This week was very productive and in many ways validating and rewarding. It was also a week plagued by self-doubt, racial confusion and adoptee imposter syndrome. Let me be clear, I am experiencing a level of self-loathing and imposter syndrome that can only be reached by a transracial adoptee who has dedicated their professional and scholarly lives to critical race and black feminist theory.
I had the opportunity to write an article about black rage(1) and was invited to return to NPR: MaineCalling as an "expert" on confronting racism(2). I got to plug my book Antagonizing White Feminism: Intersectionality's Critique of Women's Studies and the Academy alongside my co-editor and co-author.
This week I also started a new co-authored book project, my first. I am producing above and beyond expectations for a full-time administrator. Hell, I am a sought after vice president in my field. A scholar's dream week, no?
I have been in bed for 24 hours too sick to sit up. I am writing this while promoting my publication while lying down. As a transracial adoptee, and all the things that entails, when I am productive in these very public ways; it puts me at the intersection of white racism and black exclusion.
This week was, and weeks like this always are, an opportunity to have my blackness and my identity as a black scholar - as a black person - completely undone. I regularly get critiqued for keeping my head down and flying under the radar. I am understood as not radical enough, read - not black enough. When I present myself in the public square - there is flogging as anticipated. My crime, being genealogically isolated ... being severed from my black family ... and, producing a performance of blackness that can render me un-black at will. My will is supressed and who I say I am is in question. I used to joke about how black folks would "take away my NAACP card" but I no longer find this funny. I will no longer accept this exclusion.
This is not new. What I know about the trauma of being a transracial adoptee is that no matter how much I accomplish, one post by a respected black scholar; and, I come undone. I don't even know if the post was leveled at me or not. In real life, this person probably isn't paying enough attention to me to even bother to sub-tweet the bile and ire black folks can level at other black folks when they find those folks - not black folks enough.
It is a measurement I have never been able to accurately gage nor avoid. The tweet that erased all my good work this week said something like ... why are people who just found out they are black speaking on behalf of black people. There were many of these types of posts and tweets, so the likelihood this or any other post was about my anti-racism work are slim to none. But it still lands on my inner, abandoned, not-black-enough child as an indictment.
Having just found my genetic family in January 2019 and only just confirming my genetic father on March 8, 2020; I may never be certain that my blackness, or my performance of blackness, meets expectations. The more time I spend with my black family members, I know that I am black as a continuum of our family's blackness. I also see the ways my relatives move in and out of the intersections of their blackness without apology.
My siblings and close cousins claim blackness, Choctaw-ness, Oklahoma-ness interchangeably and without any authentication processes. They are not required to validate their right to blackness in the ways that I am required to. No two of them interpret or perform their identity exactly the same and live this fluidity without penalty. They can publically say and do really dangerous and harmful things around racial identity and interracial engagement without reproach. And because they were not severed from the family, the external black community accepts them as black ... makes exuse and explanation for their messiness ... and keeps it moving. Because I was not raised by black family, I get dragged through and across the village green and am deemed not black or worse.
To the black scholars and public intellectuals, I want to yell, to beg, "please don't reject me and my hard work""please don't de-black me". I also have to resist the desire to seek forgiveness for having grown up in white systems and for navigating the world using the skills I learned in the white constructs in which I was abandoned. I want black people to know how much I love them. I also want them to know how badly it hurts me when they deem me unauthentic, if not willfully deceptive, in my blackness. I want them to understand that what they are doing is harm on top of harm due to something over which I have no control.
And then there is the part of me that wants to rage against accusations that I suddenly became black, that I somehow don't have a right to represent blackness and talk about race and racism. As a transracial adoptee, I lived blackness in the most violent, traumatic, life threatening of ways. Black people raised with and by black people have this sense that those of us who have been genealogically isolated - given away - had an easy, pain-free life living amongst white people ... being black in an inescapable white gaze. We had no cover. We lived knowing we could be eradicated, erased, at any moment, only to find out that we could also be erased by the black gaze and authenticity requirements.
I want my black peers to understand that the first time I ever heard the word nigger, it was directed at me inside my own home. My adoptive captor's version of social norming included yelling "don't be a nigger""don't act like a nigger""that nigger deserved what he got" and "if you keep it up, you will be just like those niggers". And this was my world, and there was nowhere to hide. I knew it wasn't true. I just couldn't find anyone who agreed and was brave enough to save me.
I didn't have black people of any kind in my life until 2nd grade. In second grade, I was chased across the playground and pinned up against a fence and stoned by a fourth grader. Stoned. The whole time my attacker was calling me a nigger. I knew being stoned was a bad thing. Because of my isolation, I didn't process the event and the lack of consequence - the principal made him apology -as racism. I just thought that was how people like me were supposed to be treated. There was no regard for my black body or my black being in the house in which I was living. In that house, I was emotionally and physically harmed in the very same way as I was on that playground. This act of violence was indistinguishable from my everyday life.
