Does a questioner have the right to want to know about an adopted child’s birth parents? This issue was presented last summer in Creating a Family. A young mother who adopted a mixed-race child agonized in a blog post Is His Father Black? about what to tell people when they asked her about the child’s racial mix. She would explain that the child’s father was Black and the mother White, but that her husband (the adoptive father) was White. Why explain that detail? They asked about the child, not her partner, and the answer implies distancing herself from the child’s ethnicity, making a Black father a negative. I absorbed such inadvertent subliminal messages early on, when my German mother said to me she would not have wanted me had I been “a little Black boy.” I instantly knew, then and there, that something was “wrong” with little Black boys.

 I feel the White mother needs to learn not to answer curious interrogators. White or Black or whatever ethnicity they may be. With interracial/international adoptions becoming a popular feature in White USA and Europe, the child’s sensitivity to becoming a conversation piece needs to be considered. It may be interesting at first, but was having a child that looked different than them part of their objective for adopting an exotic child?

It always aggravated me that just because I was dark with White parents, people felt entitled to ask how come I was not with the ones who gave me life. I briefly, and faithfully answered while feeling thoroughly invaded. In spite of the fine education I received, the three languages I spoke fluently, and moving with ease within every culture into which I was introduced, I had not been taught to strengthen that particular aspect of my life. I believe it was because I was a much loved little conversation piece.

As a child, teen, young adult, full-fledged adult… I always felt emotionally invaded when, by answering, I had allowed my boundaries to be breached. No one ever asks a White, blue eyed person why their eyes are blue when their parents are not, or why they have curly hair and their parents don’t. It was the same with people touching my hair, wanting to know what its consistency felt like. When I was older (in my early fifties) and got my gumption, I touched a White woman’s hair right back. “Touching me is too close,” I said, and still delight at the memory of her shocked expression. But she got it, and I’m quite sure, in the future, she thought before invading someone else’s boundaries.

Again, in my early fifties, I suddenly realized, (and was quite appalled at the realization) that questions about my birth parents were none of anyone’s, other than perhaps my physician’s, business. It would have been fantastic to have known how to cope with that burden in childhood.

And so, my suggestion to the young mother of her mixed-race child, is to learn to recognize that when she adopted the darling little brown baby, she and her husband became a minority. Simple as that.