Family Proclamations: “Leaving the Ghost Kingdom,” with Angela Tucker

About the Guest

Angela Tucker is author of You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race Identity, and Transracial Adoption. Her story was also featured in the documentary Closure. She has over 15 years of experience working within adoption and foster care agencies, mentoring over 200 adoptees. She is founder of the Adoptee Mentoring Society. In addition to producing the podcast The Adoptee Next Door, she consulted with NBC’s This Is Us.

Transcript

ANGELA TUCKER: As a kid, as a teenager, I only made sense in the city of Bellingham, Washington, if my parents were right nearby. If I'm walking around holding hands with my mom, people would go up to her and say, "Wow, what a great thing you've done." They recognize she has adopted me—"Oh, okay. You're a safe Black person because you're with this woman who did this great thing."

But when I wasn't with my parents, and I'm just a Black girl out in the city, there is confusion, like, "How did you get here? Why are you here? Who are you?"

BLAIR HODGES: Angela Tucker is a Black woman who was adopted by white parents as a very young child. This is called “transracial adoption,” and Angela says adoptees like her grow up wrestling with complicated feelings of gratitude and love, but also rejection, loss, and confusion.

In her new book, Angela invites us to take the perspective of the adopted child and to imagine what it would be like to wonder where you came from, to experience racial confusion, to long for lost connections. She founded the Adoptee Mentoring Society to work with other adoptees and to foster more honest conversations about adoption. She joins us in this episode to talk about her new book: “You Should Be Grateful:" Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption.

There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.

How Do You Feel About Adoption Today? – 2:03

BLAIR HODGES: Angela Tucker joins us. She's author of "You Should Be Grateful": Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption. Angela, welcome to Family Proclamations.

ANGELA TUCKER: Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: Let's start with introductions. I borrowed this first question from your book where you describe mentoring transracial adoptees: Please share your name, your gender pronouns, and how you feel about adoption today.

ANGELA TUCKER: My name is Angela Tucker. I go by she/her pronouns. How I feel about adoption today is a huge question.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I got it from you. [laughter]

ANGELA TUCKER: Wow. Adoption is so complicated. I think in general, society thinks of adoption as really a beautiful thing. That typically comes from the perspective of adoptive parents. My whole work is trying to center the adoptees' perspective on adoption, which isn't necessarily the complete opposite, but it's just a little bit more nuanced than just a fairy-tale-Annie-type story.

BLAIR HODGES: This is a question I see you’ve asked a lot of your counseling groups. You lead sessions with people who are adopted, and you open with this to signal that their feelings might change over time. I think sometimes people get a story about their life and they're just prepared to share that story. When you're sitting down with kids and asking them this question, "How do you feel about it today," their answers may vary. So as a person who has been adopted, where are you at with it today coming into this interview?

ANGELA TUCKER: The question—[laughs] I have never had it turned around on me. But yes, I do ask it of all the people that I mentor, and the reason is just because it's so common that folks put their thoughts about our adoption on us. So I am attempting to give my mentees, whether they're young tweens or teens, or even adults, the freedom to understand it can change from day to day.

For me, I do a lot of consulting with prospective adopters. And it's frustrating, I would say—this is current, as of yesterday's work—just frustrating to work with folks who really, really want a baby, they want a child, they want to become a parent, and they've found adoption as the way to do that. It's frustrating because that's not what adoption is for.

This equation—which, I can understand how it seems like it would make sense—makes things tricky because it makes it hard for the prospective adopters to really have a great understanding about keeping the biological family in your life. Because what they really want is their own child to mold and grow as if it's their own child. That's just not what adoption is. So that's the irksome conundrum I find myself in while I'm doing consulting with families.

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk a little bit about your background. You're a Black person who was adopted by white parents. You talk about them as being progressive and Earth-conscious and attuned to social justice issues. It was interesting to learn about their background and then how that affected you as a person who was adopted into a white family in a very white context.

ANGELA TUCKER: Yes. My parents were certifiable hippies of the 70s. [laughter] They adopted seven of us, all from foster care. Their view really was more of the “zero-population growth” group I talk about, how they bought into that idea that we didn't need to be procreating at the rate we were and so they wanted to adopt. I didn't have those ownership-like feelings I notice with a lot of my clients. They were really wishing all of us could have relationships with our birth parents, but we couldn't for one reason or another.

An Adoptee Manifesto – 5:58

BLAIR HODGES: We'll talk about that. That makes a big difference, what an adoptee's relationship is with their birth parents, whether there can even be one or not.

Your intro to the book begins with something you wrote. It's called An Adoptee Manifesto. I wondered if you could read that for us here.

ANGELA TUCKER: Sure, yes.

BLAIR HODGES: This kind of gives us a sense of where you're coming from and what you're fighting for.

ANGELA TUCKER: "An Adoptee Manifesto. We can love more than one set of parents. Relationships with our birth parents, foster parents, and our adoptive parents are not mutually exclusive. We have the right to own our original birth certificate. Curiosity about our roots is innate. We need access to our family medical history. The pre-verbal memories we have with our first family are real. Post-natal culture shock exists. It's okay to feel a mixture of gratitude and loss. We are not alone. We have each other."

BLAIR HODGES: It's a beautiful manifesto. We'll touch on points of it as we go. I wondered when this originated. When did you write the actual manifesto? Was it part of the book or something you'd done beforehand?

ANGELA TUCKER: I wrote just a series of statements—it was always on an airplane coming back from doing a keynote speech somewhere. Each of these lines were things I had to find myself telling myself on the airplane. I would go give a keynote speech and I might be barraged with audience members who would ask questions like, "Well, why do you really need to know your medical history? You've got great parents, and they took such great care of you, and they took you to doctors and stuff."

At that particular speech, I would be defending why I needed to know my medical history. Every single statement was me on an airplane, ruminating over that one thing, like, well, why do I need to know that? Is it my right?

Over time I collated all of those together and at a certain point wrote them all down in one document, and instead of being the flight home from a speech, the flight to a speech, I read all of them in one fell swoop and found a sense of power. Then I started sharing it with other adoptees I mentor, and they were like, "Wow. It's so simple!”

