Monthly Reflections – Page 4

Mother, May I?

- authored by April Dinwoodie,
Part-time Executive Director of Transracial Journeys

As a Black/Bi-racial transracially adopted person, do I need permission to love more than one mother? This May, I am once again faced with the “mother” of all holidays. It is a big one that warrants attention because of the complicated emotions that come up for so many adopted persons and members of the extended family of adoption. On top of the emotions that may already be present, there are the marketing messages that flood in from brands reminding us to celebrate the women in our lives that care for us.

As a kid, Mother's Day, was about my mom Sandi, the only mom I really knew. I was usually caught up in creating the PERFECT gift for her -- something to honor her, make her feel special and something I thought she’d really love. At some point though during the time leading up to Mother's Day, or on the actual day itself, thoughts of my biological mother crept in. I did not have the language to articulate them, so they came and went, or so I thought. What happened in reality is that my pain, grief, and loss, stayed present and unaccounted for, creating deep emotional confusion that would take years to unravel.

While I knew that I was adopted and there was another woman that I was connected to, there was no open door for me to consider or have a conversation about what that all actually meant and how I was to hold that information factually or emotionally. No one around me at the time had two mothers. It made sense for me to have only one, Sandi was a great mother, did I really need another one? Did I need another one that did not keep me? To be clear, my mom did not ever try to deny there was another woman that I was born to but she never encouraged me to think about her and we never really talked about her until I was a young adult and started to search.

Throughout my search I never thought about being mothered by anyone else but my mom, Sandi. I was not looking to replace my mom but I did have a deep desire to know and create some kind of connection to the woman who gave birth to me. At one point, early in my search, someone close to me asked me if my searching for my birth mom was weird for my adoptive mom and would I then have two mothers? While I was not looking for the two women to co-mother me, I did immediately wonder why having two moms under any circumstances would be a problem. At this point in my life, I had many examples of two families where two women were caretaking children so why is it that in adoption, there is often the either or versus the both/and?

After years of personal healing work, running a research institute for adoption and foster care, working in schools, and being part of a community where I am connected to thousands of members of the extended family of adoption, I have come up with a few things for adoptive parents to consider and actions to take when navigating the both/and of Mothers’ Day.

● As a starting place, think about how you hold Mothers’ Day and how you were mothered. For some, these are not easy reflections to have. For others, there is only joy and beautiful feelings. And likely for many, there is both love and joy, and complexity and pain. If these mix of emotions around mothers can be true for you it stands to reason that a mix of emotions can be present for the child you parent through adoption. Start with you and investigate how you truly hold this most sacred relationship.

● Once you have a sense of how you feel about your connections to mother, think about your holding of your child’s mother of origin. Are you in touch? Do you know her name, birthday, what she is good at? Do you know about her medical history? Do you know if she held your child? These are all things for you to think about and act where you can to gather up some of this information. You don’t have to jump in and do the most, but even taking a few minutes out over the next week or so to have some quiet time to reflect could go a long way. And remember to even mark your calendar to give yourself time to think about your emotions connected to this throughout the year. Make sure you are not tucking your thoughts, feelings, and emotions away. Demonstrate that you can be open with all that comes with adoption and understand this can be a gateway to important healing.

● With some of your emotions in check, you can work to be in even better conversation and connection with your child centered on the topic of mothers. Too often I hear parents transactionally asking their child “do you think about your birth mom? Do you ever want to try to meet her?”. Those big questions can be too much to negotiate with some children and youth. I love it when parents that have grounded themselves and have a sense of how they feel. They can open up a healthy conversation with the child they are parenting by first sharing their thoughts and feelings. Something like…”Today I thought about XX/your birth mom, I wondered how she was and I was sad that we don’t know more about her. Do you ever wonder about her too? Do you want to sit down and talk with me about that?” Remember, you know your child better than anyone so use your personal style to communicate, just don’t miss an opportunity to communicate and keep a door open.

