Giving Compass' Take:

• JS Lee at YES! Magazine argues from past adoption experience that it takes a lot to break through the brainwashing and barriers of "whiteness" even for those raised with racial support in America. 

• How can we start to evaluate and move past our white fragility around speaking about racism? 

• Here's how adoption agencies are using technology to connect children with families. 

At 6 months old, I was adopted by a White family and brought to the United States. I was told growing up that my Korean mother loved me so much that on the day I was born, she took me to a police station in Seoul so that I may have a better life. I believed this story. When I became an adult, I learned from a stranger that, at 2 weeks old, I was found outside of a Daegu hospital on a cold winter’s night. Whether this version is true, I still don’t know.

For intercountry adoptees of color, “a better life” often translates to being taken in by White Christian parents in the West with money and means. We are considered “lucky” to have escaped the poverty and crude treatment we would’ve endured in our homelands. Sometimes that is true, but it assumes the best of our adopters, implies that our cultures are less than, and can cut ties and access to one’s roots and people.

There’s nothing lucky about that.

When I was adopted by affluent White folks from the Greater Boston suburbs, everyone saw what I gained—two houses and two sisters born from two White Catholic parents—but not what I lost. Adoption erased my Korean family, language, and culture, while granting my adopters a badge of honor for saving a poor child from a war-torn country.

Read the full article about transracial adoption by JS LEE at YES! Magazine.