Transracial Adoption: Black Mothers Edition

A small, careful circle. Two overlapping conversations sit inside this network. First: Black mothers raising children of other races — children adopted from Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Pacific, or domestically across racial lines. Second: Black women who themselves were transracially adopted, raised by white parents or by adoptive parents of another race, and are now becoming mothers in their own right. The work is different in each direction. The questions are honest in both.

We started this circle because the larger transracial-adoption discourse has rarely centered Black women. The adoption literature is built around white adoptive parents and the question of how they should raise Black children. That is a real conversation but it is not ours. Ours is about Black women doing the parenting and about Black women who were the children. Both deserve their own room.

What gets talked about in the first conversation. The home-study process when we are the adoptive mothers. The agency interactions. The international adoption laws and the slow tightening of them over the last fifteen years. The ethics work we are doing — what we want our adoption to be and what we refuse for it to be. The first-mother and birth-family relationships, when they exist. The cultural and racial work of raising a child whose ethnicity differs from ours. The hair, the food, the language, the holidays, the long arc of identity development across a child's life.

We also talk about the social experience of being a Black mother walking through the world with a child who is read as a different race. The grocery-store interactions. The school-pickup interactions. The questions strangers ask. The questions other parents at the playground ask. The way we have decided to respond. The way we have decided not to respond. The conversations we are having with our children about it as they grow.

What gets talked about in the second conversation. The adult adoptee experience of Black women who were raised by adoptive parents of another race. The reunion with birth family, when that has happened. The grief, when it has not. The complicated love for adoptive parents who did their best, did their worst, or did both. The cultural reclamation work in adulthood — learning hair care, language, food, ritual that we did not learn growing up. The therapy work that has been part of all of this.

Now we are becoming mothers ourselves. Adoptees becoming parents is a particular conversation. The decisions we make about our own children's connection to our biological families. The pregnancy and birth experiences inside bodies that carry a fragmented family-medical history. The choice of whether to use a donor when our biological family heritage is incomplete or inaccessible. The naming of children. The way we explain our own adoption story to them. The way we explain it to our adoptive parents.

Both conversations meet in the middle around several shared questions. The ethics of adoption as an institution. The first-mother relationship and how it is honored. The long question of identity development for a child who is navigating multiple racial and cultural belongings. The role of community in filling in what one or two adults cannot teach alone. The honest place we hold for grief alongside the joy.

Membership: Black women who are adoptive parents of children of any other race. Black women who themselves were transracially adopted, including those who are not currently mothers but are considering motherhood. Black women who are fostering with the intent to adopt across racial lines. We do not currently include white adoptive mothers of Black children; that is a different conversation and there are other forums for it.

Cadence: a monthly long-form thread. A quarterly virtual gathering. An annual in-person retreat with a small cap, location rotating. Members can opt into smaller subgroups: international-adoption mothers, domestic-adoption mothers, adoptees-becoming-parents. The subgroups are slower, deeper, and tightly held.

We are not here to perform either resolution or grievance. We are here to talk. Adoption is a long arc, not a one-time event. Some of us are in the early years and some of us are in the third decade of this work and some of us have watched our adopted children become adults and parents themselves. We hold all of those vantage points in one room.

What we do not do: judge each other's choices. Demand that any member resolve her ambivalence on a timeline. Share other people's stories outside the room. Speak for adoptees who are not in the room.

What we do: name what is hard. Sit with what is unresolvable. Share what has actually helped. Make a place where Black women in transracial-adoption configurations — on either side of the parent-child relationship — can talk to each other without having to first explain themselves to anyone else. That is the value of this circle. It is small and quiet and it has held women for a long time.