Making a family: adoption is a pressing racial issue as more children of color are adopted by white parents.

IT'S HARD TO FIND A MORE LOADED TOPIC THAN TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION. Perhaps that's because the personal decision to have a family is an emotional one and we want to believe that institutional racism doesn't affect our choices. Perhaps it's because adoptees have such a range of responses from cutting ties to expressing gratitude toward their birth parents and adoptive ones.

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Either way, transracial adoption is a pressing issue for families and for those committed to racial justice. More than one million children across the United States are adoptees and seven out of 10 kids are adopted by white parents. The number of kids adopted from other countries continues to grow--tripling in the last two decades to 20,000 children a year.

To address the topic, we invited two adoptees and an adoptive mom to tell their stories in the following pages. We hope they will give you lots to think about and we invite you to e-mail us ([e-mail]) your letters for possible publication in the next issue.

BECOMING A MOTHER, QUESTIONING EVERYTHING

One white mom struggles with skin color after adopting.

WHEN I WAS TRYING TO DECIDE who and from where to adopt, I had a lot of questions about transracial adoptions, and most people responded to my curiosity with a subtle discomfort. I felt embarrassed voicing possible concerns to my liberal friends, because all of us were adamant that race made no difference to our choice of friends, lovers or tiny babies up for adoption. But in looking around at these friends, they all seemed a pretty tribal bunch: when it came time to make a family, in nearly every case, like colors had stuck together.

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The first photo I received of Vaishali showed her with fair skin. I was surprised, because from what my adoption agency told me, the child assigned to me would be much darker. After I got over that surprise, I had another: I felt relief. Suddenly--guiltily--it was a comfort to know that she would not look so different from me, and even more important, that her light skin would save her from a lifetime of prejudice.

But ah, the magic of flashbulbs. A few months later I received several more photos and gaped at them in shock. The baby was much, much darker. Worried that the child to whom I had grown unbelievably attached had been given to some other family, I sent a bewildered e-mail to my adoption agency in Maine, which then made a bewildered phone call to their trusted social worker in India, who assured us that she had seen the child on many occasions and all the photos were of the same girl. Phew, I thought, as long as this little girl is the same one I have held in my heart for three months, she is my daughter and I am going to bring her home.

I flew to Bombay and became a mother. For the first week, my new daughter Vaishali clung to me, terrified, and I sacrificed eating, sleeping and bathing in the service of comforting her. Over and over, I told her: "Mama is here. You are my baby."

Back home, after a couple weeks had passed, I stared at Vaishali's naked bottom--her darkest part--and tried to ignore the insistent whispers of fear. Instead of brimming with pride, I felt like a trespasser, performing ablutions on this private flesh with color so foreign from my own. It was one thing to swoon over her photographs for months, but now she was in my home; she was my family. How could this be my daughter? I looked at her and tried to find similarities between us, relieved that her hair was straight, her lips not too full. Just thinking these thoughts made me feel horribly ashamed. I tried to sort emotion from fact: was it the dark color of her skin that was making me uncomfortable, or just that she did not look like me? I ached to talk to someone about it, but I was too afraid people would disapprove, would doubt my ability to be a loving mother. Worse, what if (since I had only been awarded guardianship and the adoption would not be final for another six months) some Indian official found out how I was feeling and took her back?

Finally, I got up the nerve to confide in a friend who has two biological children, both white, as well as an adopted Indian toddler with skin the same shade as Vaishali's. "After a while," she said, "you don't really see what your children look like. But every so often it's like returning to your home after a long vacation, and you can see it again for the very first time." Surprisingly, she confessed that one day she'd realized how dark her adopted daughter is and started comparing her to others: Is she lighter than that Black man mowing his lawn? Darker than that Indian woman at the mall? Once she'd said it aloud, I admitted that I had done the same thing, and it had shocked me. I adored this little girl, and every single day my heart pounded stronger with love. What was I so worried about?

