If they gave out As for Aggravation level, I'd be getting an Asian A, which is to say the highest A available on the American Grading Chart- which I just made up to sound like something official.
Oh, I've smiled through it all, I nodded, I asked semi-pertinent questions, I even shared deep thoughts and memories I was completely making up- I was an utter trooper- so good at all the SEMINARS, WORKSHOPS and CLASSES that adoption agencies make you do. Transracial Parenting. Parenting workshop. Adoption and You. Seven hours at a stretch in an airless, flourescent-lit room in Culver City. And we have to pay for the priviledge of well meaning social workers to rip the heart out of our precious Saturdays. 9am class in Culver City? All day Saturday? To explore transracial adoption? Smile and nod and go and crack jokes, make small talk and be as bitter as you want on the inside. That's how I roll.
But workshop. I want workshop to be killed as a word unless one is actually describing a shop filled with tools and the smell of wood chips. If there are no half made puppets or unstrung guitars hanging from the ceiling and goggles lying about-- it's not a workshop. It's an airless room with florescent lighting and styrofoam cups.
Since we went through the MAPP training of three months of weekly classes (also in Culver City, which is convenient to NOWHERE unless you call Mar Vista home. And we don't.) when we entered the Foster-To-Adopt scene back in 2010 I immediately believe we should be allowed to skip any and all classes resembling a do-over. We did it. We got the three sets of fingerprints, the TB tests, the CPR and First Aid training so we don't have to do any of that again, right? Wrong.
Of course the morning of the first class I wake up feeling very unwell. I always get sick when I don't want to do something. I refused the bagels they set out to make us all feel taken care of, because I wanted to feel really put out. The other couples all broke my heart- I really related to everyone else's grief at not being able to become parents for free. And there was a Hispanic couple, and a Middle Eastern looking woman and a seemingly white man who was half Mexican so we all shared hilarious and not so hilarious stories about being racially profiled.
Transracial Parenting Class started out pretty dull, earnest and obvious. My resentment glowed like a deep sunburn, especially as I believe I am the embodiment of racial understanding. I never see skin color, except for the inadequacies of my own rashy rice paper skin as compared to the gorgeous skin of basically everyone else in Los Angeles. Andrew and I are as white as whites can be without being albinos but we are secure in our transracialness. At least we were until the film strip started.
The film was a documentary interviewing a smattering of multi-ethnic adopted children of white parents. They ranged in ethnicity from Native American, to Vietnamese, to African American and they all had stories of the moment they realized they were different from their super white parents and other siblings. In almost every instance, the white parents kinda blew it. One African American man was fairly blithe and casual about having white parents and for liking Pearl Jam. But he wasn't in the documentary that much.
Much, much more film was burned on two particular adults who were articulate and so fucking fury-filled in their articulation about how baffled they were to find themselves the one black child in an all white Swedish town in Minnesota, for example. This very dark skinned girl, who spoke about growing up knowing more about lutefisk and Swedish words for snow then anything about her clearly obvious cultural identity said that adoptive parents should ask themselves, "Why are you adopting outside your race? Are you trying to save someone or make some sort of color-blind statement?" In most cases the children grew up to escape their adopted families and dive into their cultures of birth, preferring their own race to that of their 'parents'.
I was shell shocked. I didn't have an answer as to why I was open to transracial parenting, other than wanting to adopt anyone who needs a home. Hell, I have two adopted siblings, an adopted step-sibling and an adopted cousin- and as far as I knew everyone was fine. But then I had to admit I never even thought to ask my cousin or my step sister how they felt being Korean and adopted into white families. I just assumed they were fine and that I wasn't a racist because I never looked at them as different from me.
When I dug deeper as to why I was open (even excited) to a mixed race baby, it was more than for a baby with much more useful skin and hair than mine. It's more than just looking forward to saving money on sunblock. And I'm not afraid of us being different, we'd just be a family with a story. And we live in Los Angeles. How hard could it be to be a culturally diverse family here?! In Los Feliz we'd be downright popular with our transracial family.
But what happens when you travel with an other-race baby? Road trips? Questions and stares will abound. I remained undeterred in my thinking but learned how much being the color of the until-now dominant race has made my life easier in ways I will never truly fathom. So how hard would I ever know it could be for my own child? I could only imagine what must have felt like a parental smack in the face by the African American child who was pissed at me for 'rescuing' her from her own people.
The social worker leading the group then showed us the rest of the documentary, where they re-visited the adopted mixed race kids ten years later. The articulate African American guy was there and so was the angry African American woman with the lutefisk exposure. They had definitely simmered down in the ensuing years. They had made peace with their parents and were grateful for the lives and the educations they had received. What stuck with me was when he said, "As soon as you adopt a mixed race baby, you are no longer a white family. You are a mixed race family." I was down with that, and appreciated learning it. My sore throat throbbed with knowledge.
Then there was a game. Games led by Social Workers during workshops are not fun games. Don't let them lull you into a false sense of gaming security. We each got a clear plastic cup and a box of beads- each color of bead was assigned a race- African American, Native American, Asian, White and Hispanic. We were read a series of questions and had to place a correspondingly colored bead in the cup. What is the color of the people you work with? What is the color of your boss? Who are your favorite authors? What color are your neighbors? What color is your dentist? What color is your hairdresser? What color is your best friend? What color are the stars of your favorite TV shows? What color is your favorite movie star? What color is your favorite musician? The point was made. My cup was like tapioca pudding with one yellow, one black and 2 brown raisins in it. Shameful. Harrowing. Gut churning. Depressing. True.
Then we had to talk about how we'd incorporate the race of our child into our lives. Shopping in markets that cater to their culture, going to barber shops for their kind of hair, their culture's language, churches, festivals, restaurants- my betrothed Canada brightened at the idea of learning new foods to cook, or places to explore. We all shared our stories and laughed and none of us made dates to get together, which I was particularly thankful for.
At the very end of class we were all given papers to sign (or not) which would let the Adoption Agency and lawyer know that we had changed our minds about transracial adoption.
We looked at each other- deep, well-meaning white folk looks- and we didn't sign. We vowed to make more friends of other ethnicities and then we drove to San Fransisco to go to a concert where only white people sang. Except for Carlos Santana. He was the one brown bead in our all-white cup. We're not going to workshop that.
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