In Their Voices

Black Americans on Transracial Adoption

Rhonda Roorda

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231540483
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

While many proponents of transracial adoption claim that American society is increasingly becoming "color-blind," a growing body of research reveals that for transracial adoptees of all backgrounds, racial identity does matter. Rhonda M. Roorda elaborates significantly on that finding, specifically studying the effects of the adoption of black and biracial children by white parents. She incorporates diverse perspectives on transracial adoption by concerned black Americans of various ages, including those who lived through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era. All her interviewees have been involved either personally or professionally in the lives of transracial adoptees, and they offer strategies for navigating systemic racial inequalities while affirming the importance of black communities in the lives of transracial adoptive families.

In Their Voices is for parents, child-welfare providers, social workers, psychologists, educators, therapists, and adoptees from all backgrounds who seek clarity about this phenomenon. The author examines how social attitudes and federal policies concerning transracial adoption have changed over the last several decades. She also includes suggestions on how to revise transracial adoption policy to better reflect the needs of transracial adoptive families.

Perhaps most important, In Their Voices is packed with advice for parents who are invested in nurturing a positive self-image in their adopted children of color and the crucial perspectives those parents should consider when raising their children. It offers adoptees of color encouragement in overcoming discrimination and explains why a "race-neutral" environment, maintained by so many white parents, is not ideal for adoptees or their families.

PART I

Jim Crow Era (1877–1954)

THE LEGAL SYSTEM OF SLAVERY in the United States, which treated black people as property and therefore allowed children and parents to be separated, bought, and sold—ended in 1865 after the North won the Civil War and Congress ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Yet many in the South refused to give up the economic caste system that greatly benefited whites, although at first southerners had little choice, as the federal government was administering the states of the former Confederacy. During that period, known as Reconstruction, “the newly freed men . . . could vote, marry, or go to school . . . and the more ambitious among them could enroll in black colleges . . . open businesses, and run for office under the protection of northern troops. . . . Some managed to become physicians, legislators, undertakers, insurance men. They assumed that the question of black citizens’ rights had been settled for good and that all that confronted them was merely building on these new opportunities” (Wilkerson, 2010, p. 37).

But within ten years the federal government had given up on Reconstruction. As the writer Nicholas Lemann (2013) details:

The Army was in the South to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments [civil rights and voting rights, respectively], and it became increasingly clear that without its presence, the white South would regionally nullify those amendments through terrorism. But the use of federal troops to confront the white militias was deeply unpopular, including in the North. . . . The country had never been entirely for full rights for African Americans in the first place, and it wanted to put the Civil War and its legacy behind it.

The Ku Klux Klan, which began in the immediate aftermath of the war and was suppressed by federal troops, soon morphed into an archipelago of secret organizations all over the South that were more explicitly devoted to political terror. . . . In the aggregate, many more black Americans died from white terrorist activities during Reconstruction than from many decades of lynchings. Their effect was to nullify, through violence, the Fifteenth Amendment, by turning black political activity and voting into something that required taking one’s life into one’s hands.

Isabel Wilkerson picks up the story: “Around the turn of the twentieth century . . . southern state legislatures began devising with inventiveness and precision laws that would regulate every aspect of black people’s lives, solidify the southern caste system, and prohibit even the most casual and incidental contact between the races. They would come to be called Jim Crow laws” (2010, p. 40). The Jim Crow era lasted almost one hundred years.¹ By 1915 all southern states had some form of Jim Crow laws. For example, blacks were prohibited from eating in the same restaurants, drinking out of the same drinking fountains, entering the same restrooms, going to the same schools, or watching movies in the same theaters as whites. Common signage at the time warned: “Whites Only”; “Restrooms for Colored”; “No Dogs, Negroes or Mexicans”; “Colored Waiting Room”; and “Staff and Negroes Use Back Entrance” (Householder, 2012).

Punishment for blacks who defied Jim Crow laws (and even for sympathetic whites) was severe. For infractions like attempting to register to vote, stealing a cow, talking back to a white person, or fighting for justice, blacks could be lynched by white mobs that didn’t even bother to hold a sham trial (NAACP, 2000). And in the case of serious felonies, many innocent people were hanged.

