“Transracial adoption” is a major bugaboo on the left these days. If you couldn’t tell from the term, it’s when families adopt a baby of a...
“Transracial adoption” is a major bugaboo on the left these days. If you couldn’t tell from the term, it’s when families adopt a baby of a different race, and the left seems to complain about it most in the context of a white family adopting a black or minority baby.
Check out the headlines from just this year alone. People: “Why ‘Colorblindness’ Doesn’t Work for Transracial Adoptions — and How to Get It Right.” Newsweek: “We Celebrate Transracial Adoption. But Child Welfare Can’t Ignore Race.”
One of the loudest critics of transracial adoption at the moment is Rebecca Carroll, a black writer and transracial adoptee. She went viral during the oral arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court case that could end up overturning Roe v. Wade. In particular, she criticized Justice Amy Coney Barrett for her remarks about adoption — and for the fact that Barrett herself is a transracial adopter.
“My memoir Surviving the White Gaze, which came out earlier this year, is not just my story about the enduring trauma of being adopted into a white family, but an excavation of the chillingly foundational dynamic of transracial adoption in America,” she wrote as part of a Twitter thread.
“Amy Coney Barrett‘s callous suggestion that birthmothers just gestate children and then give them up for adoption is sadly emblematic of that foundational dynamic. That she is an adoptive mother of two Black children all the more so.”
“Amy Coney Barrett in her stance here alone has already damaged the psyches of her Black adoptive children — has already made them feel like their origin stories were transactional, that she saved them from heartless Black vessel,” she said later in the thread.
“Barrett is the White Gaze incarnate, but she is not the only form of it — my adoptive white parents are well-intentioned, liberal, educated people. They created what they thought was an idyllic world, but it was through THEIR gaze, which meant a race-less existence.”
That was on Wednesday. On Thursday, she had a message for white adoptive families who might want her advice: back off.
“Prospective white adoptive parents looking for advice or information about transracial adoption — respectfully, I don’t do free consultation work,” she said. “Like discussing racism, and specifically breaking it down for white people, this is emotional labor. Hard emotional labor.”
Kmele Foster, a black libertarian-leaning podcaster and political commentator — as well as someone who was raised, in part, by someone who wasn’t his biological parent — thought this was a good thing.
“This is a blessing; she can’t *help* you,” he said in a tweet.
“I was raised by my mother + a dad who wasn’t my biological father. His attention/love is an unmatched gift.
“If you’re considering adoption and have the means to provide a loving home, DON’T LET ANYTHING AS TRIVIAL AS PHENOTYPE STOP YOU,” he added.
For those of you who graduated with a Common Core education, phenotype is the outwardly visible, genetically determined physical characteristics of a living thing.
In Carroll’s thread, she implied that the real tragedy for black children was the violence of being adopted by a white family. The violence of abortion or the heartbreak of being a ward of child services, meanwhile, didn’t even enter into the picture. Better to sacrifice unborn babies and foster children upon the altar of wokeness — particularly if they’re black — than to allow them to undergo the indignity of being raised by someone who doesn’t look like them.
And if you’re a white parent who wants to adopt a child that’s not of your race, don’t expect counsel from Rebecca Carroll. This is hard emotional labor, and you need to DO THE WORK.
As Foster pointed out, it’s probably a good thing she can’t help you because she seems indifferent to whether your prospective child was killed in the womb or not. Your child, meanwhile, will almost certainly have a different opinion.
Foster’s tweet wasn’t the only sturm und drang Carroll faced over her thread. However, they did have one final exchange after Carroll tweeted out praise for those on her side in the form of a passive-aggressive thank-you: “The way my people look out for me — whew. So grateful.”
“There are hundreds of thousands of children in the United States foster care system,” Foster tweeted. “If a single one of them misses out on a loving home because of your *work,* it’s one too many. You could acknowledge legitimate criticism or just play *wounded victim.*”
She’ll be playing wounded victim, of course. That’s not even a question.
As for the wounded victims in the womb or the foster care system, don’t expect much sympathy for them from Carroll or her allies. That’s emotional labor. Hard emotional labor.
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