Things like, "we can love all of our parents," but to say it out loud, and to say it's not mutually exclusive feels really empowering. After I had collated all these together and started sharing them with others, I just thought, why don't I create it into a beautiful manifesto? I had someone design it, the lettering, the font, and put it up on my wall.

Then I started using it as a tool with other adoptive parents who were a little skeptical to say, "What would happen if you put this on your wall for your adopted child to see?" That started creating sense of empowerment for the kids, and so that was really the iteration of how it came to be.

A Tricky Minefield – 9:19

BLAIR HODGES: We’ll hit on some pieces of the manifesto throughout our discussion, but let's also talk about how tricky the discussion itself can be. In your introduction you write that “being honest about adoption is a tricky minefield to navigate, because regardless of your own stance, somebody inevitably seems to get hurt.”

What kind of mines are you trying to avoid?

ANGELA TUCKER: It's so many people's emotions. So many people's good intentions. So many assumptions that this is the best thing for us.

I feel like there's the minefield of the prospective adopters, who maybe just want to help, or they'll say that. For me, I'm trying to articulate how, specifically for white parents who say, "We will adopt a child of any color," I want to speak in a kind way, but to show them perhaps that isn't the most responsible thing to do, given their place, or given people's desires for Black and Brown families to start adopting at the same rate as white, entitled middle-class families seem to do.

Then I'm also working around, like in my story, my birth mother's deep feelings of shame she has around the time that she placed me for adoption. She doesn't really remember very much about that time. For me to even bring it up—and working on this book was part of that—inevitably triggers her into a space that's really dark and sad.

But when I'm talking with her about it, I am sometimes trying to advocate for her, to say, "You really should have had more support." But in even saying that, it reminds her of what she didn't have, and what she couldn't do, which was keep me.

For social workers I also feel like it's a minefield because many of them are just doing the best they can with what they have and the knowledge they know. But obviously, it's not good enough if we have one in four adoptees who are in therapy seeking suicide. Something isn't right there either.

I think the minefield, if I could sum it up, is that people's good intentions are all over adoptions. It's rare that I meet folks who really want to harm people. Like that's not people's goal. To be critical of it is definitely weighing everyone's perspective all at the same time, it feels like.

“You Should Be Grateful” – 11:57

BLAIR HODGES: Right, and I think the title itself speaks to that—the idea that you should be grateful, a statement that adoptees often hear and, as you point out in the book, some adoptees kind of tell themselves even when they don't really feel it.

ANGELA TUCKER: It's gaslighting and it's not gaslighting at the same time. People would say this to me all the time, but they didn't even know my birth parents. I didn't know my birth parents. I didn't know anything about what my life would have been like. But there's that assumption that I got a better life.

Certainly, I got a different life. I have really great parents and grew up in a city that, even though it was predominantly white, was a pretty great place to grow up in the Pacific Northwest. But the “should” part—In the book I write the word "should," to me, feels like a combination of judgment and failure at the same time before I've even done anything, and that is irksome, and I also understand where it's coming from.

BLAIR HODGES: Is that because you can feel some gratitude? You clearly care for your adoptive parents so much, just like so many kids can be grateful for their parents, and so the phrase is complicated. I think part of the problem is, it seems to really hem everything in. It's very limiting. Instead of saying, "What are you grateful for?" Or "What is there to be grateful for?" It's, "Well, you should be grateful. Here is the story. This is all you should really focus on." It's not curious at all.

ANGELA TUCKER: Right. I talk in the book a lot about the things I'm really grateful for, which this idea that I am grateful for the family I have, yet I am not grateful to have to have been adopted. It's an ever so slight difference, but it makes all the difference to me. I don't think any of us wish to be adopted, nor do birth parents want to be birth parents that—

So much else happens, and yes, we can still have gratitude for the family we find ourselves within.

Adoptee Centrism – 14:07

BLAIR HODGES: I haven't had any close friends who were adoptees. I don't have any direct relatives that are adoptees. I think grappling with it came through popular culture and media, and most recently through NBC's This is Us, which follows the story of adoptees, one of whom is a transracial adoptee. That character has become, in my life, an important role model of fatherhood, and to see the story play out of the complications of adoption.

For people who haven't seen the series, it's a couple who have two kids and adopt Randall, their third child, and Randall is Black. Especially toward the end of the series you get to see more of the of the racial dynamics play out. I think you consulted on the show, right?

ANGELA TUCKER: I consulted on the last season, so season five for Randall's character.

BLAIR HODGES: There was so much there and there was so much in that show and in your book that really put my eyes on what the adoptees themselves thought. That's really important. You call it “adoptee centrism.”

As you said, a lot of the stories take the perspective of parents and a whole family, like parents wanted a child, they either couldn't have one or for other reasons adopted—that's the story, rather than what's happening to the person being adopted. Talk a little bit more about Adoptee Centrism.

ANGELA TUCKER: It's funny how when I talk about adoption, and when I was consulting with the writers of This is Us for Randall, there is this idea of like, "Wow, I've never thought of it that way.” And then, "Oh, how obvious that is” at the same time!

In adoption, I often talk about how we are wedged between someone's great joy, which is the adoptive parents often, and someone's extreme pain, which is the birth parents oftentimes. The fact that media hasn't spent much time on our perspective of what that feels like to be in between both, that we often hear about—probably the most critique from media is this "savior attitude" that adoptive parents might have, you hear about "White Saviorism," but the space of wishing we could be with our birth family, perhaps understanding why we can't—that's the story I'm trying to tell and promote.

Adoptee centrism hasn't been mainstreamed because there seems to be a big threat, especially to adoptive parents, when adoptees speak out. I am grateful my parents don't seem to have that. They're very open to my viewpoint on all of this. One thing I talk about in my book is how many adult adoptees say, "I want to find my birth parents, but I'm going to wait until my adoptive parents die before I start."

That's because they're trying to show love for their adoptive parents, and they don't want them to feel put off or like they're not thankful for all they did. So many stories I know, right when their adoptive parents pass away, these adoptees go try to search, and those are really sad stories often because birth parents sometimes have passed away too by that point.

