I saw a show about adoptions the day before yesterday. A couple from ‘frozenland’ Canada, white as white can be adopted a child from Haiti. Another adopted one from Korea. I am undecided about the wisdom of doing this, taking into consideration the welfare of the child only. One side of me says “who cares, if they are open enough to want to add a child of a completely different background to their family then they probably want that child very much and will love him/her through thick and thin. Good parents are good parents are good parents”. Another side of me says “what the heck are they thinking? This child will be forever alienated, always feeling that she/he doesn’t belong. That’s a terrible idea”.
What do you think?
The other matter is when biological children don’t look like their parents, something of which I have firsthand experience. Let’s see: My mom is dark-skinned, my dad white with blue eyes. I am somewhere in between them. No problem, I don’t look like any of them, but anyone would believe that I am the daughter of each of them (guessing immediately what my other parent looks like).
I married an “ethnic Dane”, and had a blonde, very light-skinned, blue-eyed child. I get surprised looks in the street, and (nosy) people ask me if she *really *is my daughter. To top it off she is my husband’s spitting image. The only thing she got from me was the ‘pixie ears’ that I had until puberty.
Knowing that there was a chance this would happen, I thought about it before we had children, and decided that I would rather my daughter looked like me, or at least a bit like me. My husband never said what he thought about the matter, except that she wanted her to have curly hair a la Sonia Braga. That didn’t happen either. This bugs me a little, but it hasn’t diminished or changed my love for her in the least, as a matter of fact it is a bit funny to have a small copy of my husband around. I hope my daughter doesn’t mind either that she’ll be asked “is she *really *your mom?” when she grows up. I wonder if my child is not in a similar position as those children adopted by parents of different ethnic backgrounds. Will this affect her at all?
In this year 2006, my children have the following heritage: English, Scottish, Welsh, German, Cherokee Indian, Irish, and Mexican. Long gone are the days when almost everyone could state “what they are”. I thought the days were long behind us when anybody cared what skin colors make up a family. I had hoped, anyway.
Also, of the two boys that I’ve had with one man, one looks exactly, and I mean exactly, like him. The other looks exactly, and I mean exactly, like me. I’d never thought to have any expectations of what they would look like. What they look like is part of who they are, and I wouldn’t have them any other way. They’re the perfect thems.
Well, in my family it is worse. I am a mutt, I don’t care where my ancestors came from, and I only have the vaguest idea. But this is not about heavily mixed families, I am talking about children that don’t look *anything *like their parents. Please try and see what I am trying to say (but am probably failing miserably at conveying). How does it affect a child to grow up with parents, or a parent, that does not resemble them physically in the least?.
Okay, I understand a little better what you’re talking about in re to obviously dissimiliar origins. I’d have to say maybe some people find it odd, or will stare, but I really do feel that it’s 100 times better than it was in 1954, and in another 50 years it’ll be 100 times better yet. People, especially Americans, are being more and more homogenous. Heck, they changed Betty Crocker from a 50’s white woman into a hip Latino chick. Maybe I live in an area of the country where mixing of all races is prevalent and doesn’t really get a second glance. I’m glad of that.
What I said about my own two boys- I mean one looks nothing at all like his father, and the other one looks nothing at all like me. Really. Not one iota. I’m fascinated with the looks of one, because he’s the spitting image of my brother, my grandfather, and I’m sure many others way back there. He’s like an icon for my genes. The other one, I don’t mind that he doesn’t look anything like me. It’s like, when I first got pregnant with the second, I wanted a girl. After he was born, and I saw that it was him, all thought of wanting a girl went out the window. I wouldn’t even have wanted a girl, because then it wouldn’t have been him. I wouldn’t want the one who doesn’t look like me to look like me, because then it wouldn’t be him!
But even then, when we reach racial-relationship utopia, the child might still feel like he doesn’t belong. It is not a matter of color only, a pigmy child adopted into a Tutsi family would probably feel the same.
I have never known a “different looking” child, adopted or otherwise, that didn’t feel like he belonged to a loving family. Many adoptive parents make an extra effort to involve a child from another culture in that culture, giving them a sense of roots. My son looks like his dad. In fact, my ex had children with at least three women, and when all the kids get together, you’d swear they were all from the same pair of parents.
I knew a Japanese guy who was adopted and raised by a white family. He said he didn’t feel like an outsider until he was a teenager and started noticing racist assholes around him.
I wonder how that same child would feel about herself if she were never adopted, if she spent her entire childhood and adolescence in a Haitian or Korean orphanage, run by a rotating series of staffers who don’t have a particular interest in her personally. I wonder if she would feel like she was never really loved, like she was part of an unwanted class of society, as she sees other kids in the neighborhood who have parents who do things with them and take them places.
On a semi-related note, it kinda bugs me when Tiger Woods is described as “black”, when he himself doesn’t use that term and has only one black grandparent. It smacks of creepy “one drop” sentiment.
We both agree that the fate of these children would be far worse if they hadn’t been adopted, but this still has nothing to do with my original question.