● As you create the conditions at home for open and healthy dialogue and connection to mothers of origin and extended birth family, remember outside of the home your child can be challenged by having more than one mom to consider. This is the time of year when school projects in celebration of Mother’s Day are happening. If you’ve had the conversations about your child’s birth mother and they wanted to create art for them too, teachers and caregivers need to know that your child may need some extra time. If you are not there yet and your child does not want to share their family structure for a school project, you can create something together at home. Even if you are not in touch with the birth mom, you can create something special for the time you might have a connection. There are usually complex circumstances at the root of adoption. There will be a lot of work that will go into creating and keeping connections to family of origin but it does not mean you can’t keep an open conversation especially when the world around us is reminding us of the special people of our lives.

Who says we can’t have more than one mom? Why can’t we have love for two significant women in our lives and be connected to them in different ways? Do we have to ask for permission to love the people we care about? As mothers and as parents today entrusted with children through adoption, you have the amazing opportunity to actively expand your hearts to the people connected to your child. Even when it’s highly complex, there are ways to have open and caring conversations about and real connections to extended family.

Also Known As…

by Avril McInally

While preparing to write this month’s feature for our newsletter, I was reading April’s card entitled “Beginnings: What’s in a Name?” when I received an email from an old friend. My friend had just sent me an article called “Living in Adoption’s Emotional Aftermath: Adoptees reckon with corruption in orphanages, hidden birth certificates and the urge to search for their birth parents” by Larissa MacFarquahar. The article is a deep dive into the experiences of three women who were adopted and who also had their names changed by their adoptive parents. The article discusses other worlds, other narratives, other journeys and other names as well as families, cultures and countries of origin of three adopted women.

Do you have your child’s original birth certificate? Do you share the information on the birth certificate with your child? If there was a name given at birth, do you know it and do they?

Deanna Doss Shrodes aka Melanie Lynn Alley
As an adult knowing little about her own birth family Deanna Doss Shrodes states that she and other adoptees look for, “pieces of their lives or their selves that were missing, or had been falsified or renamed, trying to fit them to the pieces they had.” Shrodes discovered her own original birth certificate while playing a game of hide-and-go-seek with her sister. She found a box while hiding beneath her parent’s bed, and that box held her original name!

Joy Lieberthal aka Kim Young-ja aka Eun-hee aka
Joy Lieberthal was adopted as a young girl from Korea and grew up in a mostly-white populated community outside of New York. When searching for her biological family she came to discover that her original name was changed by the orphanage she was adopted from. The orphanage changed her name purposefully in order to fit the identity of another child who was supposed to have been adopted by the Lieberthals.

Joy grew up bullied and isolated from other Korean Americans. When she attended college, she began to have friendships with other Asians who then asked her to help start an Asian Student Union. She felt like a fraud until, “the international students accepted her as such and thought it was fun to fill in the gaps in her knowledge.”

After graduating from college, Joy went back to volunteer in the orphanage she was adopted from in Korea. There, she began to learn more about her origin story and eventually connected with her birth mother, but “When Joy came back from her time in Korea in the summer of 1994, she was angry—angry at the Korean government for giving so many children away, and angry at the ignorance of the Americans who had told her that she had been rescued, that Korea was poor and backward, that Korean men were abusive.”

Later, after having had returned to the U.S., she joined an organization called Also-Known-As which was started by her friend, Hollee McGinnis. “The mission of Also-Known-As is to build a community that empowers the voices of adult international adoptees, while providing resources and space to acknowledge the loss of birth country, culture, language and biological family.”

Angela Tucker aka Angela Burt aka Jocelyn Kate
The third adoptee featured in MacFarquhar’s article is transracial adoptee, Angela Tucker. You may know Ms. Tucker from her documentary “Closure” which portrays her reunification with her biological family. Angela was raised by white parents in a mostly community near Seattle, Washington.

After graduating from college, Angela became an adoption caseworker and thought that might give her access to her adoption paperwork. She didn’t gain that access at the agency. However, when she was younger, her parents did give her some adoption paperwork that had some important information about Angela’s birth parents and birthplace. Her birth mother’s surname was redacted on that paperwork but years later, Angela’s husband prompted her to look at and re-orient her search around her birth father’s unique name which was Oterious. After this change in search strategy, Angela located her birth parents.

