Many parents who adopt transracially deeply feel that looks shouldn’t matter. And in one sense they shouldn’t. But I’ve come to see that looks cause assumptions to be made. Assumptions that my daughter is lost, although she’s standing right next to me. (She’s Korean and I’m fair-skinned.) Assumptions that I’m her babysitter. Assumptions that she doesn’t speak English. Certain aspects of how one looks carry assumptions based on past experiences and emotions. Different people have different assumptions about who feels threatening and who feels comforting. The more we are around something, the more it becomes part of what we define as “normal”.
For Americans, a “new normal” began last night.
My eight-year old has been talking about Barack Obama for weeks now. She poked her head into the room while I was watching the first presidential debate and said, “I hope that black guy gets it.”
“Why?” I pressed. She couldn’t really tell me, so I chided her for making judgments based on appearances. I told her that it was more important what ideas the candidates had for helping our country.
Much to my surprise—I’ve had limited success so far in getting my kids to share my interest in current events—she has continued to talk about Obama over the past six weeks. She has mentioned various reasons at different times, telling me things that she’d heard at school and in her Brownie group while working on the “Citizens” patch. She told me that she wanted him to win because “he would be the first different one”.
Again I told her it would be nice to have a president of color someday, but beliefs and actions were more important in deciding whom to vote for.
I still hold to that basic truth, but after last night I understand my daughter’s comment better. I saw the news anchors hold up the classroom poster of all the past Presidents, then superimpose Barack Obama’s face among them. My daughter had the biggest grin on her face, and I was unexpectedly moved.
I have written before about the impact on my daughters of having a young Korean woman as a role model. Now there is a very visible role model for the nation. A role model that says you can be different and still make it to the top. One commentator said last night that Obama’s presidency would make it much easier for voters to imagine a woman president or a president of another minority group in the future.
Adoptive parents often seek out diverse schools for their children,even if they can’t find schools of their child’s specific culture, or even if their child is white and being raised by white adoptive parents. Even if there are no other Koreans or adoptees at school, having immigrant families, single-parent families, blended families—all kinds of diversity–means that students at that school are likely to think that it’s okay to be different. When the child’s peers do learn of his adoption, they may not know what it means, but they already know that people are different and that is okay.
My daughter knows that she can’t be the president herself, because although she is a U.S. citizen, she wasn’t born one. But she knows that she can vote when she’s eighteen, and she knows that she might be voting for someone who looks like her. Now she knows that we really mean it when we say people are equal in America.
A columnist in our local paper put it well:
“[Martin Luther] King’s dream came true. Finally, suddenly, publicly, the nation collectively judged a man not for the color of his skin but for the content of his character.”
Whether you do or don’t like Obama’s ideas, it’s nice to have a new, expanded definition of normal.
Please see these related blogs:
Would They Have Done that to Me?
How Do my Adopted Kids Think about Skin Color?