Although I’m mixed, african-american mom and white dad, I look hispanic. (Now that I live in NOVA, a heavily hispanic area, people constantly try speaking to me in spanish -which is funny because my daughter who looks clearly AA has to answer them for me) Up until high school there was no one else around who looked like me. The other mixed children typically had stereoptypical african-american features and a more dustyish skin and hair color.
It was strange because, back then, a lot of people of would ask “What are you?”. and I do mean a lot, it was a very frequent question - pretty much anytime I met somone new without my mother around.
When I found out I was pregnant with my first child I really, really wanted her to look at least a little bit like me. I wanted to be able to go someplace and have it be obvious that we belonged together, that she was mine. She looks nothing like me. Which saddened me at first, but I love the rich darkness of her skin and I of course love her no matter what.
Then when I got pregnant with my second daughter I didn’t want her to look like me because I wanted it to be obvious that my kids were siblings. Which worked out a bit although she does have my hair.
I think the net effect on me has been that although other people find me attractive, I don’t think so - not that I feel ugly, but to me african-american features and skin color is my standard of beauty. I do recognize that other races/ethnicities are attractive but not in a Wow kind of way.
Well, my gut says that people naturally prefer the familiar - those ‘in my tribe’ - but that social conditioning can overcome that, and should. Therefore it’s good for the kid to overcome it early (as well as the community).
Which is 100% European, plus whatever “Mexican” is supposed to mean, plus the ubiquitous mythical Cherokee, which is probably a 64th fraction of a famly legend with no documentation. News flash… that’s pretty much every white person in the country, please don’t pretend that it passes for the kind of diversity that is relevant to this question.
I think “Mexican” means she has ancestry from Mexico. You know, the country just south of the US? While some ignorants try to use “Mexican” as “catch-all Latin-American,” I’m sure trublmakr is not using it that way. What else could “Mexican” mean in this context?
And 100% + something else > 100%. How can that be? Her kids aren’t 100% European plus something else; that’s impossible. They’re 85% European or 90% European or 50% European or whatever. You can only have 100% total.
It could still make parents look different from their offspring. My mother looks Mexican
(Which means they look like they are someone from the country of Mexico, a land largely populated by persons with the charachteristics of having hair, eyes and skin darker than what is average in northern Europeans. The same group who are discriminated against to this day in my home state, even though persons descended from mexican immigrants are the majority here.)
by virtue of her grandmother being 100% Native American
(Which is not to say Cherokee, but Comanche, and yes, it makes me 1/8 indian, no one is claiming that they are owed land here.)
. She has such a Mexican appearance, that many times in her life she has been approached by a stranger who was speaking Spanish to her. When she explained (in English) that she did not speak Spanish, the other person responded they had assumed that was all she spoke.
But, by virtue of the crapshoot that is genetics, my sister and I look like we are out of the cast of a Wagner opera. We have pale skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. My dad also had dark hair, skin and eyes. But his grandfather was a Swede. This difference in the appearance of my parents and I has not really caused problems, but it has caused awkward moments. My mother has been mistaken to be the housekeeper on more than one occasion by persons introduced to my sister and I first, and by persons in stores, etc. I know of one time where she was asked, jokingly I hope, if she was certian that we were hers. I don’t think that is enough of a problem to make people think twice about the appearance of the child they raise. From this child’s point of view, it was always easy enough to explain. A lot easier to explain than my father’s idea of a joke, or the hair that sprouted out of his (and my) ears.
But I would say it was relevant to the discussion.
(Maybe I am being whooshed here, maybe nobody is really that dumb)
A bit off-topic, but occasionally siblings look totally different from each other. Here’s a Snopes story about a woman of mixed heritage who gave birth to two girls, fraternal twins. One is blond with blue eyes, the other one is black.
OK, congratulations everybody for missing my point. If you have a parent who is white and a child who looks vaguely hispanic, these people will not face the same set of problems as a parent who looks Nordic and a child who is obviously African, or Korean, or what have you. Or for that matter, of people of distinctly different appearance who marry one another. And my beef, which I’ll stick to, is the faux diversity of listing a half dozen Western European countries in one’s heritage.
I was referring to the mythical native american grandmother that always seems to pop up in discussions of diversity where people feel the need to seem a little more exotic. Funny how it always seems to be white people who do this.
Why do you say she looks Mexican and not Honduran or Salvadoran or Costa Rican or Bolivian? Does she wear a sombrero and carry a pair of maracas everywhere she goes? Mexican is a nationality. What you mean is Hispanic or Native American.
It meant that all 100% of the preceding terms were European, not referring to fractions of ancestry. Excellent job totally missing the point though.
Well, a little alienation isn’t such a terrible thing. We all feel alienated at least a little. And what do you do when you feel alienated? You move to New York!
In short, I don’t think this is such a big deal. The Haitian girl being raised on the tundra, it’ll be obvious she’s adopted, but there’s no inherent harm in that – so long as people don’t treat her badly, of course. If she’s treated normally, she’ll grow up normal. As people have said above, the whole uniethnic, unitribal model has gone by the wayside. If it hadn’t, those Canucks would never have wanted to adopt a Haitian girl in the first place.