Compounding the strictures of the Jim Crow laws were the unwritten and rigid social expectations during this period. For example, a black man was strongly discouraged from shaking hands with a white man—and from making eye contact with a white woman, lest he be accused of making sexual advances. Blacks were expected to address whites as “Mister,” “Sir,” or “Ma’am,” yet whites more often than not spoke condescendingly to blacks. Such unwritten rules further reinforced the unequal relationship between blacks and whites. Black people were ever mindful of the need to not break a Jim Crow law, give the appearance of breaking a law, written or unwritten, or “cause” a white person to feel any discomfort for any unfathomable reason.

It wasn’t until 1954 that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, overturned separate-but-equal laws and declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. By extension this ruling made segregation in other public facilities illegal. Subsequent decisions struck down similar kinds of Jim Crow legislation (Reid-Merritt, 2010).

During the Jim Crow era the idea that white American families might adopt black and biracial children would have been incomprehensible both socially and legally, especially in the South but in the North as well. After the end of World War II in 1945, some white American families intentionally set out to make their families interracial by adopting Asian children from Korea, Japan, and Vietnam and later through the Indian Adoption Project (Herman, 2012). As Ellen Herman (2012) notes, “Attitudes toward these transracial placements reproduced the historical color line in the United States. . . . White parents were more likely to accept ‘yellow,’ ‘red,’ or even ‘brown’ children. Those who took in ‘black’ children were considered the most transgressive.”

The first interracial, or transracial, adoption on record involving an African American child placed in a white home occurred in Minnesota in 1948. Shortly thereafter campaigns to promote adoptions of African American children motivated other white couples to inquire about transracial adoption (Herman, 2012). Black adoptive families were in short supply because white social workers tended to regard them as “weak, ineffective, and culturally deficient” and therefore did not view “homes of color as the kinds of stable, healthy environments ideal for raising a child.” But as the civil rights movement progressed, it helped to turn “national concern to the injustices suffered by black Americans. Child welfare professionals began to express concern with the disproportionate numbers of black children growing up in foster care” (Logan, 1996, 5, 7). A few agencies began cautiously placing mixed-race and African American children in white homes. Some of these families became targets of violence and harassment (Herman, 2012). Although only a few white couples adopted African American children at first, these adoptions began to define the debate on transracial adoption that continues today.

IN THIS SECTION three fascinating individuals discuss their lives during the latter part of the Jim Crow era. All three were born and raised in the South and have a tireless focus and determination that helped them to rise above the systematic racial, political, and socioeconomic disenfranchisement of black Americans. They fought to overcome racial segregation and discrimination in their own worlds in order to forge paths of economic, political, educational, and social opportunities for others. Their journeys were far from easy. But all three had parents and guardians who taught them to dig deep, carry themselves with a healthy sense of self-respect, and exemplify in their daily lives the values of hard work, education, perseverance, compassion for others, faith in God, and love of country. The skills and experiences they gained during their upbringing guided them into their adult years and influence their thoughts about transracial adoption and their hopes for children and families.

Evelyn Rhodes was born in 1920 in Memphis, Tennessee. She is a mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. Rhodes, a writer of poetry and short stories, is also a decades-long member of the Detroit Black Writers Guild. I sat down with Rhodes in her East Lansing living room for our discussion. I was interested in learning how she viewed herself while she was growing up, particularly since she was raised in a period when society devalued black families, especially black girls and women. I was especially curious about what values sustained her and her family through the civil rights era and into the present day. I wondered whether the racial cruelty of the era in which she grew up had made her bitter toward white people and whether it had adversely affected her intellectual, emotional, and spiritual growth.

W. Wilson Goode Sr. was born in 1938 in North Carolina. He was the son of a sharecropper, yet he rose to become the first black mayor of Philadelphia. In childhood he endured the dire economic realities resulting from the Jim Crow laws and witnessed the vulnerability of his own family. As a teenager his family migrated north to Philadelphia for better opportunities, but he soon discovered similar disenfranchisement in Philadelphia. Given these circumstances, I wanted to know how Goode found his inner strength and established a support network in such difficult circumstances. What gave him the audacity to believe that he could achieve academic success and lead a city? Goode’s voice is crucial to the discussion of transracial adoption because he has also invested in the lives of transracial adoptees and interacted with white adoptive parents.

The final interviewee in this section, Cyril C. Pinder, was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1946. His story vividly reveals what it was like to be black during a time when society could legally and overtly undervalue a person’s talent, wit, social acceptance, and even character solely because of the color of his skin. I think Pinder’s frank discussion of racism is important because one of the most traumatic experiences for many black transracial adoptees occurs when they leave their white adoptive homes, with all the attendant privileges, and confront the burden of race and discrimination in this country. Pinder’s honest conversation will help adoptees understand why it is vital to know who you are. It is also important to note that Pinder has known a few transracial adoptees, most of whom led tormented lives because of their confused racial identity.

