Growing Up ‘White,’ Transracial Adoptee Learned To Be Black
Goller-Sojourner says every six months or so, he’d hear a racist insult or some other offense, and his mother would rush to his side. Still, it was confusing. “My source of love and hate came from the same well,” he explains. “My parents looked just like the same people who were calling me a n***** or porch monkey. … My mother and my parents were in my corner, but it was still difficult to process.”
In college he began what he calls a “descent into blackness and out of whiteness.” He describes it as a journey, giving up the privileges he claimed as a child of white parents and learning to accept his identity independent of them…
“I moved to New York City, where for the first time I found my own reflection pleasing,” Goller-Sojourner says. “I learned to fall in love with myself and being black in my mid- to late-20s. And although it was a beautiful experience, it shouldn’t have taken 25 years to do that.”
…His parents were among the first wave of transracial adopters, and did their best to prepare him for the real world. Parents today can do even better, he says.
“I don’t have a checklist,” he says, “but if I did, it would sound something like this: If you don’t have any close friends or people who look like your kid before you adopt a kid, then why are you adopting that kid? Your child should not be your first black friend.i had to move to seoul before i learned to find my own reflection pleasing (which i wrote about here) it took me 27 years.
ps. this article is super “easy on the ears” - he even says that he’s not against transracial adoption (and is open about the colorism within black adoptive families) and STILL people are calling him an ungrateful, whiny brat with “issues” - that’s basically a given whenever adoptees are critical of adoption.
"Your child should not be your first black friend”
MIC DROP.U.S. neoliberal bastion NPR does really shitty and completely inaccurate coverage on transracial adoption. It’s great seeing class bastard Chad Goller Sojourner make news — but of course NPR displaces the problems of transracial adoption on the struggles of the individual.
So screw NPR. Get it from the source… check out the coverage of Goller Sojourner’s glorious, LIFE-giving memoirs Sitting in Circles with Rich White Girls:
Sitting in Circles with Rich White Girls: Memoirs of a Bulimic Black Boy chronicles the performer’s life long affair with the scale and ten-plus year liaison with an eating disorder. Also a hilarious and heartbreaking exploration into the process and pattern of identity construction — in this case how growing up: fat, dark-skinned, gay and adopted by white folks affected and shaped the performer’s maturation — is always crushingly honest, with the performer’s greatest gift being the ability to find playfulness even in the midst of grief.
(Via poc-creators)