Loving the Whites Who Raised Me

Transracial adoption and the journey to define, access, and practice intentional, healed love in white spaces.

Continuing the reflection and acknowledgment for National Adoption Month, here is a new essay on love as a transracial adopted person navigating white familial spaces. For my mom and dad, who I love with all my heart.

Love is complicated. Adoption across racial lines forever tethers controversy for existing to those adopted. It politicizes the human experience and creates a land mine in one’s own living spaces.

Can I live?

It is a strange phenomenon to be told to be grateful for something one didn’t choose to begin with. Yet minorities are told this all the time.

The thing I envied about my friends of color who weren’t adopted growing up, and still sometimes do, is that when they experience this dynamic with a white person, they can choose to walk away. They can leave.

Even if the person is their boss, their colleague, their friend. They can literally leave the space at some point and choose whether or not to return and in what capacity.

They can plan an exit. Start looking for another job. Request to be on projects with other colleagues. Put in for a transfer to another department. Find new friends.

But being adopted into a white family, a person doesn’t necessarily have those options. I have…