I’m sharing this piece that I wrote for www.forharriet.com earlier this week.  While the aim of this piece is to demonstrate how the fixation on white babies and a white future through controlling white women’s reproductive activities is connected to discrimination and amped up violence against people of color, I felt it was important to share with STK’s audience.  Parents, black or white, who are raising children of color need to understand the context under which they are raising their sons and daughters…..

By Stacey Patton

The GOP’s war on the most intimate aspects of women’s lives is undoubtedly real, but it is not being applied without discrimination. 

Let’s be clear—the primary targets of the right wing’s rhetorical and legislative attacks are, and have always been, white women. The war on white women is really a push for more white babies. And, that push goes hand in hand with amped-up racial profiling, vigilante policing, mass incarceration, school closures, hoarding of resources from communities of color, and blatant disregard for violence directed at African Americans and their children, including the unborn. 

More white people are dying than are being born, a trend that is projected to continue. Meanwhile, the birth rates for people of color remain stable or high, primarily for Latinos. The trick for the modern American situation is to prevent people from seeing that the war for more white babies and the war against people of color are related. But the two phenomena are inseparable.

What we are witnessing is not new, but rather a familiar pattern of desperate efforts to preserve white domination through strength in numbers. It is an historic fact that when radical demographic shifts take place in the United States they are accompanied by white supremacist fears of being outbred and crowded out by immigrants and people of color, and losing majority rule. 

And so here we are again. America is undergoing yet another periodic age of white fear and cradle competition. As the white population marches toward a less than majority status, the constant fear of biological extinction has infected our political discourse, policy decisions, and everyday racial interactions, whether in the comments sections of news sites or in the streets.

For those who remain skeptical about the association between fears of white race suicide and emphasis upon women’s reproductive roles, consider the words of famous and respected persons such as Teddy Roosevelt, a champion of race purity who with little embarrassment called black Americans “a perfectly stupid race that can never rise.”

Responding to the falling white birth rate, in his 1906 state of the union address Roosevelt blasted elite native-born white women for shirking their national civic duty to be mothers of the nation by engaging in “willful sterility—the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race suicide.” In his eyes, a white woman who avoided having babies was a “criminal against the race” and “the object of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people.” 

Later, in a 1913 letter to the prominent eugenicist Charles B. Davenport he wrote: “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind…. Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizens of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.”

Roosevelt’s declarations came at a time when more women were pursuing education, seeking careers, voting rights, greater voice in public life, and control over their own fertility. All of these factors supposedly made women physically unfit to be good wives and mothers. Doctors of the era argued that the pursuit of higher education, participation in sports and professional life diverted too much blood to women’s brains from their reproductive organs. 

Meanwhile, all this discourse was attendant by race riots, lynchings, unpunished rapes of black girls and women by white men, and other forms of genocidal violence. In 1918, in Valdosta, Georgia, an angry white mob hung an 8-months pregnant Mary Turner upside down by her ankles, doused her with gasoline and set her on fire. While still alive, a man in the mob split her swollen abdomen with a hog knife, and stomped the fetus to death before the rest of the mob riddled Turner’s body with bullets. That same year a mob of whites hung Maggie and Alma Howze from a bridge near Shutaba, Mississippi. Both had been raped by the same white man and were pregnant with his children at the time of their lynching.

Consider also Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood who believed that eugenics and birth control could prevent “biological and racial mistakes.” This contradictory historical figure saw no problem with seeking funding and support from the Ku Klux Klan. The eugenics movement was about encouraging the “fittest” to reproduce and directed toward eliminating undesirables. While thousands of black females, white “degenerates” and “ morons” were legally sterilized in the early 20th century, smut suppressors like Anthony Comstock led successful campaigns to make it illegal to send birth control literature through the mail.

Flash forward to the Obama era.

Since 2011, state legislatures across the country have introduced hundreds of provisions from “heartbeat bills” and fetal pain laws, to encouraging violence against abortion doctors and reducing women’s access to birth control and abortion services. Some right-wing politicians have even sought to redefine rape in a way that would force female victims to carry the fetus to term. Their twisted rationale is that an unborn child should not have to die because of a rapists’ crime.