April’s card reads:

“Your name is central and significant to who you are and, in essence, can be the keystone of your identity. When your child is adopted, there’s another world, another narrative, and perhaps another name that accompanies them along with their “who am I?” journey.”

“One thing almost everyone agrees on is that adult adoptees should have the unrestricted right to see their original birth certificates, rather than only the “amended” ones with the names of their adoptive parents (but this is the law in only a dozen states).” An original birth certificate doesn’t only contain one’s first name, but the names of biological parents too. Information on the original birth certificate can divulge one’s roots not just physically, but geographically and ancestrally too.

Had these three women grown up with free access to their original birth certificates, how would it have shaped their “who am I” journeys?

- Avril McInally no aka

March: Changing the Script on Adoption, Luck and Microaggressions

by Avril McInally

By now, many of you have probably experienced the “Lucky to be adopted” commentaries that society heaps upon adoptees and families formed or extended by adoption. It’s March, I’m thinking about St. Patrick’s Day with its accompanying themes of rainbows, pots of gold and luck.

When I think about luck and I look back on my life, I’m struck by the intrusiveness of luck conversations which began occurring after I adopted my daughter. So many strangers have said to my child, “you’re so lucky to have been adopted!” Sometimes, this commentary would include remarks that my daughter should be grateful for my “rescue” of her. As these assaults accumulated and I learned more about race and racism, I began to view them as microaggressions. As I processed and unpacked more of my daughter’s lived experience, I arrived at the basic fact that luck had nothing to do with her adoption journey at all!

Understanding Microaggressions and Their Impact

“Microaggressions are defined as the everyday, subtle, intentional — and oftentimes unintentional — interactions or behaviors that communicate some sort of bias toward historically marginalized groups. The difference between microaggressions and overt discrimination or macroaggressions, is that people who commit microaggressions might not even be aware of them.”

This lack of awareness…this obtuseness has caused my children and my daughter’s family of origin cumulative damage and pain. Yet if I were to tell the commenters of the damage they were causing, they often would react defensively. They disregard and have no understanding of our children’s loss of their family of origin and their family of origin’s loss of their child! Luck has no place in adoption.

Taking some liberties with the article “Microaggressions are a big deal: how to talk them out and when to walk away" by Andrew Limbong, I made some edits in order to reflect our particular perspective.

“Oftentimes people of color [, adoptees and children] are asked to educate white [non-adopted, adults] people on issues that the person of color [adoptee and child] has lived with and thought about for their entire lives. That can be very psychologically and emotionally exhausting for a person to then have to care about the white [non-adopted and adult] person's feelings and to take those extra efforts so that they can learn something that they should have — and could have — learned throughout the duration of their life.”

Microaggressions from the Perspective of a Transracially-Adopted Child

In most of the literature I've read about microaggressions, the status of the adoptee is not considered. So, I took the liberty (with apologies to the author) of viewing this theme in particular from the perspective of a transracially-adopted child. There’s not a lot written about microaggressions in adoption. That’s why I’m talking about it here and why I’m shining a light on a useful article called “Helping Your Adopted Child Handle Adoption Microaggressions” at creatingafamily.org. Not only does the article identify microaggressions towards adopted children, but it gives some scripts you can rehearse with your child to prepare them for these intrusive comments and questions.

Being Our Children's Allies

At the heart of the matter, we need to be not just our children’s parents, but their allies. When they’re old enough, we can ask them how they would like us to respond in situations like this. Until they’re old enough, it’s up to us to stand up for our children. The adults in these conversations often unwittingly challenge or harm our children’s identities. These conversations are not ok and the children entrusted to us will mature into adults that may still need their elders to stand beside them.

After having read and researched this month’s feature for our newsletter, I’ve come to see the term microaggression is falling from favor. In the book How to Be an Antiracist, author Ibram X. Kendi writes, “I do not use ‘microaggression' anymore. I detest the post-racial platform that supported its sudden popularity. I detest its component parts - ‘micro’ and ‘aggression.’ A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term ‘abuse’ because aggression is not as exacting a term.” Dr. Kendi is clearly addressing racism here and not the intersectionality of the adoptive status of our children, but we can call it out for what it is.

These luck conversations and savior conversations are abusive.
Whatever you call “it”, Dear Reader, recognize it for what it is and continue to protect and love your children.

For help starting conversations about the "luck" language with your adopted children, see Preparation: Transracial Adoption: Be Ready! and refer to our post last year, The Luck Code.

What can help is to hold some space for having a conversation with your family about this month’s prompts. The conversation starters on our cards could help when it comes to others’ reactions to our children and families, as well as the ensuing comments of luck and saviorism that may also be aired.

February Featured Article

author: Avril McInally

It’s February. Our chronologies and calendars feature both Black History Month and Valentine’s Day (read this month's parent conversation theme, February Intersections: Love and Black History Month). Fresh on our minds, is the recent murder of Tyre Nichols. As we attempt to process the pain and the confusion, we are reminded of how vital it is to the intricacies of the Black experience and celebrate Black excellence every single day of the year. As the world and our media shouts, “love, love, and more love” and “Black history is important and relevant,” we sit with the reality of how urgent it is for white people to be anti-racist and work to truly have empathy for what it means to be a Black person in the world today!

I began writing this column around the release of the deadly beating of Tyre Nichols’ video - January 27, 2023. While sorting out my own complicated thoughts and emotions on whether or not to “witness” the video, I held a twin reckoning of my children’s reactions to seeing the video. How do I do this? How do I hold my own fear and concern while making space for my children’s fears also? Then, my phone blew up with text messages from other parents, who were like me, worried not only about their children seeing the video but also their extended family members of adoption, their friends and the Black community at large. Like them, the concern snowballed quickly from my family, to my community to the more universal community of Black and brown folk living with these brutal conditions of race in America day in and day out! How to love? How to respect? How to protect? How to care? How to have compassion? How to make change? How to engage? These are all questions we can ask ourselves not only at times like this (when, absurdly, the media is celebrating February’s themes of love and Black beauty while simultaneously featuring assaults on Black people), but all year long.

In part 5 of April’s, “How to Love a Transracially Adopted Person”, she writes, “I can’t help but wonder if all of these losses of our Black and Brown brothers and sisters are actually my Black and Brown brothers and sisters. I wonder if I will lose members of my family of origin before I find them. I wonder if they are ok and as I am worrying about them I realize I need people to worry about me and wonder if I am ok. I need my loved ones around me to recognize that these heartbreaking losses hit me different and I am losing part of myself.”

How are you checking in with your children right now? How are you supporting them and listening to them? How are you checking in with the Black and Brown community and showing them support and love too? This awareness and diligence is my forever Valentine to my children and to the people who share their race.

In the words of Nikki Giovanni, remember:

"Some say we are responsible for those we love. Others know we are responsible for those who love us."

This post is from our February, 2023, e-newsletter. If you would like to get our newsletter in your inbox each month, please subscribe. You will get invitations to our Parent Meet-Up each month, a virtual meeting to act as a transracial adoption support group - sharing issues, ideas and strategies for creating a culture of communication and curiosity in your home, as well as monthly card prompt to keep the conversations about race, adoption, family, love and relationships front and center all year long.

Create Gates and Doors for Your Family with the Calendar

This two-headed depiction of an old, Roman god may resonate with those of us living in families experiencing multiple dualities ourselves. Families like ours, formed by transracial adoption, experience dualities of identity in which there are several intersectionalities. Race, gender expression, religious beliefs, class, disability and adoption are but a few of these intersectionalities.

“Janus was also the guardian of gates and doors. He presided over the temple of peace, where the doors were opened only during wartime. It was a place of safety, where new beginnings and resolutions could be forged.” How you manage your gates and doors this year to promote your own temple of peace may take some planning, some resolve or some resolution.

