DJ
Sociology of Family

Gay Adoption: Race, Identity and Family Millions of children in this country are eagerly waiting to be adopted by loving parent/parents who will care and provide for them. Studies have shown that the role of race and identity in transracial adoption with the added pressure of being raised by gay parents affects children who are part of it. Some believe that these children are receiving a home that many dream of and others believe that these children are being deprived of their heritage and identity. Should children’s heritage and identities be taking into consideration when they adopted? Studies have proven that adoptive parents should be accepting of their children’s heritage and should alter their lifestyle to accommodate their children’s lives.
Many children in the system are looking for a second chance for a better life. Adoption is a second chance at this better life, but with this second opportunity it can pose some challenges. Child adoption is complicated and complex situation in a whole, especially when it comes to race. When you mix a transracial adoption and a gay adoption into one household, you get a family with many questions and concerns.
In the documentary, “Off and Running,” we see a coming-of-age story about a young teen named Avery Klein-Cloud who is an African-American girl adopted by white Jewish lesbians. She is one third of an adoptive set of children. Her older brother is a black and Puerto Rican boy and her younger brother is a young Korean-American boy. She was adopted into a loving, caring and supportive family who encourages her and pushes her in whatever endeavors she wants to do. Society starts showing its influence and with concerns about identity and race, it starts to take a toll on young Avery and her family. For Avery, growing up in a Jewish household has out casted her from her black culture and as she gets older she gets more interested in her roots. She reaches out to her parents to help her understand where she came from. Her mother receives the letter and writes back telling her about her background and apologizing to her, but Avery still yearns for more in her discovery of her black heritage.
For Avery, she wants to “grow into her own person.” She engulfs herself into her “black culture” by changing her style including her hair, her attitude and changing her surroundings, including her friends. Her need to find herself has led her to distant herself from her family. Her brother Rafi, also a product of adoption, on the other hand doesn’t take Avery’s approach in the idea of cross-racial identity crisis. Rafi embraces the upbringing his mother’s Tova and Travis has provided him despite him being Black and Puerto Rican. He takes advantage of the situation he was placed in and goes off to an Ivy League college to study to become a neurosurgeon. Avery on the other hand takes a different approach to “finding” herself. She starts to skip school, not come home and even decided to skip out on her parents wedding. Her approach in finding herself has led her in a downward pattern. But, she pulls through in the end because she remembers her upbringing and realizes that her identity was there all along. She ends up graduating high school, winning a medal in track and earning a scholarship. She realized that being a black girl raised by two Jewish women is a part of who she is and she doesn’t have to change to fit into what society wants her to be.

According to a POV article on PBS,”The adoption of black children by white families has long generated controversy in the United States, sparking criticism from both blacks and whites, as well as from adoption professionals. The national conference of the North American Council on Adoptable Children, the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) issued a formal statement opposing transracial adoption, citing concerns that such placements compromised children’s racial and cultural identities and amounted to a form of cultural genocide.” (POV) Many people believe that white parents who adopt minority children may cause their children to face challenges in developing a sense of identity in their culture and not really experience life outside of the one they know, which is white culture. This becomes challenging because blacks have always been stigmatized into their own culture that has been separated from everyone else. In sociology, symbolic interactionism shows that humans adapt to social settings through interacting and communication with others. Leslie Hollingworth stated that “the African American community consists of people and institutions similar in their African heritage and in their experience with racism and oppression.” (Hollingsworth 1999)
If we were to define racial identity we might describe it as one’s self-perception or a sense of belonging to a certain group and how one perceives one’s self and how they perceive themselves in other ethnic groups. “Racial identity in children develops in two stages: First, a child distinguishes race at a conceptual level, and second, he or she begins to assess his or her own membership in a racial group.” (POV) Beginning at the age of 3 years old, children attitudes start to develop a sense of how they look at their own race and the influences around them also play a factor. This also plays a large part on children who are adopted by a different race. They start looking at their adoptive parents and calculating the physical differences between them and start feeling isolated because of that.
In an interview, Beverly Daniel Tatum a psychology professor at Spelman College found that “one reason young people of color tend to build their identities around the racial background is that they see themselves as differing from the dominant images in American society. And the white majority, which tends to see itself as colorless, encourages this further with question and observations about those perceived differences...” (Tatum 2003)
Families have a hard time addressing race issues in the home with their children. In those families where parents don’t have a conversation on the issues of race, their children might feel that it is inappropriate or a foreign subject to say how they feel on the subject. Some might even feel embarrassed to bring up any issues or feelings. Whereas, in families where there is an open forum for discussion, children may think too much into it and it may cause them to have a self-consciousness about the situation.
Same-sex couples have been struggling and fighting for years to be considered to become adoptive parents. Some people feel that it is not morally right to have gay parents raise children. “Some individuals feel that children should be raised by a man and a woman, who are married, not by a gay or lesbian individual or couple. Starting with the premise that homosexuality is wrong; they feel that such a relationship is inappropriate context in which to raise children.” (Hall 2013: 245) Hall stated, the problem starts with people thinking that homosexuality is wrong. It’s not a question on whether two committed individuals with good jobs and stability to raise a child is capable of succeeding. Who are people to judge on whether a same-sex couple have the right to raise children. I know some people have the fear that same-sex couples who raise children may influence the child that they are raising to grow up becoming gay. They focus is on that theory and not the theory of parents raising children to be whatever they want to be and be the best at it. So what is a parent to people, Hall describes what is parenting is in his article, stating:
“Parenting is an area that has so many unknown factors, influences, and outcomes. Two-parent, high income families sometimes have children who grow up with emotional and/or behavioral problems. Single parents can raise healthy, well-adjusted children. Some heterosexual couples raise children effectively, and some do not.”(Hall 245)
Parenting is not about being gay or straight, being a parent is about exercising the skills to raise a child effectively to do their best and to work hard and achieve their goals. Every parent fails at some point while raising children. Some parents face disadvantages just for being Black, or Latino, or Chinese. It all comes down to the attitudes that people have, some are not open-minded and acceptable to things that are different. In Bernstein’s and Reimann’s book, “Perspectives of Children in Lesbian Step Families,” Janet M. Wright explained how families communicate effectively by communicating by telling a story of how she tried to explain to her son about homophobia:
“Years ago I was trying to explain homophobia to one of my sons, who was five years old at the time. He looked at me with confusion. “Mom, I don’t understand. How can it be wrong to love someone? Recently, when I was doing research on lesbian step families, the children in the families echoed the same sense of surprise and confusion – how was it that something good and secure as their families was considered so disgusting and awful by so many people?” (Wright 2001: 272)