My adoptive captor kept my consumption of all things black to a bare minimum. There was no black art, no black music (no Diana Ross, no Supremes and absolutely no Prince - I had to sneak it and when she found it she would destroy it), no black TV, no black magazines and no black people. The only black content she willfully gave me was a single book on starving kids in Africa.
I was born two years after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and never saw footage on the civil rights movement, King's assassination (but she cried for days when Elvis died), voters' rights efforts, bus burnings, sit-ins ... nothing. This is classic social conditioning that says that, if you can control the input, restrict access to possibility, and invoke life threatening fear; there will be no revolution. And, so there wasn't.
The violence continued through January 2019, I was almost 49 years old. My adoptive captor responded to my newly found genetic cousins' facebook posts - things like "so glad we found you baby cousin" - with venomous things like "these black people are no relation to you". Despite the fact that I look exactly like my father's family, this was her invocation of almost 50 years of racist social conditioning ... her erasing me and suppressing my black genealogy. She used to tell me that "being black or white doesn't matter"... This time, I saw it for the violence and racism that it was and we have never spoken again.
And so, here we are 45 or so years later, and I am being held accountable by my black intellectual and professional peers for not revolting. Those isolated from their people in the ways that transracial adoptees are - enduring the violence of genealogical isolation - do not resist; they survive.
I had noone to process my blackness with. I didn't have a language for the pit of rage in my stomach every time I had a racist experience. I had no route to rise up, to escape, to argue for my own humanity. And, when I resisted, I was beat. I was starved. I was filled with self-loathing.
And like every abused adoptee story I have ever been exposed to, I was angry. I knew little girls were not supposed to be dirty, hungry, terrified, beaten and disdained by their mother. I knew little girls should not be called niggers. I can remember from a very young age... 3-4 years old... after beatings that left scars that I still bear... thinking "I deserve better. I am better than this."
I am not sure I understood that rage to be connected specifically to black-ness any more or less than adopted-ness or human-ness. Now I know that there is no separating those things. The very act of having been adopted by these unstable people was directly a result of racism and the devaluing of black lives and bodies from birth.
I now have the language to articulate the rage I still carry as I live with the daily onslaught of the racism I have endured since I was a toddler. I still live in the shadow of the disregard for my humanity that resonated in the ways that my adoptive captor did not protect me and consistently put me in danger by putting me in direct contact with her racist married boyfriend. He hated me because I was black and because I was smart and because I resisted him in every possible way. I can remember ...
... his hands around my neck calling me a nigger ... I was a child and nobody helped me.
I still feel that rage, the trauma, in my daily brushes with imminent death. Black death. I now have language to express my blackness, to demand my humanity be acknowledged and to hopefully do something for those who have not yet found their voices, especially black transracial adoptees.
There is no greater hell than to be severed from your black family, your black community, especially during civil uprising around black lives. Because, there is no way to fight for your black life in a white space that, if you push too hard, will also sever you from the people who are supposed to keep you safe, who are supposed to love you, who are supposed to be your "forever family".
Those posts may not have been about me. I would offer that those posts shouldn't be leveled at any black person who is speaking up for black lives as black people. This is violent. This is a perpetuation of the trauma that our black communities have had to outlive for almost 400 years - this taking of our children - this dismantling of our families and communities. This socializing us to not recognize each other as genealogically connected.
For those of us who were removed, given away, sold out of our mother's wombs and stolen from our grandmother's laps; being rejected when we finally make our way back to our people is a trauma more deadly than racism. There are black folks raised in a multiplicity of disconnected ways. That is by design. These posts, the rejection of black people by black people, are a symptom of that design.
Blackness in the gaze of white supremacy does not allow for anything other than the arrival of black people - especially public intellectuals - as fully evolved. There is no space for confusion, dissonance, disagreement, multiplicity, identity disconnection ... which is to say, there is no space for blackness at all. And those of us who see it, who can lead black people, our people, to an undoing of this construct that was created to keep us from reaching capacity, keep us from organizing, keep us from liberation...
...we, the genealogical isolates, are silent because we know that our rage is never going to be black enough.
More soon...
Baby Girl Murphy
(1) "Black in America: Trauma, Rage and Death" Victory Tastes Like Candy (August 15, 2020) https://www.vtlcandy.com/
(2) "Confronting Racism: Beyond the Protests, What Meaningful Actions Can People Take for Racial Justice" NPR: MaineCalling (August 13, 2020) https://www.mainepublic.org/post/confronting-racism-beyond-protests-what-meaningful-actions-can-people-take-racial-justice
