I am supposed to be reading, and I will return to it in a few minutes. I am temporarily frustrated that most of what there is to read on my poet is biographical and very little of it is critical. Guess where that puts me? In the both enviable and unfortunate position of a pioneer. Great.
I’m afraid to write about my Brown Babies dilemma. I think part of being white in this country is being caught in this constant trap of not wanting to think oneself as racist but working hard to acknowledge the pervasive, subconscious racism that is part of a white upbringing. Our adoption process has brought these issues to the fore and I am still struggling with them. As mamamarta has admitted, and as I will echo, I am no stranger to race in an academic or even in a practical sense. But I am nowhere near a comfortable level of ease in the discussion of race. I have learned to talk about race with my students, but I am not at ease with discussing it with myself.
Lately, and I think this is par for the course, I’ve been revisting our experience of losing/never having not-Boomer in February. This pregnancy has been bizarre in that regard, in no small degree due to the fact that it came a mere month after our loss. We were a little shocked to get pregnant that quickly–we meant to open ourselves up to it, expecting nothing (loss makes you frame things that way, too). So all of the sudden we were operating in a whole different context in relation to having a child, and this context was also not quite the same if we had started with biological children and not tried to adopt first. It all became tangled up. I had to work through what it meant to me to have a biological child as opposed to an adopted one. Simplistically, it meant (and means) that I am having a child in a different way. Biology still doesn’t matter much in terms of a value comparison–it’s just different.
But because we were planning on a transracial adoption, the issues surrounding race have become more complicated. As I’ve explained before, we began our adoption journey being open to a child of any “race.” We believed when we started the process that children of color were in greater need of adoption (and subsequently learned that this is only true for children in foster care), and many agencies have separate programs. So we were compelled, I think, to make a choice. And we ultimately decided that our level of education, Attic Man’s experience as a sibling of transracially adopted siblings, our own attitudes about race, and our willingness to make radical life-decisions based on our children’s unique needs made us good, but not perfect candidates.
Here’s where it gets complicated. I am a visual dreamer. I like to picture the future. I do this with things I’m anxious about, too, because it feels like a rehearsal and makes me feel more prepared (I’ve done this a lot with the birth experience, and it’s done a lot to quel my fears). Consequently, I spent over a year picturing myself holding a brown baby with black hair. I imagined putting a little girl’s curls in puffs and learning how to braid. I closed my eyes and talked myself through the things that family, friends, and strangers would say to and about our family. I was fully immersed in the dream of parenting a brown baby as a white woman.
Now I’ve found that pictures of brown babies give me a pang of sadness, especially when they appear on blogs of people who have adopted them transracially. I didn’t have any idea I’d have this reaction, and I’m starting to feel uncomfortable with it. I’ll put it bluntly: is this a racist reaction? Have I become romantically enamoured with difference? I’m starting to think about how much more I like to be in churches in which I am among a very few white members, or for that matter in restaurants and malls and at concerts. There’s a level of happiness I get from that kind of experience that I don’t get from typically ‘white’ contexts. I don’t know why this is or where it comes from, and it worries me. Am I fetishizing brown children, and people of color in general? Am I no better than a white suburban teenager who carelessly appropriates race because of a need for excitement (or is even that more complicated than I’m making it out to be)?
The Snapper is going to be glowingly, transparently white like his parents. I’m not at all disappointed in having a white child and besides, with how much we have learned I know he’s not going to have the typical ‘white’ experience, especially if we do go forward with our plans to adopt transracially in the future. What worries me is that my own attitudes may be no better than the primitivistic attitudes of the worst kind of racist. I just don’t know what to do with it.
I don’t think it’s racist – I think you had an image/a dream in your head and you are adjusting to a reality that will look different – just like you had to adjust to having a baby that was biologically connected to you and Attic Man. But I think it’s the kind of question to ask in order to become a good white parent to a brown baby (eventually).
We struggle with these questions all the time. Roo was born pretty pale but now is pretty brown, and it’s interesting to wrestle with these questions while we watch others wrestle with them in their own heads when they see us together and identify us as a family.
Let me know what it means when you figure it out. 😉 The Captain and I were talking before the Sprout was born and he said ït’s going to be so strange to have a white baby…I just think brown looks nicer.” And I have to agree. In general, at least. I don’t know what it means either.
I think it’s because you thought you were going to adopt one so made space in your heart for that. Dark skinned babies will always be a trigger for you.
This is really difficult, and I think any comment I provide will be inadequate, which is what makes all these such very good questions . . .
“Am I no better than a white suburban teenager who carelessly appropriates race because of a need for excitement (or is even that more complicated than I’m making it out to be)?”
You are voicing your interest in people of other races and ethnicities, you aren’t taking on a persona that pretends to be a person of color. And you clearly recognize that to pretend to be a person of color would be inappropriate.
I completely understand what you’re feeling. Thanks for writing about your feelings so openly.
I think brown babies are really beautiful too, and I had a white baby first. He was the most beautiful baby in the world at that time, and now my currently-little ones are. I think a lot of it is associating affection and beauty with the people you are attached to and “in love” with, as parents are in love with infants during the close need-filled stage of babyhood.
That said, even when I was in jr. high I thought brown skin was more beautiful. It is also more common for humanity if you consider the whole world. I think brown skin looks healthier, stronger, warmer and younger. Maybe I am wrong in that opinion, but I don’t think there is anything racist about that…. The worst kind of racist thinks that some colors/races are less human. Less valuable, less soul-ful, less intelligent, less God-like. Beauty may come after that, but I don’t think it’s actually the skin color that sets off racism. It’s the negative values. If one started thinking those things about white babies, then maybe… but that’s not what you are saying.
Anyway I think your feelings about brown babies have a lot to do with your emotional preparation to parent one, and when you know this new little baby he/she will be stunningly beautiful too.
It is because we are meant to have children within our race due to being attracted usually to people with the same features.