I thought hard. What had I done, taking this helpless child from her native land halfway across the world? I chose to adopt from India because I felt a familial pull toward its people and its culture (there is actually a community of Indian Jews!), and because I learned that the babies were usually healthy and birthed by poor, unwed village girls who were not prone to ingesting any unhealthy substances. I wanted to give an infant girl all the human rights she deserved and every possible opportunity to find gladness at being alive. I wanted to make a family with a child who had none; I wanted her to feel wanted. But had I simply upset the balance of the world? Very soon, my daughter will have a lot to process. She's adopted, she's the child of a single mother and she's an Indian Jew by conversion. We spent the summer with my father in upstate New York, and she was nearly always the darkest child in music class, gymnastics and day care. In New York City, even Blacks and Indians in Vaishali's and my social circle are lighter than she. Over and over I see how light skin equals privilege. Now that I have become Vaishali's mother, I realize: We need darker friends.

I can't help but worry (I'm a Jewish mother!) and yet so far, our non-traditional family has been met with a surfeit of loving acceptance. My fears about disapproval from the Black community for adopting a dark-skin child seem laughable now. Before, riding the subway, I received no special response, but now, Black men and women offer me and Vaishali warm smiles; they give up their seats. Do people just, as a friend hypothesized, love babies? Maybe, but this never happened to me when I toted around my equally adorable niece, nephew and godson, all of them white as snow.

It might just be Vaishali's vibe. Certainly her tiny size, enormous charm and extroverted nature would draw in anyone with a beating heart. As her mother, I am constantly on my knees before her, big-eyed with happiness at her intelligence, dead-on comic timing and fearlessness. She is so curious and ecstatic, so engaged with the world in ways I never was as a child, and rarely can be as an adult. Still, I wonder if her same spirit were encased in a lighter shell--who would her admirers be? In the six months we have been together, my fears for my daughter have not disappeared, but I'm betting that in the battles ahead, my own good sense will prevail. Note the matter of sunscreen: two specialists, one in infectious pediatric diseases and himself half Black, the other a famous, white dermatologist, both assured me that Vaishali's dark pigment is enough of a natural sunscreen. Vaishali's current pediatrician, a mocha-brown Indian, counter-advised me to put it on her. In the park, I approached the Black parents of a toddler the same color as Vaishali, and apologetically asked them for counsel.

"We put it on our baby and ourselves," said the mother. "Black people wear sunscreen to prevent skin cancer. We worry about our baby's skin the same as any one else." And more, I wanted to add, but I just thanked her. It became suddenly, ridiculously simple. I am my baby's protector, and I'm not taking any chances. I whipped out the SPF 45.

Lisa Lerner is the author of the novel Just Like Beauty.

By Lisa Lerner

A SON'S BITTERSWEET LOVE

One mother gave him away in Colombia. The other gave him up in Montana.

I AM A COLOMBIAN MAN. I do not speak Spanish. I cannot dance. And, I am in love with a white woman.

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I was born in 1979 at an unknown place to an unknown woman in Bogota, Colombia. What is known is that on March 10, I was placed in a basket on the steps of a run-down orphanage and legally determined abandoned. The nuns guessed that I was about 6 weeks old. That is what I know about my life in Colombia.

Six months later, a young Christian couple from Bismarck, North Dakota, paid $5,000 to adopt me, after seeing my picture in their local church's missionary newsletter. This was their third time to adopt from the agency; they were already raising one little girl. The second child died before they could bring her home. My adoptive mother's devastation gave her a hidden determination to save me, at all costs.

My mother is now in her 50s. She's a white woman in small-town Montana. She has always been strikingly beautiful and young-looking, often being misread as my older sister. People often said that she was the kindest woman they had ever met. She was the model Christian wife: hardworking and dedicated solely to her family. She worked 60 hours every week and gave all she had and then some to her family, hoping that her children would live the life she only dreamed of.

My father was one of the most openly racist people in my life. He was raised in an abusive home in North Carolina and became the product of his misogynistic, homophobic and racist upbringing. He was the one who told me that if it wasn't for him, I'd be picking coffee beans on a plantation. He cheated on my mom openly until they divorced when I was 5, leaving her with two kids and a mortgage. At night, she would crawl into my bed and cry. She would talk to me for hours and hold me tight and say, "I love you so much. Promise me you won't ever change." I promised, and she told me that I was her very best friend, her only friend in the world.

Rarely did we ever speak of Colombia or adoption growing up. My mom had a lot of fears--the fear that someone was going to come take me away, the fear that I would want to return to Colombia and look for my birth mother and the fear that my father might kidnap me in the night. Those fears kept me from ever exploring my past or my history, because I refused to do anything that would hurt her.