This passage best describes that there is no difference between how children feel concerning families. If they are loved and treated kindly, all they see is love. They don’t see that they have two mommies or two daddies. So where is the disadvantage in that? A parent’s love is something that has no boundaries, no sexual identity or gender or race.
“Parenting” is something that any caring person of either gender and an sexual persuasion can do. If there are two people – or more – doing it whether it’s a man or woman, two woman, two men or any conceivable combination of loving, competent adults who are passionately committed to the well-being of the child, so much the better for the child as well as for those who are taking care of him or her.” (Wright 2001: 279)
Families are the key important factors in many people’s lives. They are the glue that keeps things together, the unity that unites us and strengthen us. Families in today’s societies are those who we read about in our “Diversity in Families” textbook. “Families today are different from what they used to be. They are more diverse and more likely to be formed outside of marriage than in the past. They include a complex array of domestic arrangements, and they are more easily fractured.” (Zinn, Eitzen and Wells 2011: 2)
Zach Wahl’s is a young man from Iowa who told his story at the Democratic convention and many other venues about how he was raised by two women. He challenged a lot of conventional leaders on their views on gay marriage and how being raised by same-sex couples is wrong. He gave an impressive speech at the House of Representatives in Iowa about how he was raised by his two mothers and how his life is no different from any other child’s life in raised by straight parents. In his speech, he brought up how he and his family lived their lives, his moms and sister was the normal family.
They went to church, dinner; they did chores and argued like any other family. His family was like any other family. He stated, “The sexual orientation of his parents had zero effect on the content of his character. Families come from the love that bonds them.” This is a 19 year old man, who was an eagle scout, scored in the 99% tile on his ACTs and operates a small business. Now once again, I ask is he at a disadvantage? What is the difference in his story and say the story of Chelsea Clinton. They were both raised by two individuals who loved them and cared about them and who raised them to be great citizens in society. Wahl’s even asked one of the chairmen “If I were your son Mr. Chairman, I believe I make you very proud.”
So is it a disadvantage to raise a child in today’s society as a same-sex couple? I personally don’t think so. I think it is more of an advantage to raise a child as a same-sex couple because you have to work even harder to prove yourself to the many doubters you have out there in this world. It’s not easy answering all the hard questions or trying to explain something to your child that most people just don’t understand. They do all of that because they have love to share and they want to be able to show and give that love. Things in this world change constantly, there was a time where you black people couldn’t adopt white children. Things have changed now and rightfully due. So, why does it have to be a disadvantage for a same-sex couple to raise a child? There are more advantages to them raising children because they are not out there looking for a handout or producing children out of wedlock, they are looking to raise a child out of love. I believe the disadvantage is not having an open mind to the possibilities that two loving people can raise a child with love and commitment like any other parent.

Bibliography
Baca Zinn, Maxine; D. Stanley Eitzen & Barbara Wells 2011. Diversity in Families. 9th edition. Allyn & Bacon.
M.David,Hall (ed.) 2013: Taking Sides: Family and Personal Relationships. Ninth Edition. McGraw Hill
Bersteing, Mary; Renate Reimann. 2001 Queer Families, Queer Politics. Challenging Culture and the state, Columbia University Press
IowaHouseDemocrats. 2011. “Zach Wahls Speaks About Family.” YouTube Web site. Retrieved November 10, 2013
Hollingsworth, L. (1999). Symbolic Interactionism, African American Families, and the transracial adoption controversy. Social Work, 44(5), 443-453
POV. “Transracial Adoption” www.pbs.org