History of Transracial Adoption in the US – 17:39

BLAIR HODGES: I think taking the perspective of adoptees is really helpful and your book has a lot of voices in there, a lot of different people you talked to, to help give people a sense of adoptees' perspectives. You also give a history of transracial adoption in particular.

There's a startling moment in your first chapter I wanted to bring up here. You describe a meet-and-greet that happened after your documentary Closure was screened. This is a documentary about your experience. A Black woman approached you and told you that you were her worst fears realized and said you're not a true Black person. This chapter puts her comment into historical context about what she could have meant by that.

Why would someone say something like that, that you're her worst fears realized and there's something questionable about your Blackness?

ANGELA TUCKER: That was a really hard moment, but the woman who told me this was a member of the National Association of Black Social Workers. In 1972, that group called transracial adoption "cultural genocide," because they felt like white people weren't going to adequately imbue the skills we need to traverse America and its racism.

The group wasn't saying white parents couldn't parent us, but that we would have to do a lot of code switching and essentially become way familiar with whiteness, perhaps at a really terrible cost.

In my speech I was essentially saying that in a positive way. I was talking about how comfortable I felt in both white and Black spaces as a result of growing up transracially adopted, even though I did talk about finding my Blackness and being really proud of who I was, didn't come until I was in my college years and got away from that predominantly white city. But that was exactly what this woman wanted to work against.

She in her career was trying to avoid adoptees having to feel that split, and so with my speech I basically confirmed it's still happening. I didn't know all of that when she told me I was her worst fear realized and so I was really shocked—more than shocked I mean, to have a Black woman say that to me was really tough. But as I reflected on it against that backdrop, I had an understanding. It's similar to how hard I'm working to ensure adoptees are no longer in closed adoptions. And if I went to a speech in twenty years, and someone came through a closed adoption, I don't know that I would go right up to them and say that, but I would be frustrated about my life's work.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. “Closed adoption” meaning there's no connection between adoptees and their birth parents and there's really no way to find them. You're basically not allowed to, whether the records are hidden, or whatever. That’s closed adoption.

I want to talk a little bit more about the history. The first recorded transracial adoption in the United States that we know of you say happened in 1948. That's not all that long ago. Then in the 1950s there's a rise of a paternalistic kind of racism. White people were saying, "Oh, we need to uplift Black people. We can do this through adoption." Or, "Black people are less fit as parents and so we should bring Black children into white families," and so on. That's the context the National Association of Black Social Workers was protesting against and saying there's racial genocide in the 70s, which to me made total sense historically, to see why they would have those problems.

But then in the 1980s, which is around the time you were adopted, there was the rise of a colorblind, feel-good, post-racial kind of vibe. It's sort of like, "We don't care what color they are; we'll welcome any child into our family!" Which on the surface seems great, right? It seems not racist, but in ignoring the experience of race in America, it ends up overlooking really important aspects of what it means to be Black and what it means to be white. You say a colorblind, feel-good adoption is actually kind of problematic.

ANGELA TUCKER: Yes. So problematic. I remember actually wearing a t-shirt that says, "Love sees no color." I think that was a common adage back in the early nineties maybe.

Color Evasive – 22:26

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, that was my youth. "I don't see color" was the thing.

ANGELA TUCKER: I like the upgraded term for colorblindness, which is “color evasiveness,” because it doesn't let white people off the hook to say like, "I just don't see it." Because actually, you do, and you're choosing not to see a certain color, certain races. But in doing that we're only upholding whiteness as the status quo.

To say, "I love you no matter what. You're beautiful no matter what, but we're going to put you in this predominantly white space," means we really want you to assimilate to be just like them and we're not going to celebrate any aspect of what makes you who you are. That idea is really covert. It comes across when people like myself wanted to have hair that flowed in the wind like my mom's. I didn't want to have my afro. That could be interpreted as just individuation, just trying new things and hairstyles, or we could see it through the race of colorblindness. Of course I want to fit in with the culture around me.

I know so many families who would just choose to see it as the former, as just self-exploration, and put us in an all-Black place. We likely wouldn't be so keen to have our hair look like Eurocentric flow in the wind. We still have it a little bit because that's what is in popular culture. You just have to work really hard to embrace and to see race. We really want parents to see our color because once they do there's so much historically and in our culture we can seriously celebrate. But also, there's that piece of, if you want to avoid talking about race, then it must mean you don't love my birth family, is how it feels way deep down.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. You also talked about how growing up in a white household, it might be like the way you talk, the way you dress, the kind of things you enjoy. If you're more surrounded by white folks and not as invested in Black culture, that can be reflected in how you talk and how you act—I don't remember if the book uses the word “Oreo” or not, but it's this kind of derogatory way of saying “Black on the outside, white on the inside.”

ANGELA TUCKER: I do talk about “Oreo,” when I'm working with a group of transracial adoptees at a transracial adoption camp, that this group of boys talk about this word "Oreo" and how they are called that, and what that means to them. In the book, you can see their struggle with accepting that reality and believing it, and then also wanting to push back against it, because they understand there are aspects of themselves that don't fit with the societal view of Blackness.

I try to teach that Blackness is not a monolith, but that's something I didn't learn until later on. I didn't really, truly believe there could be Black nerds—Black folks like me who love to read. I really did buy into the narrative that Black folks are only athletes. It was just so narrow. But how do you know if you aren't immersed in the culture? So it still is a prevalent term.

I like to point people to Susan Harris O'Connor's research where she talks about the five different identities of transracial adoptees and how tricky they are. That our genetic identity might not match up with our feeling identity. Like I know I'm a Black woman, but I may I have a feeling I really can identify with whiteness. Of course I can, if that's all I was raised in. That has changed in my adulthood, thankfully, but it would make sense.

I try to give transracial adoptees a little more latitude and some language around the expansiveness of our identities. It's nice, because I think it's not just limited to transracial adoption anymore, that there are so many different groups of people grappling with what it means to belong. That's really a surprise I've found with my book coming out, how many people aren't related to transracial adoption but are like, "I feel myself in your book."