Growing up as a brown-skinned Latino in Montana was not easy. Most of the kids read me as Native American and treated me with such disdain. When I was in third grade, they called me a "chocolate-covered raisin," among other things. I fought on the playground daily for my right to exist. I earned respect, yet remained a target.

My mother tried to protect me the best way she knew how, by not acknowledging my brown-skinned reality. She would hug me and tell me, "Don't worry, honey. You are beautiful. It's like you have a year-round tan!" She would tell me how beautiful she always thought brown babies were, with their dark eyes and dark hair. I think I was her lifeline to another world, one more exotic and exciting than her real life.

Later in my childhood, my mom married a man who was already raising two daughters. We became one of the newest trends in the United States: the blended family. Although my mom fought with my sisters often, she and I never had conflict. In fact, the first fight we ever got into was over my hair. I was 19 years old, and I had returned from college with bleached blonde hair. She was so angry, but all I could understand her saying was that she just wanted babies with dark hair. That night, I stayed at my grandma's house. While she did apologize, she made the same request of me that she had always made: just don't ever change.

For the next three years we fought. She hated that I identified as a person of color. She would scream, "What does that mean? White is a color, too!" After three years of fighting, I explained to her that I could not be who she wanted me to be, and I could not have her in my life if she could not accept me for who I was. I left it for her to decide to accept me as I am or close the door forever. I have not seen, heard or spoken to her since.

I am now 27 years old and live in Oakland, California. I moved here five years ago to try to find a connection to political communities of color. But, I ended up still feeling like an outsider. I could not relate to their experiences or histories. All I knew was my own reality, one where my closest friends and family members were all white. I tried dating women of color, but there always seemed to be that same disconnect. Soon, I fell in love with a white woman, one who was full of the kindness and love that reminded me of my mother.

When my girlfriend and I used to walk by groups of people of color, I longed for their acceptance. As we edged closer, I imagined their words for me: sell-out, white-washed, traitor. I would feel ashamed. I conceptualized their words for who she might be to them: racial fetishist, trophy wife, stupid white girl. I would feel sad and torn. I imagined them shaking their heads thinking, "Damn, we lost another good man of color, stolen from us by some stupid white woman."

The last thought is more accurate than they know. I was stolen. I was abandoned, sold, white-washed and later disowned. My white mentality, my white words and my white memories betray the reality of my brown skin. But not because my white girlfriend made me this way.

There is a unique complexity for anyone living between identities, between different worlds. We are aliens; our existence is both suspect and intimate. We know that nothing is black or white, good or evil. Each of our stories is different and folded in the complexity of love and hatred, fear and safety, newness and loss, and privilege and racism. That privilege is now both my savior and my captor.

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At night, the same dreams haunt me. They are always about war, violence, whales beneath the water, the ocean and my mother. I think in the end, they are all about my mothers, both of them. I have one mother who gave me away and one who gave me up, and I loved them both, with everything in my being.

Mateo Cruz has dedicated the last eight years to working with and learning from young people of color. He works at HIFY (Health Initiatives for Youth) developing a team of peer health educators in East Oakland, California.

By Mateo Cruz

ADOPTION WAS NO SALVATION

Raised by a white missionary, one Indian woman remembers abuse, poverty and the road back home.

I WAS BORN IN 1953 on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. At the age of 18 months, I was adopted out to a white missionary family. This family was originally from Illinois but moved to South Dakota to "work with the Indians," a phrase my adoptive mother always used when she referred to her missionary call. Because of their close work with an Indian church, they were aware of babies being born to already large, poor families. They believed they would be helping a child have a better life in a home with money and "stability."

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The very thing that I was to be "saved from"--poverty, abuse and alcoholism--was thrust onto me by life's natural unfolding. My adoptive father died as a result of a farm accident when I was 6. The farm was lost and my uneducated, emotionally unstable mother supported us on a minimum-wage job as she faded in and out of sanity. I was the target of her pained, frustrated and broken heart and endured years of verbal, physical and sexual abuse.

Growing up was difficult because of poverty and abuse, though I often think I probably could have survived that alone. But it was the feelings of "being different" because I didn't look like any one around me that led to unbearable feelings of isolation. I grew up without an Indian face to reflect my image and so concluded that I was ugly and unwanted. All I knew was that I did not fit in anywhere, and, at the age of 14,1 learned to numb those desperate feelings with alcohol and drugs. However, somewhere deep within myself I had a sense--as small as it was--that I was Indian and that it was a good thing. I had no language for those feelings. I never discussed it with anyone. I did not know how I was going to get out, but I felt that someday I would.