April gives some great tips for January and nurturing this type of intentionality in her deck of cards: Read January Relationships: Honoring the Whole Family

“Think about culturally diverse holidays that can be added [to your calendar] and make a plan to learn about these new holidays together as a family.”
“Work together to decide the best way to honor both the fun days and make room to honor and prepare for the harder ones.”

Parenting with the Calendar: Gateways and Doorways

As parents, we manage gateways and doorways constantly. Think about the calendar year ahead, and write down some gateways or doorways you may want to nurture opening, guard and keep closed or crack open a little? How do we purposefully navigate our dualities? Like Janus, how can we look back and how can we look forward? How can we honor, celebrate and mourn as families where we have been and where we are going? Using our calendars to light the way can be a start.

For more ideas about governing your calendar read our previous post, The New Year and Hard Relationships.

Creating New Traditions to Reflect Our Families and Celebrate Their Identities

author: Avril McInally

For many of us, holidays can be a combination of many emotions and elements. Do we have all the candles we need for our Menorah or for our Kinara? Have we gotten our holiday lights and decorations up? How are we managing our budgets? Is the house tidy and clean enough for our house guests? Do we have enough food? Speaking of food, what about those special recipes we need to prepare? Do we have all of the proper ingredients? And the gifts? Did we purchase enough gifts to make sure no one is left out or one child gets more than another? These are the scenarios for many families at Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa or Yule, yet what of our families? Our families manage these aforementioned holiday traditions of hosting, eating and gifting as well as creating space for our adopted children, their race, the family they were born into, their culture, their religion and more!Read our previous post: ‘Tis the Season to Reminiscence

Because our families represent multiple aspects of identity, heritage, and culture, we visit the idea or concept of intersectionality. Some intersectionalities that help to describe our families include race, gender, sexuality, adoption, age and religion. We have several aspects of intersectionality to honor, celebrate, foster and sometimes protect. There’s a little more “juggling” for us to do to manage these precious aspects of our children’s and family’s identities. One way to celebrate “us” is to create new traditions that reflect our families and honor their identities. Read our post about the conversation cards this month December - Reflections: Making and Breaking Traditions

Traditions can be a way for families to connect and memorialize important life events. To adoptive families, creating traditions is more than a way to bond, but it can also be a great way to commemorate each family member’s roots. By incorporating activities that celebrate birth culture, adopted children can develop a strong sense of identity.

This year, I’m going to work on creating a holiday card for our family with my family. I’ll make a list of our intersectionalities with my adult daughters. Black, White, Adopted, Not Adopted, Atheist, Immigrant, American, Cisgender, Female, Male….. You get the picture. Then, we’ll draw a Venn diagram of our family’s identity and decorate it. Heck yeah, “This is Us”! This is who we are with some holly on top! This could be a new holiday tradition for us. If you start this tradition now with young children, you can save your cards every year and watch how your lists morph or mature.

In addition to creating and honoring traditions, it’s important to make time to honor our extended family of adoption as we gather to eat a special meal, to light a candle, to build a fire on one of the longest nights of the year or simply when we tuck our children into bed at night. Remember it’s important to honor and/or acknowledge the family members absent from your home. It’s the “most wonderful time of the year,” yet at the height of festivities and anniversaries, our children may be experiencing loss and sadness. Make space for children who are processing these emotions and thoughts and love on ‘em a little more and give them space to talk about their feelings. And last but not least, you may also have emotions surrounding losses or complexities that can come up as well. Building a tradition of inclusion, empathy and love starts with tending to ourselves!

Book Corner: Holiday Guide 2022

The Book Corner is a consistent favorite in our Transracial Journeys monthly newsletters and our parents are always looking for age-appropriate books with themes of diversity, inclusion and adoption. The Book Corner's creators, Avril McInally, MLS and Victoria Richards, MLS, bring us this Holiday Guide for 2022 - a great roadmap for picking books as holiday gifts for our families and friends.

