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Love transcends the bounds of race and any of life’s distinctive aspects. As transracial adoption becomes more common, what are possible problems these families can face?
Parents are society’s unsung heroes.
They may not provide the intricate and complex services demanded by communities, but they care for those who do so. Without their guidance and affection, these individuals wouldn’t have achieved the successes in their lives leading to their contribution to society. Indeed, the love parents provide is unconditional. It’s a force to be reckoned with, challenging limits to provide for their children.
But can this love also conquer the challenges that come with society’s long-established prejudices?
Love Rising Above Biases and Race
In Marvin Blake’s Why, a story of two sisters one black and one white, the author takes his readers on a rollercoaster ride with a family’s experience of interracial connections. With its central plot revolving around sisters of different races, the book tackles the bounds of what parental and familial love can genuinely accommodate. It challenges how unconditional a parent’s love truly remains despite being confronted with society’s detrimental influence.
Readers can observe the significant difference one sister experiences throughout her life. This can be because she’s birthed out of deceit, carrying a separate identity from her primary family. But the book spotlights the separation between black and white despite taking the same family name and heritage.
If anything, the book shows the reality of racism, connecting a possible correlation between the sister’s race and her disposition. Marvin shows how prevalent biased evil whispers are in a discriminative society and how vile it can be that disrupts family harmony.
Although Why is a fictional tale, it conveys a real problem. What the sister has experienced in the narrative can be one that’s, unfortunately, mundane and a regular occurrence by someone in society. Racism remains prevalent, and in a society where it can disguise itself as sincerity and support, an indifferent and apathetic perception about it can become a problem. This has become more pressing nowadays, especially with the popularity of transracial adoption.
What Is Transracial Adoption?
This isn’t to say that transracial adoption is immediately all evil. Some parents have pure intentions about it, but this doesn’t bar it from common challenges.
Transracial adoption describes the process of adoption where the adoptive family is of a different race from the adoptee. Typically, this entails a white family adopting children of color, whether they’re Asians, Blacks, or other ethnicities. From this dynamic alone, one can already envision possible problems that may arise, relationship and differences-wise.
But with how progressive society and cultural norms have become, transracial adoption has become ordinary. In fact, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, 40% of recent adoptions have been transracial, and this number is still growing. Adoptive parents have moved past basing their choices on looks, now settling on hearing and following what their hearts say. Still, despite it coming from the purest motives, without proper transition and management, the adopted child can suffer from unintentional racism and a damaging environment.
The Effect of Mixed Heritage Families
When these adoptive parents have finished processing the adoption, their lives will have changed. They must consider the consequences of their actions and be sensitive enough to make these children feel the most welcome in their new families. They also need to help transracial adoptees cope with the struggles of adjoining their lives to an entirely separate culture. Hence, many aspects must be resolved, from their choices to their adoptee’s life.
Transracial adoption is noticeable.
This difference in appearance is among the most sensitive problems that may arise later in the adoptees’ lives. As much as these parents have worn a color-blind lens throughout their adoption and in welcoming their new children, society still hasn’t fully opened itself to inclusivity. They’ll likely receive judgmental stares and whispers from those around them whenever they’re together. This would be the new reality they’d have to cope with as a transracial family.
Later on, transracially adopted children would also face discrimination with dissimilarity from their families. Hence, they would need their family’s full support to help them cope with this. It would be challenging for the public to understand the thought process that comes with transracial adoption, but it’s never the parents’ responsibility to make others understand their decisions.
As long as the family remains strong, the other’s opinion should rarely matter. Remember, their opinions could quickly come from close-minded perspectives about ethnicities and inclusivity. Adoption is about creating a family. It shouldn’t be influenced by what people have to say about it.
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