Last April, Kansas Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed a bill that bans sex-selection abortions, blocks federal tax breaks for abortion providers, forbids them from giving educational talks to students, and declares that life begins “at fertilization.” 

What will we witness next—a new bill introduced, in a majority-white state of course, declaring that life begins when a man gets an erection? Will Republicans start citing Genesis 38:9 to criminalize men for masturbating and “spilling their seeds” to prevent conception? Okay, I’m being facetious here. But in fact, almost nothing is directed against controlling the sexual behaviors of men, including rapists, unless of course you are a black man accused of some sexual indiscretion with a white woman. But generally, the burden of sexual morality is placed on women. 

Perhaps the worse political gaffe came from Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock, who said he opposed aborting pregnancies conceived in rape because “it is something that God intended to happen.” Are these politicians and their supporters so desperate to boost the population of white babies that they’ll even take those conceived through rape?

While Republicans and Democrats debate the war on women, they have remained conspicuously silent about the intensifying war on black adults and children. If you want a demonstration of the devaluing of black children even as white women of our time are forcibly pushed towards procreation, just do a quick Google search of police assaults against pregnant black women and you’ll see what I mean. There are news stories and graphic videos of visibly pregnant women being cursed at, punched, tasered, kicked, and body slammed to the ground by white police officers. 

Though most of the babies were born uninjured, 17-year-old Kwamesha Sharp wasn’t so lucky. In June 2012, Sharp lost her unborn child when a Harvey, Illinois police officer slammed her to the ground and kept his knee pressed down on her abdomen for an extended period of time. According to court documents the arresting officer, Richard M. Jones, said he didn’t care that Sharp was pregnant. In a few of the other cases, the women were arrested and charged, and the officers’ superiors backed their actions. 

A new video recently surfaced on social media showing a young black mom, who may have been drugged and raped, being strapped down to a chair inside a Warren, Michigan police station, where one officer kicked her and another chopped her hair off with a pair of scissors. 

In addition to physical attacks, black mothers have been fined and jailed for “stealing” education for their children by enrolling them in safer suburban schools. Black parents have had to bury their children. Their names have made headlines: Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Kimani Gray, Darius Simmons, Jordan Davis, Renisha 

McBride. Meanwhile, mass school closures in Chicago, Philadelphia and other urban districts across the country have disproportionately targeted and destabilized children in poor black and Latino communities.

The war on black children and teens is especially mean-spirited. A litany of examples makes me think of what civil rights doyen W.E.B. DuBois wrote in 1920: “there is no place for black children in this world.”

I’ve always hated Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Holidays are stressful times for many people, but they are especially difficult for those of us who are adoptees or have had a history of foster care placement.

As an adoptee growing up in a huge Christian family, I couldn’t feel the joy and sense of belonging that they felt.  Instead, I was an imposter who pretended to be happy and “grateful” for being “saved” from the foster care system, for having a home and lots of gifts under the tree.  But I knew I was there to fill a void in my adoptive parents’ lives and to make them feel normal and complete.

I was surrounded by people who believed that I was only supposed to focus only on my life post adoption.  Everything that happened before wasn’t supposed to matter.  We couldn’t talk about the past because it might make somebody sitting at the table feel bad about my loss, and their own.  Somehow, the toys and holiday cheer was supposed to erase the trauma and unacknowledged grief of being separated from my biological parents.  And it was supposed to erase my adoptive parents’ inability to bring their own children into the world.

I actually resented my adoptive relatives for their privilege.  The privilege of being able to sit at the table and talk about who looks like who.  The privilege of talking about births, names, roots, memories, photos, and shared history.  The privilege of being able to celebrate how they plucked me from the foster care system and added me to their family.

“When we got Stacey.” 

 “We chose you.” 

 “Like our own.” 

Those were the simple phrases that got uttered during conversations and made me want to stuff myself head first into the cooked gut of the turkey.  And there was always a cousin or two who reminded me that I wasn’t cut from the same cloth as them.  Their whispers and giggles at holiday gatherings made me paranoid that they were talking about me, making fun of me because, as they said, “my real mama didn’t want me.”