BLAIR HODGES: Because they sense that identity tension, the kind of different tensions a lot of different people feel. Your book explores how that plays out in the context of adoption, but I do think there’s connection there for anyone who's tried to find a place, or tried to fit in, or had questions about their identity.

I think LGBTQ issues fit in here, especially for folks who are trans who are dealing with gender expectations as they grow up. There’s a lot of different touchstones here for a lot of readers.

ANGELA TUCKER: Yeah, just pushing back against the status quo and our world is expanding on so many binaries we've had. I think that is exactly the transracial adoptee experience.

Proximal Privilege – 27:56

BLAIR HODGES: Right. Your chapter, "White Privilege by Osmosis," talks about these exact issues, about not being seen as Black enough to some people, being seen as too Black for others. But also—this was interesting to me—the “proximal privilege,” I think is the words you use. The kind of privilege you could receive by being in a white family.

ANGELA TUCKER: Yes. As a kid, as a teenager, I only made sense in the city of Bellingham, Washington, if my parents were right nearby. So if I'm walking around holding hands with my mom at a mall, people automatically would go up to her and say, "Wow, what a great thing you've done!" They recognize she has adopted me, and then I, therefore, am given this privilege of being in this space without having to explain myself very much. Just like "Oh, okay, you're a safe Black person, because you're with this woman who did this great thing."

But when I wasn't with my parents and I'm just a Black girl out in the city, there is caution and curiosity, and kind of confusion, people are like, "How did you get here? Why are you here? Who are you" kind of thing.

BLAIR HODGES: They don't just think it, either! I was shocked at how common commentary could come at you, like commentary at the store, or commentary at a playground, and how often families deal with these unsolicited comments that maybe seem well-intentioned, but I think they're really born of a sort of discomfort. People feel uncomfortable and they just need to say something.

ANGELA TUCKER: Yes. So often just out on the playground, like, "Where did you get them? How much did they cost? Where did they come from?"

BLAIR HODGES: Or overpraising, like over-attention, right? Like, "So beautiful, look at you." You're like, "I'm a kid. I'm here with my mom…"

ANGELA TUCKER: Just the stunning-ness that a Black child could be well-behaved, or kind, or having fun on the playground, or any of that is like, "Oh my goodness."

BLAIR HODGES: "She's so well spoken." What does that mean?!

ANGELA TUCKER: "Very articulate." I'm always "very articulate." [laughter] That gets back to the adoptee centrism, because yes, a lot of these points just seem like people can't even stop themselves but to gush in those ways, which are racist, but well-intentioned. To be in the middle of that as a kid, it makes you wonder, "Is there something weird about me that only a special person could have adopted me? Or is there something strange that I can speak? Am I speaking wrong? What makes me so absolutely articulate that it's just mind boggling?"

Where are we supposed to go with those questions without appearing like we're not grateful for what we've been given? That's a lot of my work and mentorship, is giving space for exploring the comments people make that really do make us question our place.

BLAIR HODGES: Your book is helpful with this. I encourage people to read it to see some of the comments they themselves may have made, because we just need to become more familiar. I think a lot of times it is coming from a place of ignorance rather than maliciousness, but we've got to learn in order to not do it.

ANGELA TUCKER: Absolutely. I mean, the title, "You Should Be Grateful"—it's funny how often people have come up to me and been like, "Oh my gosh, I hear that all the time! It's the worst." But nobody is willing to say, "Oh, my word, I've said that all the time!" Both have to be true.

I think about myself and times in my head where I've had that thought too, and within my context, if you boil it down even more, it's about poverty, and how we view—like, my birth mother couldn't have possibly loved me or been a good parent since she was poor.

Let's get a little bit deeper into that, is what I'm trying to also ask for, because it's really harmful for adoptees to grow up thinking—whatever the case may be, but for me grow up thinking—because my birth mother is poor she didn't love me. That's the message you get unless you really face it and name it. And that is not true!

Systemic Issues – 32:27

BLAIR HODGES: Well, and another one is, “She was poor because she has some sort of fundamental character flaws.” It doesn't look at systemic injustices. It doesn't look at how generational wealth has been denied to so many Black folks in the United States, it doesn't look to systemic issues.

I think there's also a risk that Black transracial adoptive kids might accept some of the stereotypes about Black communities, of being like, "Oh, maybe I should be grateful,” because of stereotypes about Black people being lazy, or Black fathers being absent, these sort of things that we know are problematic, but they can be internalized by some of these adoptees.

ANGELA TUCKER: If we think about why Black fathers are absent, let's get into the penal system and how many Black men are incarcerated, and how many of those men have children, and how many of those men have children they would have loved to have parented if not being imprisoned for a marijuana possession or something that isn't even illegal now.

BLAIR HODGES: All while their communities are over-policed compared to white communities. There was more policing there, there are more arrests. Criminality itself isn't inherent to race, but the way we build policing means there are inequities in how people are imprisoned or prosecuted or sentenced. Again, systemic stuff.

ANGELA TUCKER: Right. This is something so many people who are at that point of saying, "I want to adopt a child. I want a baby really badly," have a really hard time thinking about. The systemic issues. If I say to someone who is in that place—and perhaps they've been struggling with getting pregnant for years and this is just all they want—if I were to say, “Why do you think a Black or Brown family wouldn't be able to adopt this child instead of you?” That would be so hurtful to them because they're like, "What are you saying? I'm going to give this kid the best life possible."

What I'm trying to get to is systemic issues. To say, "What makes it such that you are able to adopt this child and a Black and Brown family isn't?" It's a hard conversation to have at that time given the emotionality of it all.

That’s a trend I've seen, and it’s really hard to talk about at that moment, but for instance if they adopt a Black boy, when he turns five or six and he's experiencing racism on the playground or even from the school faculty, then those same parents come to me and are like, "Oh my goodness, this is terrible. This isn't fair." They can't see it until, in my view, they get what they want, which is the child. And then once the legals are all completed, then there's this valve that opens in their brain, allowing for the possibility to talk about the systemic issues.

Professional Work with the Adoption System – 35:24

BLAIR HODGES: You've had a front row seat to this, not just as an adoptee, but also through your professional work. You began professionally working with adoptive agencies, helping to facilitate adoptions, including transracial adoptions. But that didn't seem to last very long for you.

