Society has been welcoming to adopted biracial child

Mitchell B. Pearlstein
November 9, 2001
St. Paul Pioneer Press

Our daughter Nicole, who is almost 11, came to live with us five years ago this month. On November 22, actually, changing in a flash of life what had been only ugly memories of that date, the anniversary of John F. Kennedy's death.

The very next day after her arrival, in anything but a dispassionate moment, I wrote a column on my first reactions to adopting a biracial child. Nicole's birth mother is white and her birth father is black. My wife Diane and I are both white, but to make things a bit more interesting, she's a soon-to-be ordained Episcopalian and I'm Jewish.

I wrote about how I had been a respondent, two years earlier, to a speech about race in the United States by the African-American scholar Cornel West. I argued that afternoon at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis that while racism was "all around," it generally wasn't "deep." Which is to say, it just couldn't be the main explanation for so much that was (and remains) working so poorly for so many people of color in our country. I said that while racism is reprehensible and painful, we focus too much on it when trying to understand and fix problems of poverty, bad education and the like.

Yet having contended that, I went on to talk about how Diane and I had been taking occasional care of a then-three-year-old biracial girl. I noted how we had been asked to consider adopting her, but that for a variety of reasons (including three sons in college simultaneously), we couldn't do so at the time. But, I continued, I had been imagining how my views on race might change if I did, in fact, come to have a daughter who would be viewed as black.

I imagined, for example, the pain I would feel and the anger that likely would explode out of me if someone did something nasty to my child. I completed the thought that afternoon by acknowledging that "unless and until whites could better picture themselves in such situations, that a little hesitation and humility on their part were in order when arguing that racism and other bigotries have come to be less consequential problems than they once were in the United States."

It has been, as I say, five years since Nicole checked into our home for keeps (the one and same child, I trust it's clear, that Diane and I had taken care of earlier). Not only have I been able to "picture" myself having a black daughter, I really have one, whom I love truly.

So has anything happened that has undercut my belief about the thinness of racism in contemporary America? Have I seen or heard anything aimed at my daughter that has caused me to burst in bitterness?

Not a thing. From Hawaii to Florida to back home in Minnesota, not a single blasted thing.

I may not be the most observant guy in the world, but with the exception of people sometimes staring at the three of us, I cannot think of even one instance in which Nicole has been mistreated or slighted. As for occasional staring, I might stare too if I were on the outside, as we are a catching combination: a gorgeous, coffee-with-cream little girl, with two white parents, both in our 50s -- who have been mistaken more than once for our kid¹s grandparents.

Do Diane and I think about Nicole being racially different from what we are? Of course. We're emphatic, for example, about her reading books and watching television shows about slavery, the civil rights movement, black heroes, etc. We would be upset if she associated only with white children and adults, but this has never been close to a problem, as her circles are drawn with handfuls of crayons.

Do we assume that things might get more complicated as Nicole gets older and, say, begins to date? (My heart just clutched.) Sure they might. But for now it's exhilarating how questions of race have receded as a child-rearing issue. Not that such questions were ever at the epicenter for any of us, including, I believe, Nicole herself.

How would I update my remarks about race if I were to share a stage again with my friend Cornel West? I would say this: For all the sins we have committed as a nation, for all our trespasses still, we don't give ourselves nearly enough credit for the open house -- for the good and decent home -- we have come to build as a people.

-- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis.

Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted.