Nurturing Anger: Race, Affect, and Transracial Adoption

My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.

—Audre Lorde

My daughter is two months old in the first picture taken of us together. She is lying on the bed in our railroad apartment in Jersey City, nestled into a dip made by the weight of her body on the duvet. I am crouched at her feet, leaning over, smiling into her face. She looks up at me. Her brown-pear-colored skin darkening into an acorn-hued sheen at her temples where it meets her loose black curls. I am tickling her stomach through a too-big pink shirt with a picture of a blue-frosted, cherry-topped pink cupcake on its front. The shirt her interim care provider dressed her in that morning. The shirt that creased into folds under her birth mother’s hands when she placed her baby onto my lap that afternoon.

My fingers curl over the cupcake shirt, red at the knuckles, skin yellow white and freckled. My other hand touches my daughter’s. Hers is balled into a fist; brown fingers pressed against my flat, pink palm.

One late spring day three months later, I dress my daughter in camouflage pants and a pink hoodie and we take our first trip on the ferry from Jersey City to Manhattan. I scan the grass near the waterfront at Battery Park for a place to sit so that my daughter can explore and play. I spot some room next to a circle of mothers and babies. These mothers have yellow-blonde highlights and manicured fingers. My daughter sees one of the pink-faced babies. A boy dressed in a striped shirt; his red hat casts a shadow over his blue eyes. Her arms reach outward. She topples over.

“Say hi to the baby,” I say.

The baby’s mother turns. She doesn’t look at me, but her eyes, blue like mine, glance at my daughter. Her hair, yellowish and wavy like mine, flicks as she shakes her head. With one of her hands, pink skinned and blue veined like mine, she scoops her baby away. She turns her back, shoulders squared, her body now a barrier.

Anger seeps into me, beginning at my fingertips, tensing the muscles in my hands, spiraling into my upper arms, spilling into a tight band across my chest, stuck in the space between my collarbone and my throat: This white mother did not want the velvet-textured, sweet-and-sour-smelling brown skin of my daughter’s hand to touch her son’s pillowy-white, red-finger-tipped hand. This white mother did not want my black daughter to touch her white son.

The anger I feel toward this white mother coagulates, immovable and untranslatable because it is not mine. My not-quite-six-month-old daughter cannot talk or walk, name her emotions, or comprehend the relationship between herself and the people around her, but today she has been judged, rejected, and excluded because of the color of her skin. I am angry but I am not the object of this white woman’s racism. My anger belongs to my daughter.

My daughter is five now and the anger I experienced then continues to provoke questions: What will my daughter feel the first time she consciously experiences racism? And every time after that first time? Will she express or repress her feelings? If she is angry, will her anger hurt her? Or will others hurt her because of her anger? Will she be afraid of her anger or, as Lorde exhorts, will she learn from it? How can my daughter experience anger as a nurturing emotion—one that will help her to understand her identity as a black child with a white mother—and as an emotion that will enable her to navigate and respond to racism?

Prompted by these questions, in this essay I examine anger and consider its ramifications for black girls who are adopted by white mothers. I use memoirs by two transracially adopted women—Scottish poet Jackie Kay’s (2011) Red Dust...