ANGELA TUCKER: [laughter] I mean, I was twenty-one years old, fresh out of undergrad, when I began placing children and doing transracial adoptions. It was a great learning experience for me.

One of the things I was curious about was how the “home study” process works. Home study can be like a six-month process that if you want to adopt you have to go through all these interviews and background checks. And I wanted to know what that was like. So I started conducting those and writing these big reports for families, and that was very enlightening, learning also about the money.

It was perplexing to me how I would be making $32,000 a year in this role, and individual families would be paying $39,000 for an adoption to wait on a list. And I had like fifty families. So I knew there was a lot of money coming in, and where's it all going?

Then I would be working with my colleagues who were supporting women who are pregnant. And for some reason, we couldn't spend very much money to support their needs. So yeah, that was really a tricky space to be in as an adoptee, but it taught me a lot.

BLAIR HODGES: You seem pretty pragmatic in your approach because you recognize issues with the adoption system and systemic issues with regard to race in the United States. But you've also targeted your focus to work directly with adoptees themselves. You've started The Adoptee Lounge, for example, which is a group you run to help discuss with transracial adoptees what their experiences are like, to help young people process this together.

You've landed in a place where you've been a professional in the adoption world. Then you've become more of an activist. You've also become a counselor. Do you feel at home more in that role? How did you land where you are now with this advocacy, writing books, and mentoring individual people? Does it ever feel a little futile because the bigger system continues to plod on?

ANGELA TUCKER: Totally. All those things. I certainly could not see myself working to continue helping people adopt children. I knew I couldn't do that. I shifted to working in post-adoption services, which is so necessary but feels frustrating because I'm no longer working at the source, although I do make attempts.

It's pretty hard to push back at every step within the child welfare industry. The adoption industry more so than foster care. I think there's a need within foster care. It's more sometimes the newborn/infant adoption space, but I do some work in foster care and that feels much more aligned with my wellbeing, when we have clarity that a child really cannot be with their biological family. There's been abuse or harm, and so advocating for individuals to step up to support them feels better because it's less about ownership and more about stewardship and the support of a child.

But landing in the adoptee space does feel a bit futile because I don't want the system to keep on churning out more adoptees. And at the same time, I don't see it stopping anytime soon and I do think when I'm working with adoptees who are in their seventies and eighties and they are grappling with these same things, I think, "All right, there is so much healing we can do in helping adoptees understand all aspects of themselves." It feels very grounding for me. It feels less adversarial.

But I also am keeping my foot in that activism space. I think about the Indian Child Welfare Act, which is in front of the Supreme Court right now. There are so many parallels to it and the National Association of Black Social Workers and their statement. That's a really scary law that could get reversed. So I do spend some time in those spaces, as well as educating adoption agencies. But working with adoptees is a beautiful space for me to be in, and for sustainability long term, it's important.

The Ghost Kingdom – 40:15

BLAIR HODGES: That's Angela Tucker. We're talking about the book “You Should Be Grateful:” Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption. You can also check out her story in a documentary called Closure I mentioned earlier. She also has a podcast, The Adoptee Next Door. She also consulted with NBC's This Is Us and has over fifteen years of experience working within adoption and foster care agencies and has mentored over two hundred adoptees.

Angela, there's this idea you bring up in the book, the "Ghost Kingdom," and this is something you got from a psychologist who coined this term. This is the imaginary worlds adoptees construct as they're trying to make sense of a past they don't have very many solid memories of—this Ghost Kingdom, this world an adoptee can build. Give us a sense of what that is.

ANGELA TUCKER: The Ghost Kingdom is an imaginary, fantastical realm where, for me, I decided my birth dad was Magic Johnson when I was young, because he's a basketball player, I'm a basketball player. He has a humongous smile, I have this big smile. In the absence of knowing any facts about who my birth dad is, then it must be him.

My birth mom was Halle Berry because she's stunningly beautiful. I don't think I could just say that about myself. But who wouldn't want to be Halle Berry? She has a similar skin tone to me. It's just a little goofy, but it's also helpful in trying to fill in the blanks.

I think it's not too different than non-adopted people who might have chosen to go to one college instead of another and they think about what life would have been like if they chose to go to that college instead, like, "Where would I be today? What would I have studied? Where would I live?" That's the kind of place where there's nothing wrong with it. I do hope adoptees don't have to spend much time in their Ghost Kingdom because we can replace it with the truth.

For me, once I found my birth parents, they are so much better than Magic Johnson and Halle Berry, like they are my blood and it was, oh, unbelievable to know them. That's kind of what the Ghost Kingdom is. It's not just adoptees. Birth parents have a Ghost Kingdom, especially if they don't know where their child went, and that's thinking about who their children became and where they are living and what they are doing.

BLAIR HODGES: You talk about the grief of ambiguous loss. There's a Welsh word—I don't know how to pronounce it. Hiraeth. Do you know how to pronounce it?

ANGELA TUCKER: I learned how to pronounce it when I was doing the audiobook recording. I'm still not very good at it. But it's “here-ayeth."

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, yeah. It's this sense of homesick, nostalgia, and longing for something that is irretrievably lost, something that can't come back, something that's just gone, and maybe was never fully solid. It's this sort of ambiguous nostalgia.

And as you mentioned, you hope the Ghost Kingdoms don't need to be built as much because you're advocating for more open adoption versus closed adoption, meaning kids can learn more about their birth parents earlier, they can know more. There could possibly be contact. Because when there's not any of that, all kids have is their imagination, and their imagination can take them anywhere really. In good ways and bad ways.

ANGELA TUCKER: Yes, and I think some adoptive parents may not recognize the hole that's filling, if a child is having a huge imagination and is wanting to watch Annie over and over and over and over again. The reason is we're essentially searching for ourselves, and so let's just make it possible.

I advocate that we can always have open adoptions for every single adoption, even those where a birth parent is deceased, those where a birth parent is truly unsafe, or they're in jail. That every single adoption can be open because it has more to do with what the adoptive parents have within their control, which is, if you know your child, you can say, like, "Gosh, I wonder where your traits come from. Your birth parents must be lovers of art, or great singers." You know? You can really take what you see in the child and expound upon it in relation to birth family, even if you don't know them.

