2 black kids adopted by white Republicans 40 years ago [View all]

[jodymarie aimee]

I found this very interesting.



I grew up in a WWC neighborhood with two white parents. My sister and I were the only POC. We were adopted when we were young. I have written about my family before.

I have very mixed feelings about transracial adoptions. Obviously children need homes but taking on a child of a different race comes with a lot of responsibilities and challenges. Understanding the cultural aspects is extremely important. Ironically, I think that LGBT parents are sometimes best situated in a transracial adoption because they understand being an “other”. But that is a diary for another day.

I wanted to address this idea that a person could not possibly be a racist if they voted twice for Obama and then voted for Trump.

I grew up with racist parents. Sure they adopted a two biracial kids but they certainly didn’t understand black culture. My adopted parents were evangelical Republicans white working/middle class folks. They believed they were saving two “black” kids from a ghetto life. My father religiously listened to Rush Limbaugh.

They were soft racists. I never heard the n word growing up but there was always this idea that because we were being raised in “white” culture that it was somehow an improvement from our original background. My adoptive mother would complain about our “difficult” hair. We had no black friends or any minority friends until I got to junior high. We had to leave a church after my Sunday school teacher used a racial slur that went uncorrected or noticed until my sister protested that she was never going back. We regular were stuck in situations where we were the only black kids for miles. We constantly heard about what nice kids we were despite our foster care background. My black boyfriend from college got an eye raise even though he was better educated than my entire family.

I also grew up with the working class mentality in Central California. When I announced I was going to Harvard in the seventh grade, my mother laughed and said I would go to the local community college like everybody else. Where did I get these fancy ideas from? After I went away to Berkeley of all places, I was the snotty liberal who came home and looked down on everyone... (There was probably a bit of truth to that when I was younger). God, I spent most Thanksgivings and Christmas trying to get them to see the errors of their ways.

Immigration has slowly become a bigger and bigger deal. Central California is agricultural land. The big middle of nowhere. Not much industry outside of farming. Farm hands were never a big deal because those weren’t the sort of jobs WWC wanted anyway. But a generation later, immigration has affected the makeup of Central California. Spanish is regularly spoken. Suddenly the “help” now had their own business. Construction, landscaping, shops...pretty much any traditional white working class job now had competition from immigrants making the transition to middle class. There is this idea that immigration is fine as long as it doesn’t displace traditional WWC jobs. The black population of the Central Valley is fairly low so competition from that arena isn’t seen as significant.

I went to school with these disgruntled WWC guys. Hell I dated a few of them. They were the popular jocks who didn’t do well in school at an already failing HS. After HS, they went into jobs that didn’t require a 4 year university. Almost everyone farted around in CC for a while. There were a few that went from CC to 4 year universities. We all are approaching 40 now and they look around and wonder why they aren’t to where their dads/moms were. Brown people now occupy jobs that their parents had. Again no one is screaming racial slurs at each other but the tension is there and it shows up at places like the ballot box. Very easy to blame the “others” for why you haven’t quite made it.

“When you’re accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels like Oppression".

There is absolutely economic anxiety but the core of the anxiety is that it’s more readily affecting white people. It’s always been there for POC and segment of the WWC but now that pain is being felt everywhere now. It isn’t that Clinton didn’t address these needs. She did but Trump made them front and center. Diversity is fine as long as it doesn’t affect your place at the front of the line.

It isn't that we need to talk less about "identity politics" issues, it's that we need to be clearer that a shared table doesn't mean that your topic is being ignored.

And we continue our fight against soft racism. In some ways soft racism is more damaging than a hard core racist. A hard core racist, I know what I’m getting up front. A soft core racist is much more disappointing because it usually coming from a person that we like or respect.

Some of my ramblings.

Updated:

3 Notes:

Thank you for the reclist!

First abbrevations: WWC = White Working Class and POC = People of Color