Leaving the Ghost Kingdom (with Angela Tucker)

Angela Tucker is a Black woman who was adopted by white parents as a very young child. Angela says transracial adoptees like her grow up wrestling with complicated feelings of gratitude and love, but also rejection, loss, and confusion about their heritage. 

Angela is author of “You Should Be Grateful:" Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption. Her family story was featured in the documentary Closure. She has over 15 years of experience working within adoption and foster care agencies, mentoring over 200 adoptees as 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 ow