racial arrested development

on being an adoptee

I want braids again. I say again, but I’ve only ever had them once before. In fourth grade, my mom took me to a braiding salon and unlike most from my childhood, the memory is sharp and clear. Maybe because, for once, my mom was the only white person in the room. Probably the same reason she left, returning to pick me up when my hair was done.

The braider is kind and maternal. With a raised brow, she asks if my daddy is Black.

I don’t know, I tell her, I think so? I was adopted. To my surprise, she tells me it’ll take a good few hours to braid my hair the way I want: little boxes all over my head. She smiles when I tell her I found her through her advertising: a vinyl decal on her van’s back windows, a phone number I hastily jotted down. I tear up when she pulls tightly at my hairline. I close my eyes, but when I can no longer hide my tears, she asks if I’m tender-headed. I’ve never heard the expression before. I tell her no, blaming my watery eyes on the fan blowing toward us from the corner of the room. I’m nine years old, but I want her to know she’s not hurting me, I appreciate just being in this space with her. It’s 2001, right before a vacation to Hawai’i, an occasion for which even white girls would get braids.

Back home in our living room, after a week in the ocean and chlorine, my mom tries to take my braids down to no avail. Rather than take me back to the braiding salon, an experience both of us would find humiliating, she crops my 3C hair. The curls barely reach my ears now. 

I hate it, but I try not to cry. I know she feels bad, like she’s failed, but it’s my hair that’s the problem, after all. I tie a scarf over it for months, a lewk when combined with my transition lenses. 

It’s 2019 and this will be different. Determined, I do what has become second-nature: research. My ability to hyper-focus helps me find braiders online, watch countless tutorials on YouTube, read article after article on beauty sites, and scour product reviews. I learn which style to request, how to prep my hair for the appointment, the best ways to care for it while it’s braided, and how to properly take it down. I check Black Twitter daily. I have a few Black friends. It’s mostly the internet, a stand-in for community, that teaches me how to be Black. I’m embarrassed about this, of course.

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There are things you learn to do for survival as a transracial adoptee. I’m observant, thoughtful, and cautious, a result of decades spent trying to blend into predominantly white spaces. The one person of color in so many extended family photos. It’s only in recent years, and in finally working with a Black therapist, that I’ve been able to unpack the maladaptive behaviors. One of the biggest being chronic overthinking. Existing in white spaces has required assimilation and a mask, but being in Black spaces is still complex: I’m both at home and two steps behind.

In my longing for connection and a stable sense of my own identity, I’ve spent hours reading, watching, and consuming Black culture. We—can I say we?—are everything. And yet, I’ve felt like an imposter. Am I no better than the white girls weakly copying dances and lip synching to Black voices? The culture vultures.

It’s complicated, of course. I am Black, confirmed by the DNA tests Twitter jokes about, but without which I would have almost zero knowledge of my ancestry. When I consult a genealogist, she clarifies that I’m descended from people who were enslaved in Virginia in the 1700s and I should look for my ancestors listed under farm equipment in the censuses prior to 1870. I’m also Swedish, although those percentages are smaller. In reflecting on the violence of colorism, I second-guess myself. Who am I to share my thoughts? Yet another light-skinned, privileged person taking up space. How accurate are those DNA tests anyway?

I read essays and scroll through comment sections where the need to gatekeep Blackness is discussed. I cringe when other mixed people are loud and wrong. I share posts about the entertainment industry’s continued colorism and Hollywood’s refusal to give dark-skinned actresses their flowers. A grown ass woman, learning about bonnets and Eco Styler for the first time. The shame of racial arrested development runs deep. On TikTok, they roast biracial girls with white moms, surely I’m worse than that. My white adoptive parents met in Boston. 

I want to apologize for existing.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” 

- James Baldwin

It’s 2023 and here is what I know: like many other Black women, I’ve struggled with perfectionism, imposter syndrome, internalized anti-Blackness, and colorism. As an adoptee, I have been robbed of too much time, connection, and understanding of my own identity to continue second-guessing myself. Blackness is not a monolith; it’s expansive. Scarcity is a myth and gatekeeping is a manifestation of white supremacy and internalized oppression. I’ve removed myself from white-centered spaces and invested intentionally in beautiful, fulfilling friendships with other Black women. My movement community is diverse. I’m grateful for it all.

I am determined to keep growing and evolving. I will mess up, I’m not perfect. But I know how to lay my edges now.