What is the whitest thing

I need a small break today. The program I work on is gearing up for new events, and it’s just constant nose-to-grindstone craziness. I’ve discovered, to my chagrin, that I have no anger management skills. I have so rarely actually gotten angry in my life, for good or ill, that now that I am healthier and feeling those things, I have very little ability to process. I just sort of sit and silently fume and worry I’m going to explode. A lack of anger management skills and a propensity to busy myself when upset just creates this massive feedback loop. Work makes me cranky, so I WORK MOAR, and soon I realize I am just a hair’s breath away from cussing at somebody I am not too fond of in the office these days. Which, really, I think that is just great, but it’s not so great for everybody else in the office who has to deal with the tension that will create.

I remember Mr. Flint once told me that during finals, I would become irrationally workaholic. I’d have my nose pressed in my book, taking notes, and talking about how I hadn’t eaten or slept in a day. Mr. Flint would tell me I should take a break, and I’d say, “No time.” He’d fill a glass of water and put it next to me and tell me I should at least drink that. I’d look up at the water, look down at my book, and say, “No time.” I find myself doing that lately. “I should get up and stretch my back.” NO TIME. So every time that goes through my head, I force myself to quit and do something non-work-related for a moment. Today, it’s a blog.

The project I work on, I’ve mentioned that it has to do, basically, with white parents who adopt African-American children. That’s not our stated mission — we serve adopted African-American and African children, and would serve any kind of parent that came along with the kid — but what it boils down to is that we serve white parents who have adopted African-American and African children. Black folk certainly adopt black kids, but their adoptions tend to be more informal, because African-Americans have a pretty different idea of what community and family means than white people, and because African-Americans are immensely distrustful of government officials. So, when white folk want to adopt, they find an agency and go through a system, and eventually they land in our lap. When black folk want to adopt, they take in a kid from their neighborhood who needs a home, and don’t involve themselves in the system.

My roommate was asking me what my sense of the parents we serve is; that is, how did they come to this place where they adopt black children? My answer was that most of them came to this place as a third or fourth option. First they wanted to adopt a white baby, and couldn’t find one. Then they went international to get a white-enough baby, and ran out of money, or decided they were too important to wait and wade through paperwork. So eventually they accepted a black baby, because they didn’t have the time, money, or patience to adopt a child through any other means but the public foster care system.

(As a ranting aside, and after all this they THEN have the gall to FREAK OUT whenever anybody suggests they ought to take a two-hour training class on race before adopting. “How are we to learn how to live in a color-blind society if you won’t even let black kids be adopted by white parents?” they say, conveniently ignoring the fact that they didn’t want black kids until they had no other options.)

This isn’t true for all of them, but I feel comfortable making a complete and utter generalization, because, really, this is true for most of them. And I’ll again put in the disclaimer that even though most of our parents start this way, there’s no reason they have to stay that way — no reason except their own unexamined privilege that allows them to never functionally change.

There are other kinds of families we serve. Ultra liberal types who think adopting a black child is the way to King’s Dreamland, proof of their progressive street cred. Ultra conservative types who think God called them to civilize the world. Both types are dangerous, because both are inflexible. Their world view is naive, narrow, and incompatible with change, adaptation, or growth.

We also serve a lot of non-heterosexual families. Sometimes, these families aren’t much different than the heterosexual privileged families that come to black children as a third or fourth option. They’ve tried in-vitro, they couldn’t find a donor, they didn’t have the money for international, so finally they settled on us. But a good deal of them adopt black children because they’re accessible to non-heterosexual families. African-American children are disproportionately represented in child welfare, and they desperately need homes and families. When you confront a crisis like that, you’re less likely to turn away a dyke who wants to love and raise a child nobody else wants.

That could be a recipe for disaster, really, because in some ways it’s still based on privilege. Black children would not be overly represented, would not be so accessible, so clogging the system that we even let homo-gays adopt them, without a major push from racism. And if there were no homo-hate, non-heterosexual families would have access to all the avenues of adoption that heterosexual families have. So in many ways they’re accepting black children, instead of seeking them, or wanting them.

But as a result of heterosexism, non-heterosexuals have a certain degree of flexibility that heterosexuals haven’t been required to learn. When you tell gay couples that sexism and racism exists, they say, “O RLY,” instead of “Oh, I think we’re beyond that by now.” When you tell them they have to be sure they can raise their children to expect and understand and cope with discrimination, they are already way ahead of you. Which is not to say they still don’t have miles of work to do to cope with racism and white privilege. But it’s a lot easier for non-heterosexuals to arrive at that “click” moment, where they realize that discrimination still exists, is virulent, and requires their active effort to confront and eliminate. It’s a matter of further generalizing their already available understanding of discrimination, rather than the tooth-pulling work it takes to activate that sense in the first place.

Anyway. All of this is a prelude to the story I want to tell, to put this conversation into context. This conversation is more blunt and direct than we usually get, but it’s by no means more fucked-up. When you’re talking about people who have come to accept non-white children only as a very last option of getting what they (the white people) want, the story below is nothing exciting, new, or unbelieveable. It’s standard fare. Racism has done a myriad of inhuman things to black people, but it’s mindfucked the hell out of white folk, too. It’s made us stupid enough to have the conversation below:

A while ago, a new family with a six year old son showed up at one of our events. Afterwards, the mother went to speak to our facilitator. The mother described how difficult the event had been. The facilitator, who is a very compassionate woman, said yes, it’s a lot of stuff to take in all at once, all this learning about racism and white privilege.

Mother: No, no. That wasn’t what I meant. I mean, to come here tonight, you know. We had to have the talk.

Facilitator: The talk? What talk do you mean, exactly?

Mother: Well, you know. We had to tell our son.

Facilitator: I’m sorry, I don’t understand. What did you have to tell him?

Mother: Well, we had to tell him he was black.

Facilitator: …

Mother: And then, of course, we had to have the other talk.

Facilitator: Okay…

Mother: Because now we had to tell him he was adopted.

When we hashed this conversation over during staff meeting, one of my co-workers quipped, “Did she tell him he was a boy, too? How else is he going to know?”

What is the whitest thing.