Click on the image or the link below to download a 9-page annotated bibliography for families formed by transracial adoption with a focus on the intersectionalities of adoption, race, ethnicity, gender expression and identity.

Download Holiday Guide 2022

Our Transracial Journeys families regularly seek out books to share with their children and to read for themselves, as white parents of black children. We are fortunate to have a resource in the Transracial Journey's Board of Direcors Secretary, Avril McInally. With a Master of Library Science from Kent State University and over 35 years as a public librarian, Avril and her colleague, Vicki Richards, collaborate to curate phenomenal book recommendations for our children and parents. The Book Corner is a regular feature in our Transracial Journeys monthly newsletters. If you would like to receive monthly book recommendations via email, please subscribe.

Nourishment: Reflecting on Thanksgiving, Adoption and the Family Table

author: Avril McInally

Our November theme is all about family and nourishment but not simply about food and what we eat, but how we nourish our understanding of the uniqueness of our families and in service of the children we are entrusted to care for and love.

This month we center on both Thanksgiving and National Adoption Awareness Month (NAAM)! This year NAAM’s theme is “Small Steps Open Doors”. One step we can take as adoptive parents is to participate in the online training available from the National Training and Development Curriculum for Foster and Adoptive Parents. This curriculum,

“is now available and free to States, counties, Territories, Tribal Nations, and private agencies. The curriculum encompasses more than 38 themes that include contributions from adults who have experienced foster care and address topics such as parenting in racially and culturally diverse families, trauma informed parenting, and maintaining a child’s connections.”

Thanksgiving and NAAM

At the intersection of Thanksgiving and National Adoption Day, which is held annually on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, while we traditionally center on the joy we also need to make space for the challenges that come to our literal and figurative table. Days commemorating adoption, as well as the history of Thanksgiving, can be challenging for those of us who have been adopted as well as for indigenous people in the United States. We, as families formed by transracial adoption, have a unique and lived perspective of coping with related challenges in this nation. As we continue to move through the more complex layers of our modern lives, we can ask ourselves an important question - how can we celebrate or commemorate Thanksgiving and NAAM? Related post: Adoption: A Three-Sided Coin

Deciding What Holidays to Celebrate

In the past, we’ve shared thoughts about Juneteenth and Independence Day, and how different families decide to celebrate one holiday over the other. What we choose to put on our calendars and how we choose to celebrate or give a moment’s grace to our anniversaries is personal to each one of our families. This year, we encourage all families to work on threading the strands of National Adoption Day and Thanksgiving together at the Thanksgiving meal. Let’s give thanks for family, honor the adopted children entrusted to us, and continue to process the history of Thanksgiving and how it plays out in our lives today. As children advance and grow, we can encourage conversations and connections to adoption and differences of race. Regardless of how old children are, there is an opportunity to explore the important elements of identity and connection.

Black Excellence: Daniel Smith 3/11/1932-10/2022

Being raised the child of a former enslaved person along with his 5 siblings, he later came to acknowledge seeing his parents as,

“...followers of the “twice as good” philosophy — the futile belief that black people must perform twice as well as whites just to be considered equal. And beneath the sunny message of how extraordinary the Smith children were lay Abram Smith’s stories of slavery with their frightening symbols of brutality.”

As a young man, he served as a medic in the Korean War. Upon returning to his home in Winsted, CT in 1955, he was dubbed, “Danny Smith, the Negro hero of the town,” for rescuing a drowning man from a flood.

He later attended the Tuskegee Institute to pursue a career as a veterinarian but he left the program after the KKK bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL in order to join the Civil Rights Movement. Then, Mr. Smith went on to work on many endeavors related to race equity and civil rights. One such accomplishment was his work as a literacy advocate with migrant workers. This provoked retaliation from the KKK but it didn’t stop him from continuing to work on behalf of the movement, as his life was filled with similar endeavors until his retirement in 1994.

Click on the links to read more about this man’s remarkable life.

