babiesbacks.jpgBefore I went to the Families Without Borders?: Adoption Across Culture and Race conference in New York last weekend, I was planning on writing something about why I don’t consider myself a transracial adoptee. I just didn’t Feel like one. Because I was half white and adopted by parents of color, I felt like a “reverse” transracial adoptee, or a “backwards” one, or an upside down one, or maybe not one at all, since here I was steeped in the dominant culture since the day I was born, and so somehow that made me less transracially adopted than, say, a biracial black child with white adoptive parents. But it was confusing. It was really confusing. I felt like I was different from adoptees of color who had been raised by white parents. The whole thing was hard to make sense of, but I desperately wanted to make sense of it.

Do you know how it is when you go to a large conference, and there are dozens, even hundreds of panels and workshops to choose from? And the choices are just so overwhelming. I felt that way when I went to this conference. Everything looked simultaneously fascinating and baffling. I decided first off to go to a workshop with a really intriguing but confusing title: I had no idea what it meant.

“An Ecological Approach to Racial Identity Development in Transracial Adoptees,” by Susan O’Connor Harris, MSW

Okay. I had no clue as to what “ecological approach” meant, but I was interested, and so I went. And this 90 minute presentation was totally worth the price of admission, the flight across country, the stinky stuffy hotel room, ALL of it. Because it answered my question, with a better and more complex and satisfying answer than I ever could have come up with.

Susan Harris is an incredibly engaging, articulate woman. She spoke with a lot of humor and compassion and passion about growing up as a woman of color (half white/Jewish, half black/Native American, but more on that later) in a white family in an all-white community in New England. And she moved back and forth between her intensely personal story (which she presented as a spoken word/performance piece, which ALSO blew my mind) and the very academic, theoretical. In a long, meandering but always completely engaging way, she outlined how she came to develop her Harris Racial Identity Model.

She detailed how racial identity development is an extremely complex (nod) and fluid (nod) thing, not a category that can be neatly (nod nod nod) defined by a single box to be checked off. And as she went through the five levels of racial identity development, I found myself scribbling furious notes, nodding, wiping away tears, and feeling the top of my head just ready to explode and splatter into little bits on the ceiling.

Someone had finally, finally, finally described in perfect and utter detail exactly what racial identity development has been for me, in a way that makes sense.

Here it is. The Harris Racial Identity Model.

  • Genetic Racial Identity: this is the factual identity that comes from birth family. A person is half X, and half Y. They may or may not know the details of these facts, but this is what is. (for example: I know that I am half Japanese and half… something else)
  • Imposed Racial Identity: this is what others assume/say/think about another’s racial identity. This is about people thinking that I just can’t be Asian, that I must be Jewish, or Italian, or Puerto Rican or whatever. Or this is about people thinking I’m not at all white. Or about people thinking I look just like their freaky aunt Betty. Many people experience this as racism or confusion or judgment, but it’s all about other peoples’ experience of you. Biracial/multiracial and transracially adopted people get other peoples’ imposed racial identity their whole lives. Susan Harris, in a different forum at the conference, read an incredibly poignant piece from notes that a nurse took about her as an infant in foster care: on days that she appeared to be especially “Negroid” in her features, she also seemed coincidentally “delayed” in social development; on other days, she seemed less black to the nurse, and oddly, also more “advanced.” (sigh)
  • Cognitive Racial Identity: This is what a person thinks or knows themselves to be. I know that I am biracial/hapa. I know this with my brain.
  • Feeling Racial Identity: (okay, this is where I really started blinking the tears) This, Susan Harris explained, is what you feel like inside. Regardless of what other people tell you, and regardless of what you even know to be true. This is where I say, I feel Japanese. Whatever that means. I feel Asian. I don’t feel half white because I feel like I have little proof or experience of that aspect of myself. I have not met or seen proof of my white birthparent. The three out of four parents I know (2 adoptive, one birth) are all Japanese. Despite the “facts,” this is all that I feel I am inside. She says that this feeling RI is not always in synch with the other kinds of racial identity: genetic or cognitive. At this point my brain was going BINGO BINGO BINGO, the cherries were all lining up, the slot machine lights were flashing and twirling and I just felt like one big Yes.
  • Visual Racial Identity: This is when you need to use a mirror to understand who and what you are. Often transracial adoptees feel disconnected from their visual image (I know I am, although after fortysomething years I’ve gradually, and I do mean gradually, started to get used to what I look like) and have a distorted racial image in the same way that people with eating disorders have distorted body images.

So that’s it. It was lifechanging and mindchanging to go to this workshop. Suddenly it all made sense to me; all the myriad levels and shifts of racial identity that I have experienced throughout my life. It’s constantly evolving, shifting, moving backward and forward and inside and out. It’s not anything that can be put inside a single check box. Not even close.

Oh, and the ecology part? It just means that everything in society - our “ecology” impacts our racial identity development and its many different components - that it is an organic, living, changing thing that is constantly being impacted and changed. I get it.

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