I was the small, silent observer choking back tears, faking smiles, wondering about my “real” family, feeling guilty for wondering about my “real” family, and wishing I could be reborn into better and more authentic circumstances.  Most times I got through holiday gatherings by withdrawing to some quiet corner away from everybody.  I was that kind of girl who would rather be alone than be surrounded by a whole lot of people and still feel like an outsider.

By the time I was 12 I was right back in foster care.  I spent so many holidays in the homes of strangers.  Black people.  White people.  Christians.  Catholics.  Jehovah’s Witnesses.  In the boondocks.  In the ‘hood.  My foster parents did the best they could to include me in the day’s events.  But I often felt guilty for being this dark shadow, this fleshy burden in their homes.  I felt bad that they were obligated to keep me safe and buy me a gift so I wouldn’t feel left out.  After the dinners I stowed myself away in my borrowed room so they could be themselves without this stranger in their midst.

And then there were the holidays in the youth shelters and group homes.  Some of my foster brothers and sisters got to go home for the holidays.  For some of us it wasn’t safe.  So we stayed behind, opening donated gifts that were marked “boy” or “girl.”  The fact that the gifts were anonymous worked for me because then I didn’t feel like I owed anybody anything.

I had my first Christmas with some of my biological relatives when I was 16.  Years before that I had fantasized about how wonderful the holidays would be with them.  I thought I’d finally be surrounded by people who looked like me.  People who would create a space for me in their home and hearts.  People who would love me unconditionally.  People who would keep me this time around.

But the fact is, they believed they owed me nothing other than edited versions of the truth.  All those years separated and our divergent life trajectories had made us into different people with nothing in common accept blood and genes, and even that was debatable. 

So there I was again, an outsider at Christmas in a family with secrets.  I resented my biological relatives for their privilege.  The privilege of having stayed together while I was separated from the family.  The privilege of talking about births, names, roots, memories, photos, and shared history that I was cut off from.  And we couldn’t talk about that big elephant in the room – the painful and tragic events that led to my adoption.

Over the years many wonderful people in my life have reached out during this time of the year to invite me to their homes.  I always say thank you, but no.  I know they mean well and they’re coming from a genuinely loving place.  But there’s still the little girl in me who is grieving the loss of her parents, who still resents having been abandoned, adopted, and having spent the rest of her childhood as a ward of the state after a failed adoption.

I’m not sure if the people in my life feel bad for me or if they worry that I’m in some dark corner curled up and depressed this time of the year.  And I’m not sure if they take my declining of their invites personally.  I want them to know that sometimes I do curl up and sleep the day away.  I do grieve during the holidays.  I acknowledge my losses (and the love I’ve gained).  And I count my blessings.  But I refuse to sit at somebody else’s table and being that outsider.  Your happy moments with your family only reminds me of what I lost.  For some adoptees and foster kids, grieving that loss is a lifelong process.  It’s okay to let us take that journey and to define when and where we want to enter.

A few years ago I started what I call an “orphan party.”  Every Thanksgiving I invited people to my home who considered themselves orphans.  Some were foster kids.  Some had parents who died.  Some hated their families.  Some were outcasts because they were gay, had AIDS, or just didn’t fit in the family dynamic. 

The parties were not formal.  Some of my guests got dressed up.  Others rolled out of the bed dripping with sadness and eyes reddened from a night of drinking or getting high to numb their pain.  My kitchen was open from 4 to 10 pm.  We ate.  We laughed.  Some of us cried.  We watched “The Color Purple,” quoted scenes, laughed at painful scenes that weren’t supposed to be funny.  None of us had to pretend.

My orphan parties covered the silence and chased away the loneliness and pain of loss.  They helped me survive the holidays.  But I thought I’d share some useful tips for those of you who are helping foster youth during this time of the year.  I got these tips from one of my friends who is a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) who works with foster youth. 