That is what creates a really wonderful space for adoptees to feel free to explore and not gaslit and not like they have to have a sheer loyalty to the adoptive parents. So that is what I advocate when physical contact can't be had.

BLAIR HODGES: This was where This Is Us was so powerful was seeing Rebecca's [the mother’s] fear that Randall's [the adopted son’s] parents would replace her at some point, this fear he would connect with them and lose her, or a kind of possible jealousy, or he could reconnect and maybe be hurt by a birth parent.

There are so many feelings for the parent going through this. You're really asking parents to make room for these other families and these other connections, which can be scary for everybody involved. But I feel you make a powerful case, that all things being equal, it's a better approach because people, by and large, are going to have that longing regardless of what you do,

ANGELA TUCKER: They're going to figure out how to get it some way, even if it's like as I shared earlier, the fifty-year-old who's going to wait until their adoptive parents die till they're going to find their birth parents. Finding our roots, like I wrote in the manifesto, is innate.

I think it's scary only because we don't have a lot of examples of it. Perhaps it was scary at some point for a parent to think they could love four children equally if they had four kids. Maybe people at some point were like, "Wow, can that really be done?" Now it's not scary. You're going to have another kid? Great, people say.

How come we can't understand that for adoptees, we can love all these parents we have. We're not going to feel confused about who's who or who might not be safe, or how to put boundaries in our lives to keep that safety. No, actually, if you as our adoptive parents have taught us about boundaries, just in general, then allow us to use that here too.

Finding Angela’s Birth Parents – 46:46

BLAIR HODGES: There's something in the book you bring up. The “Birth Study.” This is a document you held to almost as scripture, this sort of story of your origins. This is a study done by social workers during the process of your adoption that talked about your birth parents. It gave clues about who they were. It wasn't until later when your boyfriend, now your partner, pointed out your possible biological father's name was included here and this is what helped open the gate to you reconnecting.

ANGELA TUCKER: This study is a three-page document. I house it in a box in my house with things like my passport, my marriage license, it's that important to me. It is filled with redactions. I didn't notice because in the era of closed adoptions, we can't know our birth parent's last name, for example, or I couldn't know her address. It would share my birth mother's height and weight and skin complexion, but nothing identifying.

It wasn't until my husband, boyfriend at the time, saw this name I had overlooked. It was an uncommon name. “Oterious” is my birth father's name. That allowed us to then Google and search and find this man who didn't know he had a daughter.

BLAIR HODGES: I hope people take the time to see in the documentary, or read the book, to see this story. You had dreamed so long about meeting your mom that it was sort of like, "Oh yeah, there's a dad too! Okay, I'll check that out." [laughter]

But you still had that drive for your mom, and as you describe in the book, it was devastating in some ways, actually. I think it's easy to romanticize and figure like, "Oh, this is going to be some grand reunion." But you describe the first time you met her in person again, she basically denied it like, "Oh no. No relation here. Goodbye."

ANGELA TUCKER: Painful. Another reason why it's so important that we bring in systemic issues when teaching about adoption, because the thing that got me through that year where she denied me, "I don't know who you are, please leave," we were in Tennessee to find her. Then we flew back to Washington state where we live. But what got me through that year was understanding how deep shame must be for someone who was not given any support to think about what happened to her daughter, and to then think about why wasn't she given support, and to start understanding issues around poverty and how the adoption industry treats that, versus how it treats adoptive parents who have resources and means.

I think it's partly a coping mechanism to kind of intellectualize.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, you say that in the book. It was so interesting to see you psychoanalyze yourself a little bit and say after your mom devastated you, you went through this investigation into the background, thinking about the systemic issues and ways you were processing grief intellectually.

ANGELA TUCKER: Exactly. I had to be mad at something, and I could not fathom being mad at my birth mother for this unexpected visitor twenty-six years later after giving birth at a time that must have been—

I was like, yeah, that is shocking. I can't be mad, but I am mad. Who am I mad at? I turned to the system and all the people that failed her, but then I didn't just think about her, and I'm thinking about the bigger system and all the people who are in leadership positions and what is happening with every single adoption. I was able to channel that grief intellectually and move on.

But my gracious, when she called back a year later, that was indescribable! She called back and said, "Yes, I am your birth mother. Come back and let's meet."

Wishing For Better – 50:56

BLAIR HODGES: It is such a beautiful story. Not all stories get to have this kind of outcome, especially in the time of closed adoptions, how many people never even had this opportunity. It's beautiful to see.

You also talk a little bit about survivor's guilt, because you met some siblings you had. Some siblings you'd never known and you were kind of comparing your life to theirs. You brought a sister out to visit you in Washington, and you would go out to Tennessee, and your survivor's guilt hung around for you, seeing the different lives you might have had.

ANGELA TUCKER: It's hard to see that many of my birth siblings weren't raised by my birth mother either, but they weren't adopted. There's one sibling who was adopted who we are still looking for and can't find her. But the others, their lives are so much different than mine.

If I could rewrite the book, I might not use that word "guilt," because I think guilt assumes a crime. You're guilty of doing something wrong. In this case, I did not do anything wrong, nor did my birth siblings. I would probably work a little harder to find the right language to describe this phenomenon.

BLAIR HODGES: Maybe it's just wishing better for them too? You're seeing some of the privileges you got, because of where you were raised, and who raised you, comparatively.

I like that, though, eliminating the word guilt because there's not culpability. But there is still an unsettled feeling and sort of a—you wish better for them.

ANGELA TUCKER: And I wish better for myself. Although they weren't raised by my birth mother, they knew her.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, and you're connecting with your siblings now, forging new relationships. I can only imagine how complicated that could feel.

ANGELA TUCKER: I think in my birth siblings' perspective, there was a sense of wishing they had some of what I have when they came to my hometown and saw some of the places where I grew up and met some of my friends and teachers and coaches and stuff.

At the same time, there was a wishing on my end for what they had. Even though my birth mother didn't raise them, they were raised by my birth grandmother and got to see my birth mom on occasion and knew her name and knew the story. For me, there was a longing for that, that they knew their roots and I didn't.

