OUR JOURNEY OF RACE & ADOPTION

This weekend we saw The Butler on our awesome date night.  It sounded like a fascinating tale of a black butler who served in the White House through 8 different administrations during a historic time in America's civil rights movement.  It was a good movie with a sweeping view that we enjoyed, plus I adore Forest Whitaker.  It was based on a true story, but as I looked up the facts, it strayed quite a bit from them.  However, the historical stuff was all real.

This is the first time that I have seen something so focused on civil rights since I adopted two African American children, and it all hits me differently now.  It's all personal in a way that it never had been before.  One thing that blew my mind all over again is how recent it all really is.  My parents lived through all the major events that the movie highlighted, and I lived through a few at the tale end.  This is not ancient history.

I don't feel at all qualified to write on the race issues in our country, but I can say that major problems still exist.  We do not live in a post-racial color blind country, and now that I have children who look different than I do, I am even more aware of it.  I've read some great posts by another adoptive mom at  Rage Against the Minivan that have helped me gain perspective.  I appreciated her take on the Trayvon Martin case as well as a featured post written by someone else titled, What I Want You To Know About Being a Young Black Man in America.

John and I had to go through extensive education on trans-racial adoption, because it is not taken lightly.  However, as we were going through all of that, we assumed we would be getting children from Ethiopia.  We learned about that country's rich history and prepared to make celebrating Ethiopian holidays a part of our family's life.  Then God changed our course and had us adopt domestically.  I think I was more prepared to have black foreign children than I was to have black American children.

There are stereotypes here.  There are race issues.  There are class issues.  There are socio-economic issues that seem insurmountable and cycles of poverty, and it all seems tied up into tangled webs of cause and effect that I cannot reason through.  And the reality is that because I am white, I haven't been forced to look many of these things in the face.  I've had the "white privilege" all my life that has allowed me to think that racial issues were not still a big deal in our country, because they weren't a big deal in my life.

The blinders are coming off, and I want to be cognizant of what is going on around me.  I want to engage in it and ask hard questions and be prepared to hear the harder answers.  There is so much I don't know.  It feels so uncomfortable, but I'm pretty sure that is because of the way we have been taught to treat race with kitten gloves.  So often the message seems to be - "Don't talk about it.  Pretend it doesn't exist."  But that message is not helpful in the face of a world where racial prejudice does still exist and play itself out in myriad ways around us.

We feel like we have a lot to learn about raising African American children who will have white parents and siblings.  There are cultural nuances that we won't understand, and neither will they, because they will grow up in our home.  I am so thankful to have Gran-Gran in our lives to help give more insight into a world that I have only seen from a distance and to help connect our babies with that beautiful part of their identity.  We want to teach our children to have respect for everyone and to enjoy and celebrate the differences that God has given us.  The differences really are what make life more interesting and amazing and reflect what a great, creative God we serve.

The Butler brought up some other nagging questions for me, but they will have to be asked in another post.  I have so much to learn.