1. Prepare the foster youth in your care for the holidays in your home

Have a discussion with the young person about your family’s holiday customs. Do you celebrate over multiple days, or is there one “main” celebration? Are there religious customs? Will gifts be exchanged? What should they wear? Who will they meet? What preparations need to be done in advance? Will there be visitors to the home? Will they be taken on visits to the homes of other family or friends? And in all of these events, will your youth be expected to participate? Knowing what to expect will help to decrease anxiety around the holidays. Avoid surprises and you will decrease seasonal tensions.

2. Prepare friends and family before you visit

Let people know in advance about new family members in your home. Surprising a host or hostess at the door with a “new” foster youth may set up an awkward situation — such as a scramble to set an extra place at the table — making the young person feel like an imposition right from the start of the visit. Your preparation of friends should help cut down on awkward, but reasonable questions such as “who are you?” or “where did you come from?”

3. Remember confidentiality

You may receive well intended but prying questions from those you visit with over the holidays. If your young person is new to your home, it is natural that family members ask questions about your youth’s background. Understand that questions are generally not meant to be insensitive or rude, but simply come from a place of not knowing much about foster care. Think in advance about how to answer these questions while maintaining your youth’s confidentiality. Use the opportunity to educate interested family and friends. Discuss with your young person how they would like to be introduced and what is appropriate to share about their history with your family and friends. (Remember, they have no obligation to reveal their past.)

4. Arrange meeting your family in advance, if possible

The hustle and bustle of the holidays can make it particularly chaotic for your young person to participate in your family traditions. Anxiety may run high for young people already, and the stress of meeting your relatives may be a lot to deal with. If possible, you can arrange a casual “meeting” in advance of “main events.” If it is not possible or practical to meet beforehand, make a list of names of some of the people they’ll meet and their connection to you. You can also encourage a quick call from relatives you plan to visit to deliver a personal message of “we are excited to met you” so that your youth knows they will be welcome.

5. Have extra presents ready to help offset differences

It should not be expected that all relatives purchase presents for your youth. Be prepared with other small gifts and for those family members that express concern over not having brought a gift, offer one of your “backups” for them to place under the tree. Extra presents may be addressed “from Santa”, even for older youth, to help offset a larger number of gifts other children may receive at the same time. Children often keep count of the number of gifts received (right or wrong) and use it to compare with other kids, so sometimes quantity is important.

6. Facilitate visits with loved ones

The holidays can be a busy time for everyone including foster parents and caseworkers. But it is especially important during this time of year to help your young person arrange for visits with loved ones. Don’t allow busy schedules to mean the postponement of these important visits. Try to get permission for your youth to make phone calls to relatives (if long distance charges are an issue, ask if calls can be placed from the foster care agency or provide a local business or individual to “donate” by allowing the use of their phone). A youth may wish to extend holiday wishes to relatives and friends from an old neighborhood, but may need your help getting phone numbers together. Use the opportunity to help the youth develop their own address book.

7. Help them make sure their loved ones are okay

Young people may worry that their family members are struggling through the holidays. If homelessness has been a regular issue, the winter season may bring cold weather and extreme hardship. Your youth may experience guilt if they feel a loved one is struggling while they, the youth, are living in comfort. Knowing that a biological parent or sibling has shelter from the cold or has their other basic needs met may ease a young person’s mind through the always emotional holidays.

8. Extend an invitation

If it is safe and allowed by your foster care agency, consider extending an invitation to siblings or bio- parents through the holidays. It need not be an invitation to your “main” holiday event, consider a “special” dinner for your youth to celebrate with their loved ones. If this not a possibility to do within your home, consider arranging a visit at a local restaurant (ask the caseworker is it would be appropriate for the visit to be unsupervised or if your supervision would suffice). Extending an invitation to their loved ones need not signal to a young person that you support their bio-family’s lifestyle or choices — rather it tells a young person that you respect their wish to stay connected to family. You will also send a message to the youth that that aren’t being put in a position to “choose” your family over their bio-family and that it is possible to have a relationship with all the people they care about.