BLAIR HODGES: It's so tempting to weigh that against each other. What's ultimately preferable?

ANGELA TUCKER: I think that's what is done in adoption. We do weigh that, and what wins is me getting three meals a day and access to all the extracurricular activities and great medical care. What loses is what my birth siblings had, which was a little more instability.

But to me, knowing what it's like growing up without roots, without knowing where you came from, or who gave birth to you, that, to me, means as much. As well as the racial element. They grew up with people who looked like them. I didn't get to see anyone who looked like me for years.

So far what has won out is what the adoptive parents are able to give and I'm trying to press back against that a little.

BLAIR HODGES: I also appreciated how you talked about your birth mother, how she might have been feeling. You spent more time, it seems, after you met her thinking about reasons why she might not have wanted to reconnect—or maybe just had conflicted feelings about it, maybe I should say—and empathizing more now that you've met her and have come to know her more as a person, that story could fill in more for you about what she might have been up to and why.

ANGELA TUCKER: A bit. It's very hard for her to articulate all of this, especially with me having white parents. When I asked her how many positive relationships she'd had with white people growing up, she's like, "I could count it on one hand." For me to think like, "Okay, and here come my parents who want to show her love, but clearly she has to be projecting upon them what she has experienced from so many the other white people in the Deep South."

It's really cool now to see their relationship. My parents went on a road trip to the South and sent me pictures of hanging out with my birth mom in Biloxi, Mississippi, and taking her out to eat, and they just had fun. I love that. It's taken a decade, but my birth mother really trusts them now. That relationship is so healing for me to see.

BLAIR HODGES: I was really moved by something you said about your mom. She didn't express to you her reservations about you meeting your birth mom. She just showed support for you, and was there for you, although she did have worries.

You suggest maybe if she did share with you, it might have dissuaded you from pursuing things. It might have prevented you from having this amazing reconnection, and to swallow her own vulnerability—or not swallow, but keep it inside, so you could have more freedom to pursue what you needed. That's pretty amazing.

ANGELA TUCKER: It's beautiful. I wish I could just categorize it as parenting. I would like for it to be in that same category of how parents sacrifice for their kids in many ways and all these times. But I think this one does feel a little more unique.

I don't think my mom just swallowed her, what she—I now know—articulates at the time as a fear of being replaced. She had a little fear. She didn't tell me. I don't think she just swallowed it. I think she just talked to other people about it but didn't talk to me about it because she knew I wouldn't want to hurt her. I wouldn't want to put her in that place.

It's incredible that she gave me the freedom to not have that burden and move forward. She worked through that fear on her own and I'm so grateful for it. I absolutely believe that's the reason I have this relationship now.

The Sondersphere – 57:26

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about the Sondersphere. This is an interesting term you bring up in the book. Because you're an advocate for more open adoptions, even though adoptive parents might fear competition or whatever, you suggest the ways we imagine our connections to each other can help quiet our fears like that, and offer a more stable experience for adoptees. I'll invite you to read a section from the book here on page 166. This is a section that talks about this Sondersphere, if you would. I’d appreciate that.

ANGELA TUCKER: "I call it the Sondersphere, a word I made up based on a term coined by John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. He defines the word 'sonder' as the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness, an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill, sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you'll never know existed.

The Sondersphere is around where every person in an adoptees' life has a place. Where birth parents and adoptive parents and biological aunties and foster parents and adoptive cousins all exist together. They don't necessarily share a home, like some awkward reality TV show, but instead share an orbit around the adoptee. The Sondersphere is a real-life antidote to the adoptees' Ghost Kingdom, a place where their questions can be answered in real time, where their identity can bounce around and try things on for size, where they always belong, because all the parts of their story are visible and accessible to them."

BLAIR HODGES: The Sondersphere. This is a wonderful way to conceive of it. I want to hear more from you about what this idea has done for you in your own pursuit as you've reconnected with your family members, and as you work with transracial adoptees in your professional life.

ANGELA TUCKER: Currently, openness is the preferred terminology and method, but when you're working in an adoption agency, what openness looks like is giving the adoptive parents a document they fill out that says "We will contact birth parents four times a year." Or, "We'll send a letter with some photos to the adoption agency quarterly and then the agency can pass it along." That constitutes openness. Sometimes those contracts are written for the next eighteen years of a kid's life. I am suggesting that is unreasonable for anyone to make relationship decisions for the next eighteen years.

Instead, this Sondersphere accounts for the ebbs and flows that are natural in a relationship. Currently if an adoptive family has this openness contract, sometimes they'll call me up and say, "The birth mom disappeared for eight months. We have not heard a thing from her. Everything's off. What are we supposed to do?" In the Sondersphere I'm trying to reframe that to say, all of us go through times where we might need a little break, or we might go off the grid for one reason or another.

BLAIR HODGES: It could even be health issues or something. Who knows?

ANGELA TUCKER: Who knows what it is? But what I do know is it's human. Can we allow for just the humanity? Especially in an extremely emotional and vulnerable relationship like this one. But the humanity is not just accepted; we embrace it just like we would with any uncle we have who goes in and out of our lives. My hope is it can just give a more human portrayal of everyone involved, and that is only going to be helpful for all of humanity if we can finally see all of ourselves as not one-dimensional.

I think this is for birth parents, too. I hear birth parents, when they are talking about openness, they'll say things like, "My kid's adoptive parents are perfect. They have this white picket fence, they have a grand piano, they have two Labrador Retrievers, and life is perfect." For them, too, I'm like, "No, no. The adoptive parents have quarrels, they struggle, they have fights, they love your kid, but no, everything is not perfect.” That's currently the system we've designed.

Legal Issues – 1:02:13

 

BLAIR HODGES: I really appreciate the attention you give to being more supportive of birth moms in general, that the amount of resources we put into foster and adoption, there might be a reckoning we could do to see if there are more social supports we could give to mothers and to fathers or to couples or single individuals who are having children, to support them in having children and keeping them and raising them if possible. The kind of systemic interventions that could help, instead of so many resources going on the other side of things in adoption and fostering.

