practically vanished from the public eye after the National Association of Black Social Workers’ “vehement stand” against transracial placements brought on a significant drop in their numbers (777). Protesting against the social perception of transracial adoption as a cure for racial divisions in American society, the NABSW raised concerns over the ability of white adoptive parents to provide transracial adoptees access to culturally transmitted identifications and social skills necessary for surviving in a racist society. Even though the ongoing public discussions of transracial adoptions informed the implementation of the Multiethnic Placement Act (1994),³ and there have been numerous studies of transracial adoptees’ adjustment over the decades following the boom in transracial placements, these inquiries have relied on a limited understanding of transracial adoptees’ experience—an understanding informed primarily by the need to determine the social value and viability of transracial adoption.⁴

In recent years, however, the often-neglected adoptees’ side of the story has found its way into representation through adult transracial adoptees’ narratives. These narratives have become available to the public as informal and research interviews (such as those included in Sandra Lee Patton’s important study Birthmarks) as well as the aestheticized published accounts of transracial adoptees’ experience that are the subject of this essay. Conversing with the reductionist understandings of transracial adoption as a universal good or a threat to a habitable identity, two adult African American transracial adoptees’ memoirs discussed below—Catherine E. McKinley’s The Book of Sarahs and Jaiya John’s Black Baby White Hands—question identification trajectories of kinship and race that are widely perceived as natural by bringing attention to common un-differentiation of culture and race in public perceptions of the transracial adoptee’s identity. A comparison of these two narratives will reveal how definitions of “whiteness” and “blackness” are complicated in the life writing of African American transracial adoptees, who expose the dependence of their identity formation simultaneously on essentialism and the performative/discursive practices lodged in the politics and economies of American kinship, American cultural imaginaries shaped by racial formations, and pan-Africanism.

Through the practice of life writing, Catherine E. McKinley and Jaiya John seek to restore their private histories in the public memory as they speak of growing up in white adoptive families, searching for a racial identity, reuniting with their birth parents, and coming to terms with genealogies that straddle both sides of the color line. Among other topics, these adoptee-authors explore possibilities for black/white kinship; limits to cultural acceptance of their hybrid subjectivities; legitimacy of their white, African American, and African identifications; and the consequences of being biracial in the United States. The aesthetically formalized autobiographical adoption narratives (re)produce and question representations of the transracial adoptee’s identity that resonate not only with American kinship ideals and established public perceptions of adoption but also with “narrative paradigms, stylistic and linguistic practices—which had to have been...