9. Understand and encourage your youth’s own traditions and beliefs

Encourage discussion about the holiday traditions your young person experienced prior to being in foster care, or even celebrations they liked while living with other foster families. Incorporate the traditions the youth cherishes into your own family celebration, if possible. Use the opportunity to investigate the youth’s culture and research customary traditions. If the young person holds a religious belief different from yours, or if their family did, check into the traditions customarily surrounding those beliefs.

10. Assist in purchasing or making holiday gifts or in sending cards to their family and friends  

Allow young people to purchase small gifts for their relatives, or help them craft homemade gifts. Help send holiday cards to those that they want to stay connected with. The list of people that your youth wishes to send cards and gifts to should be left completely to the youth, although precautions may be taken to ensure safety (for example, a return address may be left off the package, or use the address of the foster care agency) and compliance with any court orders.

11. Understand if they pull away

Despite your best efforts, a young person may simply withdraw during the holidays. Understand that this detachment most likely is not intended to be an insult or a reflection of how they feel about you, but rather is their own coping mechanism. Allow for “downtime” during the holidays that will allow the youth some time to themselves if they need it (although some youth would prefer to stay busy to keep their mind off other things — you will need to make a decision based on your knowledge of the young person). Be sure to fit in one-on-one time, personal time for your youth and you to talk through what they are feeling during this emotional and often confusing time of year.

12. Call youth who formerly lived with you

The holidays can be a particularly tough time for youth who have recently aged out of foster care. They may not have people to visit or a place to go for the holidays. In addition, young people commonly struggle financially when they first leave foster care. A single phone call may lift their spirits and signal that you continue to care for them and treasure their friendship. Be sure to include these youth on your own holiday card list. A small token gift or gift basket of homemade holiday goodies may be especially appreciated.

Most importantly, it is essential to let adoptees, foster children, and those who have aged out of the system know that they are not alone and they are not to blame for their losses. One of the best things I learned about being in foster care was the I could collect people along the way and create my own family.

Want to stress out an infant?

Have a mother look at her baby with a “still face,” no expression, interaction or words.  Before long, the child will do everything they know to engage and connect with their parent.  If the parent doesn’t respond, the baby can experience acute stress and anxiety.

Want to see what I mean?  Take a minute and check out the Still Face Experiment, in which a mother tests this theory, with dramatic results.

Watching this video, I can’t help but think of the many parents I’ve seen in public spaces who seem to take good physical care of their children, who are typically well-groomed and neatly dressed), but who appear to be very disengaged from their babies.  Often, these parents are teens plugged into their phones and/or iPods.  I’ve seen some of these infants and toddlers do everything they can—just like the baby in the video—to get their parents’ attention.

Frequently, the child resorts to improper behavior, which does get the parent’s attention, but in a negative way.  The parent often scolds their child with a mean mug on their face, sometimes curses or even hits the child for interrupting them.  Ultimately, the only “reward” they receive from exercising their natural instinct and need for their parent to interact with them is the message that what they want is bad and wrong and will result in punishment.

Decades ago, experts weren’t aware of the importance of high levels of engagement with babies, even newborns.  Today, we know that the more positive, loving, nurturing and attentive interaction a child has with their mother/parent/caregiver, the stronger, healthier and happier that child will grow up to be.  They are more likely to succeed in school and in life if they have received the proper attention when they need it most.

Speaking of school, there might be a link between the “minority” achievement gap that is epidemic throughout public education in our country today, and the fact that low-income children are said to suffer from a 30 million word gap that causes them to start school behind their wealthier peers.

In this groundbreaking study, Betty Hart and Todd Risley entered the homes of 42 families from various socio-economic backgrounds to assess the ways in which daily exchanges between a parent and child shape language and vocabulary development. Their findings were unprecedented, with extraordinary disparities between the sheer number of words spoken as well as the types of messages conveyed. After four years these differences in parent-child interactions produced significant discrepancies in not only children’s knowledge, but also their skills and experiences with children from high-income families being exposed to 30 million more words than children from families on welfare. Follow-up studies showed that these differences in language and interaction experiences have lasting effects on a child’s performance later in life.

