zimatravels

     I’m so very sorry that my son cannot know that Barack Obama has been elected the next President of the United States.  Although their lives were very different, they shared a similar beginning — a white mother and a black father.  They shared the physical characteristics of a honey-colored skin, handsome and strong facial features, very curly hair, and a thin, lanky build. 

     I didn’t meet my son until he was a 15-month old toddler waiting to be adopted.  At that time, I was a wife and mother in my mid-20’s.  Influenced by the plight of foster children by having been a social worker, and touched by the dire predictions of Zero Population Growth, I told my husband that I wanted to adopt a child that needed a home rather than have a biological child.  He agreed, and within three months of our application to the northern California county we lived in, we were the parents of a bi-racial toddler also named Barry.

     When we had asked for a “hard to place” child, we were told that black/white mixed “older” children past infancy were the largest category needing families.  Neither my husband nor I had any problem saying “yes,” even though my only personal knowledge of blacks had come from innocently walking into an all-black ghetto to tutor when I was a college student.  My relationship with that student and her family lasted several years.

     Our parents didn’t share our enthusiasm.  I was really surprised because I had grown up without any inkling that my parents were prejudiced against blacks.  When I asked my mother why I hadn’t suspected, she poignantly answered, “I knew it wasn’t right to be prejudiced, so I didn’t want to pass it on to you and your brother.”

     For different reasons, black social workers also felt that transracial adoptions were bad.  When more and more white parents started getting black and mixed black children, the black social workers of the 1970’s made their stand and declared that white parents could not adequately raise black children.  To them, even no permanent home was a better fate than white parents who, by virtue of being white, couldn’t prepare their black children for being black in America.  While not taking back black children that were already adopted, they stopped white adoption of black children dead in its tracks.  And there it lay for years during the intense era of black power and fighting for equal rights.

     Our little family joined F.A.I.R.  (Families Adopting Inter-Racially) where we could simply be mixed families with black, Mexican, American Indian, Korean, and later black-Vietnamese kids.  The white kids in the group were the biological children in these relatively large families.  Besides just having fun with our kids, we white adults were given information on how to, for example, take care of kinky hair and ashy skin.  Some speakers to our group sought to assure us that ALL whites had prejudice to some degree and we had to face our prejudices.  I particularly remember one woman who made an eloquent plea that the mixed racial children were neither white nor black, but represented their own race.  That was a lovely, idealistic idea that was confronted by Americans insisting that half and half equaled black.  Filling out governmental forms usually meant having to deny one part of your heritage.

     In the 1970’s, there were heated debates in multicultural circles about whether it was better for all cultures in America to merge into a tasty soup, or maintain certain characteristics as in a stew where a carrot remains identifiably a carrot, a potato stays a potato, a green bean stays a green bean.  Which was better for America? For the individual? For the ethnic group?

     By the new century, mixed marriages had become more prevalent and acceptable in American society, bringing along more mixed racial children.  Immigration brought into our country many more hues and shades to add to the mix.  And globalization has enlarged the pot to new dimensions.

     My tears of excitement and joy at the announcement that Obama was really, truly elected President mixed with the bittersweet tears for my son who would have turned 40 this November 16 had he not died of an incurable disease in 2003.