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An Adoptive Parent Writes:

My wife and I are an interracial couple: I am Jewish-American and she is from Colombia. We plan on having children biologically, but would also like to adopt. However, the question of race is difficult in this respect. I am white, but my wife doesn't fit into any of the available boxes. Although she appears to be more Native American, there are many members of her family who are fairly light skinned and others who reveal African ancestry.

Traveling in Latin America and having many Latin American friends, I have learned that this is quite common. Also, the society simply labels mixed race people as "morreno" or "dark," instead of the one-drop rule which is unfortunately still common in this country.

Seeing as there are many children in Colombia who have been abandoned due to grinding poverty and a raging civil war, we would like to adopt from there. However, I worry about how our children may be labeled and how we should teach them to label themselves. In the US, I suppose we might tell them that they are multiracial, but in Colombia, this term would be meaningless and would almost sound silly to the average "multiracial" person. Any advice on how to tackle such an issue?

 

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John Raible Answers:

You are correct in understanding that racial labels and identities change in different social contexts. For children adopted internationally, developing a sense of identity is complicated by intersecting factors of race, culture, class, nationality, and ethnicity (not to mention gender, religion, and sexual orientation!).

A child with brown skin who grows up in an all-white environment predictably will feel (and be treated as) different from other children, and that difference most likely will get labeled in racial terms: She is brown (or black, but definitely NOT white), everyone else is white. Raise that same child in a cosmopolitan environment where she gets to see and interact with others who look like her, and she may learn more sophisticated ways to explain her identity or identities.

For example, a Colombian adoptee who grows up around other people from Latin America will learn the various ways Latin Americans identify themselves in different contexts, e.g., as Americans, immigrants, expatriates, Hispanics, morenos, mestizos, and so on.

How will you provide access to the diverse individuals and communities who will help her sort out her (or his) identity/identities? To give your adopted child the wonderful and affirming benefits of a multicultural upbringing, I strongly urge you to think long and hard about WHERE you will live as an interracial family.

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