I survived and graduated from high school, joined the navy. got married and had two children. I got divorced and, over the last 24 years, have overcome the cycle of addiction to alcohol. I also began healing from the wounds caused by my adoptive mother. In 1988, I went home to the Rosebud Sioux Reservation for the first time. My family not only remembered me, but they have also come to expect another relative to return each year. I was one of nine brothers and sisters, and all but one were fostered or adopted out. My mother, Nina Lulu White Hawk, was the oldest of 20 children, most of whom had endured the hardships of boarding schools. My family welcomed me home and encouraged me to keep coming back.

There was a time when I thought that my feelings of isolation, confusion and shame were solely a result of the abuse. I now know that they were a result of not being connected to that spiritual center as an Indian woman. I have since gained a sense of pride, dignity, belonging and purpose in my life. This is a direct result of our traditional songs and ceremonies. I had very good counseling throughout the years, but it was not until I first heard the drum that my heart began to open and the years of shame, anger and resentment began to leave. The healing effects of sage, sweet grass and other medicines quieted my raging spirit and replaced it with a sense of purpose to my life. Our ceremonial songs, given to us by our ancestors, those old songs spoken in our language encouraged that part of my heart that I had closed many years before. My spirit is Indian. Even though for along time I did not know what that meant, the songs, ceremonies and medicines healed me and brought me home to my self.

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Today, even with the Indian Child Welfare Act, which gave tribes rather than states the right to find homes for foster children, we still have many children placed in white foster homes. Our Indian families and communities are still healing from the inter-generational trauma of boarding schools, adoption and foster care. This systematic removal of our children has it roots in the time when reservations were first formed. In the 1890s, the government began the systematic removal of our children as part of its assimilation policy. They took children and placed them in boarding schools. At the same time, missionaries came and then the social service system. Their answer to the poverty on the reservations was to convince us that our children "deserved a chance at a better life." Many broken-hearted mothers did hand over their children to Lutheran Social Services, Catholic Charities and other similar agencies. Many were coerced with shame by being told, "You don't have anything to offer your child:" The Child Welfare League of America had a federally funded Indian Adoption Project that focused on placing Indian children. The organization has since made a public apology for the insensitive and damaging effects of the project, which added to the near destruction of Indian families.

I find it ironic that these agencies looked at the concentration camp conditions of the reservations created by the United States government, and instead of saying, "How can we help improve their quality of life?" they concluded that children, the only thing we had left to secure our future, needed to be taken from their families. Quality of life is not solely determined by money and possessions. Quality of life is family, a sense of belonging. How many biographies have we read in which people say, "We were poor, but we had each other"? As Indian people, we were denied the security of our family. Today, even though there has been some improvement and understanding, I still see too many parental rights terminated and far too many children put in foster care. Sadly, misguided social workers still believe it is "in the best interest of the child" to place Indian children outside of their culture. And while the Indian Child Welfare Act is a federal policy, we still have to be vigilant to ensure that tribes maintain jurisdiction over their children.

I believe we need to put our hearts and minds together to strengthen families. We need to find ways to keep families intact during crisis. And most importantly, states must recognize that the Indian Child Welfare Act is a federal policy and work with the tribes, following their lead in matters affecting child welfare.

There are meetings happening right now throughout this country. Minds are coming together, trying to bring a solution to help families in crisis. They spend many creative hours over the topics of "safety and permanency." Meanwhile, at the same time, an adult adoptee or fostered individual who was raised in a "permanent home" is struggling to make his way back to his beginning, finding his people and searching for that sense of belonging.

As I have traveled and listened to stories on all sides of this issue, one comment stays with me: "When you take a child from a family you are taking them from their grandparents." Right now, as you read this, a grandmother is praying for the return of her grandchild.

Generation after generation, we are coming home.

Sandra White Hawk is Sicangu Lakota and co-founder and director of First Nations Orphan Association, whose mission is to unite adoptees and fostered individuals and their families with their tribes, communities, other adoptees and fostered individuals, spiritual leaders and traditional elders.

By Sandra White Hawk