He’s Black and You’re White

“Is he your son?”

“Yes”

“He’s black.”

“Yup”

“He’s black and you’re white.”

“Yup”

“Why is he black if you’re white?”

My husband and I adopted the Kangaroo, a bi-racial child, out of foster care. His birth mother is a black woman from Ghana and his birth father is a white man from Central Kentucky. Despite his white birth father, the Kangaroo is a black child. The world views him as black, when he looks in the mirror he sees a black child, he will grow up to be a black man. We work hard to help him feel proud of his skin, his beautiful melanin, his tight curly hair, and his heritage. He comes from kings and should feel powerful and brave. We have a mantra we say every time we rub lotion into his skin. We want him to associate taking care of himself and his body with pride and self confidence. “I am smart. I am brave. I am strong. I am beautiful. I am black.”

We talk openly about his adoption and about how he came to be our son. There’s no hiding the fact that this child is not biologically related to Papa Roo and me. We are two of the whitest people you’ll ever meet. We talk about how his birth parents loved him and wanted him, but for reasons out of their control aren’t able to take care of him. And that’s all we say. Their story isn’t ours to tell. How they got to this point, how they created this beautiful child sleeping down the hall from me, why they couldn’t be his parents is not my story to tell the world. So when people ask (and they always do) we tell our story. How we got him out of the hospital when he was two days old. How he came home in this little white outfit that had teal elephants on it and a matching hat, but the minute we got into our front door he pooped so violently on it that we had to throw it away. We talk about the ups and down of foster care, of patiently (and impatiently) waiting outside courtrooms, about the bittersweet feeling when his parents rights were officially terminated, and about the moment when his adoption was finalized. That’s our story of his adoption and one we can tell without feeling like we are overstepping our boundaries.

We expose him to black culture. Movies and music and art. We attend local events and festivals, we have play dates with black children, and he goes to a black hairdresser. We do our best to provide racial mirrors and opportunities for him to see strong, confident, educated black men and women in positions of power.

We do all of these things to make up for our whiteness and help him feel like he has a connection to his black culture. Most days I think we do a pretty good job of it, all things considered. And then a six year old at the Y asks an innocent question and I worry it isn’t enough. No matter what we do to help the Kangaroo learn where he comes from and who his people are at the end of the day he is black and I am white. He will have experiences I will never have. He will view the world from a different place than I do, and the world will view him differently as well. Now, while he is small and adorable, he is a cute little black boy who can do no wrong. What happens when he experiences his first racist comments, when he first realizes how our society treats people who look like him? What happens when he is a 15 year old black autistic teenager who doesn’t have his white mom there with him every minute, keeping him safe? What happens when he starts to wonder about his birth parents, about where his skin color comes from? What happens when he looks around at our family and sees his lone dark face in a sea of white? Will he be thankful that we played Motown music in our home or will he laugh at us and tell us that’s a drop in the bucket? That no matter how many books we have that feature characters that look like him, no matter how many play dates we go to, no matter which playgrounds we play at we haven’t done enough?

This six year old, a beautiful black child playing in the water with his little sister while their mother watched, reminded me so innocently that the little blissful bubble that we live in at home doesn’t follow us when we walk out the door. It’s so easy sometimes to forget for a minute that the Kangaroo is a child of my heart but not my body.

“You’re right. He is black and I am white, and I’m his mom. He had another mom before me, a black mom, but she couldn’t be his mom anymore so I became his mom.”

“Why couldn’t she be his mom?”

“Sometimes moms and dads can’t take care of their kids, so they go live with new moms and dads.”

“What happened to his first mom?”

“She was sick and she had to go get better.”

“When she’s better will she be his mom again?”

“She will always be his first mom, but I’m his mom now and he will stay with me forever.”

“But what if she gets better?”

“We hope she gets better. No one wants to be sick. And if she gets better she can see him and visit him, but then she will go back to her house and he will come back to our house.”

“But why wouldn’t he go back to her house?”

How do you answer that? How do you explain the intricacies of adoption to a random six year old at the splash pad? Luckily for me, I didn’t have to because his mom called him over to get ready to go home. Who knows if he went home thinking about moms who don’t have their babies with them and kids who get new parents. I know I went home thinking about it.

Transracial adoption is big and heavy, and takes up a lot of space. I know adoptive parents who “don’t see race” and teach their children that “under our skin we are all the same” and my heart hurts for the children they raise. I’m not saying we are doing it all perfectly. In fact, I am 100% positive that I’m fucking up on a daily basis. But I’m trying. I read blogs and books and I’m in Facebook groups and I do the hard work of examining my privilege to make sure I am raising my son to be a strong, confident black man who is proud of himself and his skin color. This is a lifelong reality of being a white mother raising a black child and I hope that when he is a grown man he will be able to look in the mirror and feel proud of who is looking back.