Opinion:Raising Culturally Responsive Black Children in White Adoptive Homes
Occasionally, we will link to media opinions on aspects of adoption and child welfare that you may never have thought about. This opinion piece discusses aspects of raising “culturally responsive” Black children in White adoptive homes. Darren T. Smith, PhD is a professor at Wichita State University. Dr. Smith’s research focus includes racial identity development, the impact of discrimination on healthcare practitioners, and social determinants of health and the effects of stress on the human body. Dr. Smith’s is the author of White parents, Black children: Experiencing Transracial Adoption (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011). He has a website that you can view here that has a tab on the topic of transracial adoption.
This opinion piece was published on his blog last September and was also published in an issue of Adoption Today.
Excerpt:
“Black Americans have traditionally learned and operated in two different registers which gave rise to Du Bois’ “double consciousness.” The recent film The Help cinematically illustrates the different codes and registers that African American female domestic workers utilized while working with and among whites in the “big house” with its own specific codes of power and linguistic structure, while simultaneously living in blackness at home with informal dialects and mannerisms. Many professional blacks often say they can’t wait to finish work so they can go home and be black, or in other words, be themselves. Black Americans have been expected to learn specific rules and conventions that benefit “well-behaved” minorities within and between the white and black worlds, and yet, they are faced with mostly negative racialized impressions, experiences and interactions when encountering the white community. These racial slights that occur daily, often in the form of micro-aggressions, are confusing for youth and cause a myriad of emotions from pain and sadness to anger and self-hatred. White parents must be especially attuned to listening to the racialized stories, experiences of racial misdeeds reported by their adopted children, which has the potential to cause harm to their fragile identities. Du Bois felt the weight of this tension on his soul as he expressed the difficulties that black Americans are faced with being too white for blacks and too black for whites.
White parents must know the perils and pitfalls of rearing black children in a nation with a long protracted history of racial discrimination. The looks and jeers of curious spectators double-taking when the blended family is out in public should be a hint of what black adoptees experience on any given day, whether consciously or not. That black and white Americans live in two dissimilar worlds with opposing codes of power and rules of conduct, Du Bois argued those rules and codes preferentially proffered whites at the expense of African Americans. In order for a black person like myself to gain some rewards and advantages in this country, I along with scores of other typically middle-class and well-educated people of color have to be proficient in these preferred racial codes which are often hidden from plain sight, but have enormous consequences for social mobility. For African Americans, the need and ability to tread between two separate and opposing registers is identified as “code switching.” Though this is often unconscious, it affords black Americans the ability to traverse white norms and values in order to “succeed” in the illusion of the American Dream, while still maintaining a connection with and understanding of the black community and its central struggles with racism and class inequalities as they move up the social ladder and try to preserve their status as middle class.
Black Americans raised in predominately white homes and communities never develop, or are slow to develop, what sociolinguist call alternate “registers,” specific varieties of informal/formal styles of speech that are racially and ethnically distinct from the white dominant group. Because black adoptees spend a considerable amount of time around whites, they become adroit at understanding and speaking in largely white middle class ways. These “socially white” brown and black people might have all the racial markings of blackness, but they know very little about the black experience, rendering them to some extent as “culturally incomplete.””
Read it in its entirety at
[Huffington Post 1/29/13 by Darren T. Smith PhD]
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