Raising My Black SonPosted in Articles, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, United States on 2016-08-22 21:56Z by Steven |
Brian, Child: the magazine for thinking mothers
2016-08-09
Twenty years ago, I adopted an interracial child—I’ll call him M—thinking a mother’s love could overcome all barriers, even racial ones. Twenty years later, I’m not sure I did my son any favors. I’m a white mom trying to figure out how to raise a black child in a hostile—and potentially lethal—environment.
M came up for adoption during my fourth year of medical school, the unwanted love child of a sixteen-year-old white mother and a black seventeen-year-old father. Unable to take her mixed-race baby home to her blue-collar family, the young woman kept her pregnancy secret from everyone except her mother then gave the baby up for adoption.
My family was tickled to have a grandchild, whatever his color…
Read the entire article here.