Results:

The results of the study were far more severe than anyone could have anticipated. Observers found that 86% to 98% of the words used by each child by the age of three were derived from their parents’ vocabularies. Furthermore, not only were the words they used nearly identical, but also the average number of words utilized, the duration of their conversations, and the speech patterns were all strikingly similar to those of their caregivers. 

[The researchers] found that the sheer number of words heard varied greatly along socio-economic lines. On average, children from families on welfare were provided half as much experience as children from working class families, and less than a third of the experience given to children from high-income families. In other words, children from families on welfare heard about 616 words per hour, while those from working class families heard around 1,251 words per hour, and those from professional families heard roughly 2,153 words per hour. Thus, children from better financial circumstances had far more language exposure to draw from. 

… the researchers also looked at what was being said within these conversations. What they found was that higher-income families provided their children with far more words of praise compared to children from low-income families. Conversely, children from low-income families were found to endure far more instances of negative reinforcement compared to their peers from higher-income families.  Children from families with professional backgrounds experienced a ratio of six encouragements for every discouragement. For children from working-class families this ratio was two encouragements to one discouragement. Finally, children from families on welfare received on average two discouragements for every encouragement.

To ensure that these findings had long-term implications, 29 of the 42 families were recruited for a follow-up study when the children were in third grade. Researchers found that measures of accomplishment at age three were highly indicative of performance at the ages of nine and ten on various vocabulary, language development, and reading comprehension measures. Thus, the foundation built at age three had a great bearing on their progress many years to come. 

Within a child’s early life the caregiver is responsible for most, if not all, social simulation and consequently language and communication development. As a result, how parents interact with their children is of great consequence given it lays a critical foundation impacting the way the children process future information many years down the road.

The finding that children living in poverty hear fewer than a third of the words heard by children from higher-income families has significant implications in the long run. When extrapolated to the words heard by a child within the first four years of their life these results reveal a 30 million word difference. That is, a child from a high-income family will experience 30 million more words within the first four years of life than a child from a low-income family. This gap does nothing but grow as the years progress, ensuring slow growth for children who are economically disadvantaged and accelerated growth for those from more privileged backgrounds.

All that to say: talk to your babies, to your children, as much as you can, and then some.  Interact with them.  It’s easy to make fun of or feel self-conscious about the exaggerated facial expressions and high-pitched voices we associate with baby talk, but the fact is that we are biologically hard-wired to give the babies and children what they need most: our undivided attention, our voices, our faces, and our love. Without those ingredients, they are not likely to thrive. 

Alex Haley, author of Roots, understood the connection between family history and self-identity.

“In all of us,” he wrote, “there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage –to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning.  No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.”

Though Mr. Haley’s book specifically addressed black slaves and their desire to maintain their African identity, and their quest to recover lost connections as a result of the quagmire of centuries of bondage, the need to know one’s origins is a universally human theme.

Of all groups, adoptees know all too well about that hunger, yearning, emptiness and loneliness that Mr. Haley described. 

This is why many of us, even those who have wonderful relationships with their adoptive parents, are driven to search for answers to important questions: Who am I?  Where did I come from?  Who are my birth parents?  Do I look like them?  Do I have brothers and sisters?  Why was I given up? 

Imagine living a life without a sense of continuity and without access to basic information about your body, health, identity and history.  And now imagine being told by a state bureaucracy that your birth certificate is a secret; that your birth is none of your business.

This is the case in the State of New Jersey where adoptees have been fighting for 33 years to gain access to their original birth certificates.  Our last Adoptees Birthright bill passed the state senate in March 2011 but was subsequently vetoed by Gov. Chris Christie.  Now we have a new bill, sponsored by Senators Joe Vitalie and Diane Allen,  and the fight is on again.

This week I testified before a state senate hearing in Trenton, New Jersey in support of the new bill.  I support this bill because I believe that having truthful documentation of one’s birth is a civil rights and human rights issue. And I also believe that birth certificates are the missing link in the adult adoptee’s healing process.

