Hair New Era

Suzanne Vega's adopted. Sort of. At age 9 she found out her daddy wasn't her real daddy. She was also shocked because that meant she was White. (Adoptive dad/stepdad was Puerto Rican and she'd always identified with that part of her "heritage.") She says she felt embarrassed to suddenly be different from her siblings, and later felt like an impostor when singing with a Latin Arts group.

She found her birth dad at age 28. Turns out he was also a musician, and he'd been fully adopted.

"I looked at his eyes and hands, and recognized my own. There was this spiritual connection, too. It was as if I suddenly understood myself better." 

He'd found his own bio parents and guess what––they were musicians too. And apparently Vega had been an outlier in her family when it came to music:

"Finally," she tells Oprah Magazine, "I felt like I belonged."

It's stories like these that add to the nature/nurture debate. When you find birth family and sudden commonality in interests, personality, and those intangible, non-biological traits, it seems to tip the evidence toward the all-determining-birth-culture argument.

Enter the endless debate and source for scientific investigation. ABCNews asks, "Is there a Music Gene?" Sperm/egg donor clinics surely benefit from a belief in all-determining biology. Pick this donor! He's a super smart doctor and musician! But does your kid actually turn out exactly the way you want that way? What if you have a propensity for something but need a particular environment for it to manifest? Sometimes adopteds find that their birth parents are totally opposite of them in every way except appearance. I know folks with that experience, but you don't hear those stories as much because they don't have the exciting "ah-ha!" quality.

But back to Vega and her music. Naturally, she's written about her experience finding her dad. (If you're adopted and you're an artist, it's impossible not to have adoption themes appear in your work I think.) Check out "Blood Sings." My favorite line: "When blood sees blood of its own, it sings to see itself again."

There's a new petition (sign here) to name an official day for adoptee equal rights:
"WHEREAS: It is only since the 1940s that outdated, archaic, draconian regulations have been enacted, unjustly sealing and denying equal access by adopted persons to their own original birth certificates, 

WHEREAS: This denial of equal civil and human rights was set in motion by regulations that were opposed from the onset by the Child Welfare League of America and were based on no-longer relevant social stigmas on infertility and illegitimate birth status,

WHEREAS: Alaska and Kansas which never enacted these restrictive, discriminatory regulations has experienced no negative consequences to any citizen nor any increase in abortions or decrease in adoptions, 

WHEREAS: There is absolutely no evidence to indicate that mothers or fathers relinquishing children for adoption voluntarily or involuntarily were ever given any promise of anonymity from their children, and most are eager to know of the well
being of their adopted-out offspring,"

Recently in Pittsburgh I met Barbara Katz Rothman, sociology professor at CUNY and author of Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption. Her book is part personal story part sociological study of transracial adoption. She and her husband adopted their African American daughter as an infant.

I had the opportunity to hang out briefly with Barbara one-on-one. Our first interaction happened via e-mail, as I told her I'd be picking her up from the airport.

Me: "My hair will help you recognize me [in the airport]--it's big and curly."

Barbara: "and my hair will help you -- it's grey with a purple streak."




Sure was. She said she dyed it for fun with her daughter years back, then she became fascinated with folks' reactions of shock and wonderment and kept it. "Women with gray hair aren't expected to celebrate it," she said.

True. Rather, it seems to me, they are to pretend there's no gray by dyeing their hair some "fake natural" color. Because women aren't supposed to age, right?

Sponsored by the Pittsburgh Consortium for Adoption Studies, Barbara gave a talk called "What White Adoptive Parents of African American Children Should Know." She also discussed her work at a luncheon in Pitt's Social Work Department, where she revealed some particularly interesting insights about adoption, race, and hair.

She hates how the photo on the cover of her book--depicting a White mother's hands braiding a Black daughter's hair--shows sloppy braiding technique.



"That's not me and and my daughter!" she declared at both events. "I would've had that part straight!"

Following this comment at the luncheon came a discussion about hair, the stereotype of the White mom and her mixed or Black child wearing a wild head of kinky hair.

It's not simply ignorance, Barbara pointed out. Letting the hair be its "big beautiful self" is a well-meaning sentiment from White mothers but the problem is they don't have the historical context to know what that really means. It's one story when an African American woman walks around with her Afro'd child but an entirely different story when a White woman does it. She said she was certain to groom that hair and groom it right because she knew the significance of what she was doing.

I sat quietly during the conversation. One part of me glad that this time I didn't have to be the one to bring it up or the one people think is crazy for making so much out of hair. (I always feel this comfort around African Americans, particularly in the salon.) Perhaps another part of me felt vindicated for my own hair experience. Yet another part of me--the core--was sad that this is still an issue.

One of the soc. professors said that in the field it remains a source of anguish that Black kids are being fostered in White homes. One prof said it was a form of cultural genocide, implying that hair could be a marker of this.

"Genocide" is a strong word. Not sure if I agree. But another word often comes to mind when I think of adoption--especially considering the high rates of cross-race adoption and economic circumstances that typically cause relinquishment in the first place: Colonization. Because, like Barbara went on to point out, adoption always happens from a position of power. Homeless people don't adopt. I've wondered if it's possible to adopt without that colonizing power dynamic. I might-possibly-maybe want to adopt one day, but this troubles me. I don't want to colonize.

But then...really what can you do? Leave the child in foster care because you don't want to participate in that model? Adopt the mother too? This is something Barbara said she'd questioned herself about: "If I'd given the money I spent on my kid to her mother, could I have kept a family intact?" Impossible to answer.