EVELYN RHODES

Great Grandmother and Matriarch

INTERVIEWED SEPTEMBER 29, 2012, EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN

Ms. Rhodes, I am thrilled to talk with you today. You were born on May 16, 1920, in Memphis, Tennessee. Tell me about your childhood, your family, and the values that were instilled in you at a very young age.

My brother and I were raised by our dear mother after my father passed. He was a World War I veteran. My grandparents also played a big part in raising us. We didn’t have a kindergarten or day care. I learned how to read and write before I entered first grade. My grandparents said to me, “Here are five apples. You take four away. How many do you have left?” And that is how I learned how to add, divide, multiply, and subtract. And after my father died, we moved to Chicago. This was in 1929. We were children of the Depression. We didn’t know that we were poor. We didn’t consider ourselves poor. We lived in a big apartment building. We were the only two children there. My mother would give me two dimes and tell me to go to the store and take this dime and change it and get two nickels and take the other dime and get five cents’ worth of potatoes and three cents’ worth of sugar and bring home the remaining two cents. There were gangs in Chicago then, but, no, they didn’t bother us. They would say as we passed by, “There goes skinny Evelyn and her brother.” Still, I went to high school in Chicago. I graduated from Wendell Phillips Academy High School in 1938 and from Theodore Herzl Junior College in 1940. That college was later renamed to Malcolm X College. During World War II my brother entered the armed forces, and he went to [Great Britain and] landed on the beach [at] Normandy. My brother is ninety years old now and lives near me in Holt, Michigan.

But as I got older, in high school we lived in a tenement building, where we had just one room and everyone used the community kitchen. My mother worked on the railroad. Across the street I could see a big mansion. I would ask my mother, “Can I go out and play?” She said yes. The young lady across the street said to me, “Why don’t you ask your mother if you can come over here?” This young lady’s parents were beautiful people. Her father was the first black attorney to have an office building in downtown Chicago. And in 1923 there was a race riot in Chicago so he helped some of those who had been persecuted. Her mother was head of the National Association of Negro Women. From this family I learned about all of the wonderful things I read in books. I would go to the prestigious Goodman Theatre and to concerts. My dear mother was working, and she knew that I was in good hands with this family. So as the years passed, my girlfriend, she went to Northwestern University, and I went to the junior college. My girlfriend [oversaw black music programs in Chicago public schools]. Later on she was nationally known for her accomplishments. Although she has passed, we had a great time together. When I think back on my childhood in Chicago, my mother did wonderful things for my brother and me and made sure that we were open to cultural activities. My mother was happy that her children had a good childhood.

What was it like growing up as a black young girl and then young woman in Memphis and Chicago? Did you know that you were a beautiful and smart person? Or did race issues in society or within your own family obscure that?

In my family I did know that I was beautiful and smart. Although my mother and her sisters, my aunts, and uncles, they were all light complected, and my grandmother was part Irish, we didn’t run into racial issues within my family.

Chicago had race riots again in 1968. What were your thoughts about it then, when you were older, especially given the fact that you did not experience racial tension within the boundaries of your own family? Or had you left Chicago by then?

As I got older we moved from Chicago to Detroit. Now in 1967 there was a racial riot in Detroit. I was a postal employee by then. I remember there were people complaining about the noise. The police came. People were killed. Houses were burned. But I never did have any racial upheaval with me as a person. And I am glad to say that!

I want to go back to the time of the Harlem Renaissance (1920–30). What was that period of time like for you?

When my friend was at Northwestern University, the late Langston Hughes was a guest speaker there [and] I attended. I was thrilled by being at his talk and meeting him. Langston Hughes autographed a book for me. And I gave the book to my niece. I am sorry that I gave it to her because it was signed by him. [Laugh] I have a lot of books on the Harlem Renaissance, and I love all of the writers during that time.

What is the importance to you of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 [which banned discriminatory voting practices designed to discourage black Americans from voting]?

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 means a lot to me. My grandfather, in the late 1930s and 1940s, who was living at that time in Tennessee,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Moving Beyond the Controversy of the Transracial Adoption of Black and Biracial Children
• Part I. Jim Crow Era (1877–1954)
• Part II. Civil Rights Era (1955–72)
• Part III. Post–Civil Rights Era (1973–PRESENT)
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Appendix: Multicultural Adoption Plan
• Notes
• References