I was pretty vehemently in favor of the child being adopted by the white family as to opposed to being lonely in an orphanage (do those exist anymore?) or being passed around within the foster care system or in some sort of group home.
My friend? She couldn't even consider the idea. She wouldn't say the orphanage, foster care, or group home was better. She just wouldn't allow herself to say a white family was better than...I don't know what. She wouldn't make the comparison between white family adopting the child and not having parents from ages 0 to 18. She just wouldn't do it.
Unconscious white people reading this may be upset about the tone of the debate from the outset. Even more likely, unconscious white people reading this may be assuming that we were being "racist" and responding just like so many white people do to us - automatically assuming white people to be inferior.
Reverse Racism!!!! Auggggh!!!! (<---extreme sarcasm)
However, there is an unwritten context to our conversation that many white people won't understand.
Though the unspoken context of our conversation did have something to do with the inferiority of white parenting, that context assumed a racially unconscious white couple being completely unable to raise a black child that didn't hate herself, himself, or black culture because so many white people do not see white supremacy and it's ability to produce various forms hate that look like everything from standoffish-ness to revulsion.
My friend's unspoken argument was that white people, willfully unaware of the pervasiveness of white supremacy in everyday life, would do more harm than good to a child. And when I was younger, I disagreed with her.
Today, I think I still do disagree with her. But that's only because the glimpses I've seen of group homes and foster care have frightened me.
It seems like there's a 50/50 chance that the growing up without parents can go terribly wrong in the United States. It seems like there's only a fifty percent chance that one might wind up with foster parents that are wonderful. And my wild @$$ guess of 50% seems like odds too low when it comes to making sure each child is being loved and cared for.
Regardless of my gloom and doom guesses about group homes and bad foster care, kids age out of foster care and group homes at 18 and many that "age out" wind up homeless.
So when black people, like my friend and I, are talking about the adoption of children by white people, all these horrors are being compared to a willfully unconscious white couple raising a child that hates herself/himself. And there most black people know, pretty close to first hand, that there are few things worse than not having a sense of self. Most of us have seen or known someone that has lost some piece of the their sense of self due to being raised while black in the United States.
Just look at how much damage white people, who routinely have no sense of racial identity, who are routinely unaware that they too have a racial perspective, have done to this entire country. Imagine that kind of racial ignorance being soaked into a child with dark skin. Imagine how much more damage is done to you when white supremacy is coming at you from the inside and outside at the same time.
I guess I thought having the love of white family that thinks you are "a credit to your race" (among other things), without realizing they think way, was better than all the other zero-parent choices when no black family is available to adopt the child.
I guess I still do.
I guess I always have.
This would tend to mean I thought white parents were better than zero parents even before I knew Senator Barack Obama was, at least partially, raised in these conditions I've described. His white grandmother was racially unconscious and had racist reactions to black people on the street. And I thought white parents were better than zero parents before I even considered that a white couple, like Angelina and Brad, might wake up enough to make a serious effort at racial consciousness for the sake of their non-white and white children.
In my own defense, in the 80s when this discussion was being had, I was probably mostly right in being unable to imagine Ronald-Reagan-loving white folk being able to be racially conscious.
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| Image from Jezebel.com |
But now, when I read stories about people like Jennifer Cramblett,
who sued an incompetent sperm bank
for accidentally impregnating her
with an African American man's sperm,
who then sued them for her pain, her suffering and emotional....
AFTER she got her money back
ALL THE WHILE KNOWING
that her girl child would one day read
about HER MOTHER'S LAWSUIT OVER
her own skin-color NOT BEING WHITE
and how hard that made
HER MOTHER'S DAY TO DAY LIFE,
I have to rethink my argument.
I keep coming to the same conclusion. But people like her make me go through all the evidence again and again.
* * * * *
You're not supposed to hate people, especially ignorant people who do not really know what they are saying and doing. I know that. And I know white adults can be as ignorant as a 5 year old black or brown child when it comes to race. But I hate this woman's ignorant face.
I wanna lay a curse on this woman. I want to perform a ritual and have her catch something where she can never speak or communicate her ignorance to anyone, including her child, ever again.
I'm gonna have to pray about my own attitude.
Still, I can't stand the idea that her girl child will love her, will love this white women and have to defend this white woman's actions --especially defend this white woman to herself-- when she grows up. And that's probably true EVEN IF she doesn't by some miracle not-hate herself and/or black culture.
I'm gonna have to pray for this child too.
When writing this piece, I made black people "normal" where no race needs to be mentioned. If people I was talking about were white, I mentioned "white." Were you confused?
By the way, that link at "Reverse Racism" is pretty funny.
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