The last person to testify at the senate hearing was Robert Allan Hafetz, an adoptee and family counselor from Doylestown, PA who has chronicled his own adoption reunion process in a book called Not Remembered, Never Forgotten.  Mr. Hafetz gave a scientific perspective on how unnatural separation from birth mothers causes trauma in the first hours of an adoptee’s life and can have lifelong consequences.  His testimony was a huge moment of revelation for me and I finally felt validated by my hunger to know after so many years of some people in my life suggesting that I’m obsessed with by birth history or that I should just “let it go and move on.”

Here is an excerpt of Mr. Hafetz’s testimony, which was adapted from an earlier essay:

It is from the moment of separation that the adoption experience begins for the adoptee.

On the first day of life we are nine months and one day old. We are one with the mother, existing as a mother baby dyad. The birth of the self has not yet occurred and mother and child exist in a state of harmony, literally, as a single being. Between them flows a virtual language of emotion, with affects functioning as words, and a familiar touch as a shared voice. Mother and infant are engaged in a complex emotional dialogue that teaches the infant trust, hope, and the nature of their unique world. The memories, emotions, and the struggle to bring them into balance dwell in the emotional domain of the adoptee’s mind.

At birth the limbic system is functioning and enables the infant to learn, dialogue with the mother, and to create memory representations. Adoptees can experience emotional memories as specific affects years even decades after they occur.

Many adult adoptees will speak of feeling sadness, emptiness, and isolation, often struggling for the right words to explain their feelings. It is very difficult for memories recorded in infancy to be explained or understood verbally after the child eventually develops verbal skills and advanced cognitive abilities.

Imagine having profound feelings and not being able to understand them, explain them, or ask for help in dealing with them. This is the great disconnect adoptees experience. The dimension of the mind that thinks, doesn’t understand the mind that feels, or the powerful memories that dwell beneath the consciousness.

As I listened to Mr. Hafetz speak, I thought back on past behaviors and past relationships and about all the people I pushed away because I was too afraid to be loved or to give it.

People told me that they’d never abandon me.  But my emotional memories, set in the early hours of my life, triggered fears that were exactly the opposite.  I knew I belonged, but I felt isolated.  At times I’ve felt isolated even in a crowded room.  To others, I may look whole from the outside, but there’s always something missing inside me.

There is, as Mr. Hafetz explained, an incongruence between the adoptee’s thoughts and feelings, which is the foundation of poor attachment, behavioral problems, power struggles, and trust issues that the people in an adoptee’s life can’t always understand.

“The struggle to bring thoughts and feelings into coherence can be a lifelong task for adopted children,” said Mr. Hafetz.

He eventually found a way to build a bridge within his mind and join parts of himself that were lost.  Like me, Mr. Hafetz searched for his biological mother.  But his reunion, like mine, was with a grave.  

Standing over our dead mothers brought us some answers, some healing from the trauma of our unnatural separation.  Mr. Hafetz and I were lucky enough to find our birth mother’s without access to our birth certificates.  So imagine how legions more adoptees can potentially be healed if they are given this key piece of paper that will allow them the choice to take their own journey from abandonment to healing.

If you support the right of  New Jersey adoptees to access our original birth certificates please drop a note to the President SenSweeney@njleg.org and Senate Republican Leader SenKean@njleg.org.

The digital universe is full of viral videos of adults beating children. I view them warily, alert for triggers that catapult me back into the days of being viciously beaten by my adoptive mother, the wife of a Pentecostal preacher with a penchant for sadistic violence in the name of “discipline.”

This latest video of a father, Greg Horn, beating his daughters with a cable cord for sneaking out of the house and for “twerking”—performing a popular sexually suggestive dance—zaps me to my childhood like a time machine.  Watching the father heap unthinkable abuse on his own children, young girls in need of dialogue, firm and gentle guidance from a nurturing adult, renders me speechless.

This is how my adoptive mother used to whip me.  Sometimes I was naked.  “I’m not whipping no clothes,” she’d say.  I can still see myself, like the two girls in this video, backed into a corner, small and quaking at the hatred she spewed with her hands and her mouth.  

