In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Should Whites Adopt African American Children? One Family's Phenomenological Response Martha $atz In 1997, after an extended stint abroad as a naval officer, my son entered law school. During the school's orientation week, a professor described her work as lead attorney on the Baby Jessica case, which, as we remember, concerned a couple who took a baby girl into their home, nurtured her as their daughter for two and halfyears with the intention of adopting her, but eventually were compelled to relinquish her. "Can you imagine," the child-advocacy attorney inquired ofthe assembled law students, "what it would be like to be two and a half years old and wrenched from the only home you had ever known by people whom you had never seen before?" My son, Michael, raised his hand to offer: "Yes, I can. It happened to me." I heard this account from my son sandwiched among other enthusiastic stories about the first days oflaw school as he phoned that first week. At the same time, he mentioned that child-advocacy law attracted him, that indeed eventually he wanted to work with this professor to protect children from experiencing the same trauma he had undergone. Hearing this, I gasped. The moment exquisitely distilled my experience. My son's making this revelation in his new community and desiring to work for children in the future affirmed our life together . It also augured well for my daughter, Miriam, then ten years old, whom I adopted when Michael was eighteen. For Michael, my now adult child, the one I had adopted twenty-seven years ago amid controversies concerning transracial adoption, had joined me in publicly speaking ofthe complex entanglements of adoption. That all this had occurred in connection with the Baby Jessica case resonated with me. When the case had reached its climax and the news played and replayed the video of the two-and-a-half-year-old little girl shrieking and kicking as she was removed from her home, I sank into despair. As psychologists and commentators on television shook their heads pondering whether a child could ever overcome such a trauma emotionally, I grieved for my son, who had experienced that very same blow. Most intensely, I relived my own villainy, for I had been the one wresting him from his home, inflicting the pain. But I had never discussed my reaction to the Baby Jessica case with Michael. Thus, it was shocking, but on 267 268 Imagining Adoption reflection unsurprising, to discover that we had both responded the same way. The Baby Jessica story was emotionally our own, even though factually it differed radically from our experience. When I ventured to discuss my horrified reaction to the Baby Jessica story with friends, they thought that they understood my response. The cultural stereotype pits adoptive parents against biological ones. Thus, they assumed that the Baby Jessica story must evoke in me the atavistic fear that one day, the biological parents, the "real" parents, the ones who according to some cultural paradigms have a superior claim, would come and take my children away. But in my case, experience trumped categories. I had taken my son, aged two years and eight months, away from the only home he had ever known, away from mommy, daddy, sister, brother Dan-Dan, and, for all I knew, a dog named Spot. I had taken him to a motel room where he had tried to get away, crying desperately, "Mommy, mommy:' He had made hysterical lunges toward the door. I had barred the way. I had experienced myself as kidnapper. The story of my son and me interweaves adoption, race, and the politically conservative environment ofTexas. In the late 1960s I came to Dallas as a Northeastern , white, Jewish, single woman with an Ivy League education and an almost completed Ph.D. in academic philosophy, to teach in a historically black college. I lived in an apartment on campus, one of a few white people on an allblack campus in an all-black community. I learned a good deal inside the classroom and out about African American culture and life and about myselfas well. I also came to realize that there was something I wanted. I watched myself buying and collecting books and toys for neighborhood children. Their artwork decorated every inch of my walls. I missed them when they went home. Clearly, I desired a child of my own. I did not know whether J would marry, but it did...

Share