Transracial adoption and making sense of microaggressions

I attended the Adoptive Parents’ Committee conference in Brooklyn yesterday, and heard several exciting presentations.  It was fabulous to hear all the stories, from attendees and presenters, and get a sense of where parents are on their paths to adoption.

One of the most interesting workshops I attended was on transracial adoption.  As a social worker, I learned about microaggressions and how difficult, fatiguing and ultimately damaging it can be to be constantly responding to the subtle manifestations of racism, heterosexism, classism, and the other -sims that plague us in this American life.  (If you are not familiar with the concept of microaggressions, a good recent aritcle is “Microaggressions Matter,” from the Atlantic Monthly.)

The aha moment for me was beginning to understand how disorienting and challenging it must be for adoptees who are not the same race as their parents to make sense of microaggressions, because in such a complicated and touchy area they are dealing with a subtle and insidious form of racism that many of us white folks are unaware of in our daily lives.  And how this is another way that it is hard to find that mirroring experience for the adoptee at home, and a place where action and advocacy is often called for on the part of parents.  And how this could be a source of life-long stress and a topic that could certainly impact therapy–content, of course, but also the therapeutic relationship.

Adoptive Families has addressed this (Responding to “Invisible Racism”) and our workshop, led by Jessica Pelton Rowell, MPA and Bob Bamman, LCSW had some suggestions for adoptive parents, such as make sure your world includes people of different races and in particular people of the same race as your child, and use them as mentors and resource people.  And we did an experiential exercise to see just how racially diverse our worlds are (hint:  for someone who lives in New York City and in one of its most diverse neighborhoods, I was surprised to see how non-diverse my everyday world is).

This has made me even more curious about the experience of transracial adoptees as they navigate their biological and adoptive worlds and the many worlds through which they move.  I’ll be doing some reading and look forward to posting more.