The Persuaders and Transracial Journeys

Our Transracial Journeys organization is included in a book by a best-selling author to be released in October. This post is to provide our families some background and context and was written as a collaboration by Avril McInally and April Dinwoodie.

In 2018 we were approached by best-selling author of Winners Take All and award-winning former New York Times columnist, Anand Giridharadas. He was writing his next book that centered on an insider account of activists, politicians, educators, and everyday citizens working to change minds, bridge divisions, and fight for democracy. He had heard of Transracial Journey's mission and the work we are doing to offer practical tools and support for families experiencing transracial adoption and thought it should be part of his research.

Anand at TRJ Family Camp 2019 for Research

Because we fiercely protect the community we have nurtured, we thought long and hard about how best to engage with Anand. After several conversations with him and a lot of thoughtful discussions with our board we agreed to invite Anand to our Transracial Journeys Family Camp in 2019 with the understanding that the community we create is a sacred place and if invited in without a direct connection to transracial adoption it would be imperative he abide by our guidelines for engagement. We prepared families that were attending camp and clearly articulated what it would mean to speak to him "on the record".

This October, The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy will be released by Penguin Randomhouse. As Anand describes in a pre-release article,

"I wrote THE PERSUADERS because I want those of us who believe in democracy to prevail against this dangerous ongoing revolt against the future....I set out to find the activists, politicians, educators, organizers, and others who are doing the work of persuasion when others aren’t and who I thought had something to teach us all. I talked with them, followed them, and then wrote a book about their quest, in a time of great crises, for a politics fierce and unapologetic enough truly to change things and smart and expansive enough to change the minds to get there."

A recent reviewer in Publishers Weekly wrote: “[Giridharadas]] interviews progressive leaders who seek to maintain their principles while appealing to the unconverted without denouncing them as bigots or alienating them with politically correct dogma.”

The second chapter of the book, Can Love Change A Mind?, features discussions Anand had with Transracial Journey leaders, parents and race equity trainers at Bellwether Camp in the summer of 2019. You may recognize some of the interviewees. As you read, keep in mind the preceding quote. We, as parents of transracially adopted children, sit in the landscape of this book with some amazing global leaders and activists all of whom have their own agendas and lived experiences.

Having had the opportunity to listen to adult transracial adoptees over the years, it is becoming more and more apparent that our kids and families in particular sit at the junction of more than one intersectionality be they race, adoption, gender identity, sexual orientation, age and more. For a lot of the world, adoption is not considered an intersectionality. If it were, then there would be far less adoption jokes. This particular intersectionality isn’t addressed in “our chapter”. It’s not really part of the author’s thesis or theses, but it is ours. So let’s start talking this up and engaging those who don’t have awareness of this aspect of our children’s identities. After all, that’s the modus operandi of this book.

TRJ

Category: Monthly Reflections

Mother, May I?

Also Known As…

March: Changing the Script on Adoption, Luck and Microaggressions

Understanding Microaggressions and Their Impact

Microaggressions from the Perspective of a Transracially-Adopted Child

Being Our Children's Allies

March Conversation Prompts

February Featured Article

How Do We Balance Love, Black History and the Reality of Police Brutality?

Create Gates and Doors for Your Family with the Calendar

Parenting with the Calendar: Gateways and Doorways

Creating New Traditions to Reflect Our Families and Celebrate Their Identities

Book Corner: Holiday Guide 2022

From Newborns to Adults

Book Recommendations for Families Created in Transracial Adoption

Past Book Corner Features

Book Corner – August 2025

Book Corner – July 2025

Book Corner – June 2025

Book Corner – May 2025

Book Corner – April 2025, Becoming Vanessa

Book Corner – March 2025

Book Corner – February 2025

Book Corner – January 2025

Making and Breaking Traditions:

Book Corner – August 2024

Nourishment: Reflecting on Thanksgiving, Adoption and the Family Table

Thanksgiving and NAAM

Deciding What Holidays to Celebrate

Black Excellence: Daniel Smith 3/11/1932-10/2022

The Persuaders and Transracial Journeys

Anand at TRJ Family Camp 2019 for Research