Impossible. Many questions about these subjects elicit this word, as socially constructed issues like race and systemic issues like adoption are nearly impossible to change on an individual level.

Luckily, hair is not. 

Check out this site solely dedicated to tracking PA adoption legislation: The Pennsylvania Adoptee News Blog.

Currently we are hoping that House Bill 963, which restores access to original birth certificates to adopted adults, gets through. It's a "clean" bill, meaning not a bill with lots of restrictions for access such as requiring birth parent consent forms, special court orders, or that adoptees must be born before a certain year before they can get their birth certificates. Right now it's stalled because rumor has it the General Assembly is focusing on education and taxes. Necessary issues, yes, but we can't let the adoptee rights issue get ignored. Please visit the site above for information on writing or calling your representative. 

Philly-based adoption advocate Bob Hafetz was featured on the local news. In this short interview he discusses searching for birth family and what he found. It's not the rosy reunion you'd see in a Lifetime movie.

You've probably heard Willow Smith's "Whip My Hair," but did you know it was inspired by Sesame Street's song "I Love My Hair" released weeks before? (I blogged about it months ago here.) The Sesame Street version was a direct result of an adoption story (the creator is a White adoptive dad of an African girl who told him one day she wished she had straight blond hair), and Willow is continuing the trend. Forty million YouTube hits. Nice work, Willow--we need more positive hair reinforcement like this in the mainstream!



Of course, there's always the voice of dissent and bitterness when you talk about Black hair. The most recent viewer comment in response to the video is this: "Black women have an identity complex and thats why so many of them try to emulate white women by wearing perms,weaves, and even blonde wigs and blue contacts lol slavery really screwed you people up."

Sigh. That person needs whipped in the face with some hair--the braided and beaded kind.

The American Adoption Congress has taken this opportunity with Oprah's story in the media to encourage biological/natural/birth parents to come forward and sign petitions for support of original birth certificate access for adopted adults. I recently heard that when advocates in Oregon collected 500+ signatures on a similar petition in 1998, they drew the attention of a Seattle newspaper that ran it as a full-page ad, which helped change public opinion in that state regarding the need for access. Oregon is now one of the few states that allows adoptee access to original birth certificates.

Last week I attended the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference in DC, and was surprised to find a panel on writing about adoption. Normally I only see those discussions at adoption-specific conferences, so it had me wondering if adoption writing is becoming more mainstream. The panel was called "Finding Identity in Cultural Margins: A Reading and Discussion on Transracial Adoption" and featured Korean-American poets Dana Collins, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, and Lee Herrick. (Two AA memoirists were scheduled to participate but couldn't make it due to weather.)

Dobbs read from her book Paper Pavilion, containing poems written before and after she visited Korea. Dana Collins read poems about connecting with her family abroad, specifically a sister. The essence of poetry, of course, lies not in what it's about but rather in its words, the images it conjures, the emotion it renders. Dobbs poetry to me is like a breath. It is ethereal, imaginative, stern. She dreams about pulling back a curtain and seeing her own conception. Collins poetry describes contrast and bright colors--it is a painting, a bright red cherry atop a white cupcake.

Why are so many adoptees drawn to write? The writers explained that "For transracial adoptees, separation from biological lineage leads to searching for what defines family and home." Keyword: search. To write is to search. To search for answers, to make real an experience of unremembered separation. In many ways we are blocked from searching for our families, due to sealed records, rules/regulations, or even our own emotions. But nothing can block someone from searching on the page for answers, for an image to rest against when you can't find your mother's arms. 

What's our take-away lesson? There are several, I think. Many of us in the adoption community hope that when adoption touches a celebrity and results in media attention people will recognize the underbelly of the adoption process and help us change the system. Most of all the closed-records structure that perpetuates a culture of unhealthy secrecy. Some of this secrecy is rooted in shame, and laws that conceal personal information only reinforce this.  Obviously Ms. Lee was not keen on being contacted by her relinquished daughter. Rumor blogs say that she didn't want the show to run, either, but participated because she felt she had no choice (she appears later on the Jan. 24 episode). No doubt Ms. Lee needed time to digest the reappearance of her daughter. I suspect, though, that part of why she was "reluctant" about meeting her daughter or letting word get out is because of shame, a feeling many birth parents report experiencing.

People should be able to keep personal matters private, yes, but it gets complicated when your perceived "right" to secrecy or your feeling of shame or embarrassment impinges on another person's right to knowledge of self and family. I hope Ms. Lee is working through any shame now, and has sought supportive resources for sharing her story with others who have similar experiences (such as Concerned United Birthparents). I hope people are telling her again and again it's not shameful that she placed a child for adoption. I hope the media will stop using the words "hidden secret" in headlines about this story--why not "surprise sister returns" or "lost sister found"?

I hope, too, that people truly hear Patricia as she talks about why it was so important that she find her roots. Even her children expressed joy at seeing someone who "looks like [them]" and "has the same mannerisms." We must recognize that this knowledge is important in an unquantifiable yet fundamental way. Let us allow for openness and acceptance. Let us heal together these wounds of separation.


Further reading:
Huffington Post
Speakeasy
Oprah.com (Patricia's failed attempts for contact with Ms. Lee)
Declassified Adoptee blog (excerpts from several bloggers' responses to Oprah's story)

Note: Oprah's new network OWN will begin airing a series called "Searching For," which follows a professional genealogist who helps people connect with lost loved ones, next Monday at 9 PM EST.