ANGELA TUCKER: It's pretty wild. People sometimes ask, "How did your birth dad not know about you?" They were like, "I can understand how your birth mom might have hid the pregnancy and stuff, but how did his rights get legally terminated?" I share how that process works, which is, for my birth father and many men, an attorney will put an ad in a paper, and that ad needs to run for a couple months. This varies by county, but an ad might say like, "Did you know So-and-So? Were you at this place on this date? If so, call us."

My birth dad never picked up the paper, much less the classified section where the font is size eight, and nobody reads that.

Once that ad runs, that's essentially giving them an opportunity to step forward even though they may never see it, and then John Doe's rights are terminated. They terminate every single man in America's rights to parent me.

BLAIR HODGES: What's your wish list for legal issues? If there's one or two big things you would change legally, what would those be, for the system itself?

ANGELA TUCKER: One of them is the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, which is really troublesome. It basically says that any adoption agency that receives federal money cannot mandate that prospective adopters take courses around cultural competency, that it can only be an extra—like, if you want to learn about this stuff then great, but you don't have to. That has got to change because I do feel like cultural competency is as important as feeding a child. That would be great to start.

The other part of the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act requires agencies to work harder to recruit Black and Brown families to become adoptive parents. It's not a measurable part of the law, and so even the agencies who know about this law will just say, "How are we supposed to do that? We tried." I'd love to see some measurable items added to that to show how agencies can change things to start attracting more Black and Brown parents.

BLAIR HODGES: It sounds like we need some more creativity there. You're a transracial adoptee yourself, you love your parents, you have an amazing story. But you've also experienced turmoil and tension and cultural issues because of transracial adoption. Like we said at the beginning, it's a bit of a minefield in recognizing the strengths and gifts of parents who transracially adopt and the strengths and gifts of transracial adoptees themselves, but also some of the downsides. Cultural competency training would be a good start, but also, as you said, making adoption more equalized, and seeing a greater diversity of adoptive families seems like a pretty good place to start.

ANGELA TUCKER: Yes.

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises! – 1:05:50

BLAIR HODGES: That's Angela Tucker, author of “You Should Be Grateful:” Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption.

Alright, Angela, we always like to close Family Proclamations with a question about regrets, challenges, and surprises. You mentioned a regret a little bit earlier about not using the word "guilt," survivor's guilt, that's an interesting regret. If you have any other ones, you can bring them up now. Or if you can think of anything that challenged you in writing this book, any obstacles you faced, or anything that surprised you, some new discovery, or new way of seeing the issue. This is a “choose your own adventure,” you can speak to all three of those, or you can pick one of them. It's up to you.

ANGELA TUCKER: Let me talk about a challenge. When I began writing the book, I was asking my birth mom questions about her time when she was pregnant when she kept it a secret. How did you keep it a secret? Did anybody know? When did you find out? How did you get to the hospital? Did somebody drive you there? Where did you go after you gave birth to me? Did you have a home?

I was asking her all these questions. Her answer was basically like, I don't know. I don't remember. I'm not sure. I don't know. I don't know. I was like, okay, I just need to work with that. It's twofold. It's one, emotional for me, but then two, to write this book, how do I do that?

At some point I toyed with the idea of writing a fictionized version. I said to my birth mother, let's just say there's this character named Deborah, which is my birth mother's name, who finds herself pregnant and needs to get to the hospital, but nobody knows. How would she do that in this book? And she just started telling me stuff about herself. She still couldn't remember a lot, but when I fictionalized it, it was different. It wasn't just, "I can't even go there."

That was profound. It was the separation Deborah needed to get a little closer. It made me sad because I thought, “Somebody give her a therapist.” If I could be her therapist right now, I think we could unlock so much of her trauma and shame.

Anyways, it was a tactic I just threw out there. I'm grateful I didn't have to fictionalize, but I did learn a lot. I didn't put all that I learned from her in that moment in the book, just to keep her integrity, but that was a major surprise through the writing process.

BLAIR HODGES: Overall did you find it hard to talk so personally? The book's really personal. It also has some great theory, it's got some great connections with other folks, but it's also personal. Was that challenging for you? It seems like you've been used to talking about your story. Maybe that comes along with being an adoptee, where people already feel like they should have access to your story.

ANGELA TUCKER: There's that for sure. I enjoyed writing. I really loved that process. It was quiet and thoughtful and pensive. I didn't have the naysayers and things I do when I speak about my story online or in other formats where people can right away be like, "What are you talking about," and they come at me. I loved it.

The part where I found myself feeling emotional was when I was reading the audiobook, surprisingly enough. I had moments where I was just like, what happened? I wrote these words, but I had to take some breaks. That was a surprise.

BLAIR HODGES: I've just got one more for you, and this connects to perhaps another episode. You talk about how you and your partner chose not to parent, at least as of the time of writing of the book. And we'll have other episodes that talk about single adults and married folks who choose not to have kids. Do you think that's connected to your experience of adoption? Do you feel like that’s related to a lot of different things?

ANGELA TUCKER: I certainly think it's connected. Being child-free by choice is something I'm proud of. But I know so many often get questions: "Why would you do that? You and your husband have the resources and the love and all of these things."

I love being an auntie to so many. I love being a mentor. I think my and Brian's, our kind of ethos has a lot to do with the poem I quoted at the beginning of the book by Khalil Gibran called On Children, where we don't believe parenting needs to look like ownership of a child, but we can be in people's lives in a way that helps them thrive. We do that. We have people who live in our home with us who we aren't related to, but we can support in certain ways, and they can view us using whatever term they want. That feels really in alignment with the past. We love doing that.

BLAIR HODGES: That's cool. Well, as I said, people can check out other episodes that will talk about that angle.

Angela, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about your book, “You Should Be Grateful.” It's a phenomenal book, a helpful and eye-opening book.

ANGELA TUCKER: Thank you.

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening. There's much more to come on Family Proclamations. If you're enjoying the show, why not take a second to rate and review it? Go to Apple Podcasts and let me know your thoughts. And please take a second to recommend the show to a friend. The more the merrier. Thanks to Mates of State for providing our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll see you next time.

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NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.