Birthmarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America

Introduction: Narratives of Adoption, Roots, and Identity

I N T R O D U C T I O N Narratives of Adoption, Roots, and Identity It’s hard being adopted, in many ways. . . . I mean, when I was in fourth grade—this is something that stays with me today because my father is getting into it again—we had to do fam­ ily trees. And I refused. And the teacher said, “Well, go home and do the assignment at home.” And I remember being—I mean there are very few moments I remember being upset about school because I loved school, but I was upset about this homework assignment. And my mom said to me, “Well, we’re your family now.” And I said, “But that’s not my real family.” [with anger] I mean I had this definite idea to have a family tree you had to know—I mean, I had an idea of roots, that you had to be able to trace it biologically. I mean, I knew that even at whatever age you are in fourth grade, at age nine. —Lynn Praeger, twenty­nine­year­old transracial adoptee Lynn’s story about roots and family trees raises the question: What makes us who we are? How do we, lacking knowledge of our birth families, claim a history, a heritage, an ancestry in a social context that largely de­ fines “real” kinship through “bloodlines”? The metaphor of roots res­ onates beyond the lives of adoptees. It assumes that identity—who we are—is shaped at least in part by who our ancestors were, whether we de­ fine that identity through blood, genes, culture, nature, biology, or nur­ ture. The idea of roots is a powerful metaphor for connections between genealogy, history, family, race, and identity. Cultural studies scholar Julia Watson explains: “Genealogy specifies origin. Its fundamental as­ sumption is categorical: Humans are defined by who and where we are| 1 | Introduction ‘from’—in terms such as stock, blood, class, race” (emphasis added) (Wat­ son 1996:297). Lynn and the other transracial adoptees I interviewed struggled with questions of history, origins, and the meaning of adop­ tion as they continually engaged in processes of identity construction and maintenance. Their struggles undermine traditional assumptions surrounding the metaphor of roots, challenging us to redefine popular understandings of “genealogy,” race, gender, and identity. This book is about stories—individual, familial, cultural, political, and institutional narratives about the births, lives, and identities of African American and multiracial adults who were adopted and raised by White parents. Race and identity were the central issues that emerged in the life history interviews I conducted with twenty­two transracial adoptees. Their stories raise questions about the social construction of identity, and the connections between identity, race, gender, class, and public policy. My method is ethnographic. While a number of studies of transracial adoption exist, most have focused on the “adjustment” of adoptees and have only addressed racial identity in limited ways. Remarkably little at­ tention has been paid to how Black and multiracial adoptees raised by White parents articulate their own identities. Also glaringly absent from existing research are considerations of how these lives and selves have been shaped by cultural and sociopolitical forces, such as public policies concerning child welfare, the socioeconomic situation of unwed moth­ ers, changing social views of gender and family, and shifting racial poli­ tics. The exploration of transracial adoption raises fundamental questions about how social structure affects individual experiences. How does so­ ciety define which mothers are “fit” and which “unfit”? How does the language of public policies inscribe and shape individual lives? How do social institutions account for differences in age, race, and class when defining gender and motherhood? Although most academic discussions of social policy address people in abstract aggregate terms, the lives of adoptees demonstrate that policy questions often touch them in pro­ foundly individual and personal ways. Indeed, this book argues that the identities of transracial adoptees are socially constructed through the im­ plementation of public policies concerning race, family, gender, poverty, and child welfare. Transracial adoption first became a controversial issue in the early 1970s. A heated public debate occurred about the transmission of Afri­| 2 | Introduction can American cultural identity to Black children adopted into White middle­class families.1 The central question in these debates was whether or not White parents were capable of teaching their children African American culture...