When I watched this horrible video, my fingers found their way to my right cheek, where the scars my adoptive mother inflicted feel like fleshy Braille, conveying coded messages of abuse that I see in the mirror on my face, legs, arms, and back.  So many whippings.  So many whippings I can’t even count.  So many scars.  Some of them have faded.  Others I’ll die with.

As a young girl, I was not allowed to dance in my adoptive mother’s home–that would have been a reason for a beating.  In the Pentecostal religion, dancing and listening to rap and other kinds of music was forbidden, viewed as “worldly” and ungodly.

But beating me with an extension cord until welts formed, until my skin was broken was somehow seen as okay in my home and in the larger black community I belonged to.

For all the people who think that it’s okay to beat a child with a cord, take a look at my scars.  Look at them.  Look at them real good. 

Today I am 35 years old, and these scars have been with me since age 7, when my adoptive mother flailed away at me with a cord, much like the father did in that video.  The night she scarred my face is a night that I’ll never forget: the screaming, the pleading, the stinging, the smell of my own flesh burning, the electricity ripping through my body. The sound of that cord cutting the air.  Me kicking up my legs to try to block the blows.  Me saying, “Stop mommy!  I’m sorry mommy!  I won’t do it again mommy!”  Her grunting, yelling, breathing hard, spitting from her mouth, her voice sounding like a demon.

Every time I got whipped with an extension cord, the one thought that went through my mind was: I cannot survive this.

Why do we do this to our children?  Beat them and scar them like slaves?  And why do we call this good parenting?  Why do we say things like “we need more fathers like Greg Horn?”

Every morning, when I look at my scars, I never say, “I’m glad my mamma whipped me,” or “I’m grateful that she beat me like that,” or “those whoopings kept me out of jail,” or “they made me the good person that I am today.”  I don’t look at these scars and think, “This was love.  This was discipline.  Those beatings kept be from being beaten by the police or killed by some white person,” as I hear so many black folks say as a way to justify such cruelty against their children.

Getting whipped with a cord didn’t make me respect my adoptive mother.  They were the ultimate breach of trust.  The beatings put distance between us.  They made me fear her.  Hate her.  Want to kill her.  They didn’t teach me right from wrong.  They taught me not to get caught doing wrong and they taught me early on that violence was the way to solve conflict instead of using critical thinking skills and proper communication.  The beatings almost taught me to expect violence and to normalize it.

Ultimately, those beatings drove me to run away from my adoptive parents’ home and into the foster care system like legions of other abused black children who enter care.  And far too many are becoming “crossover youth,” foster kids who end up in the juvenile justice and then the adult prison system.  So if you think beating a child with a cord is good parenting, then don’t be surprised if your child ends up in one of these systems.

I watch this latest video and wonder what these girls are thinking, what they’re feeling toward their father.  I wonder whether he is reacting to the unsettling sight and thought of his young daughters flaunting their budding sexuality, over-reacting horribly to what might be considered a normal source of discomfort.  Or is he, like my adoptive mother was, an evil monster who can’t control his own responses, emotions, fears or frustrations?

I don’t know what the girls’ mother is like, but reportedly she saw the video online and called the police on her ex, the father.  He has been indicted on charges of corporal punishment, as he should be.  I applaud this mother’s actions even as she is being castigated by many people who think that she was wrong for calling the police on yet another black man who will likely do time.

As someone who miraculously managed to survive this kind of torture, I cannot for the life of me understand how anybody can rationalize this kind of behavior.  These videos are often trailed by long comments on social media and Facebook threads where many people blame and insult the children.  In the case of this “twerking” video, there were so many folk commenting that they were “little whores” and “bitches” that my stomach turned.

I drew from the well of my memories to put myself in those girls’ place.  I knew their pain.  Understood their jumbled emotions.  Tasted their fear.  Fingertips dancing over the legacy of hateful abuse that destroyed my childhood and marred my appearance.

No child deserves that kind of torture, regardless of what the parent (or abuser) might say to justify their choices, their lost control, anger management issues, and the unresolved pain and traumas they’re now inflicting on another generation.  Children need guidance, not violence. Love, not lashings.  Every child needs and deserves to feel safe in their homes.  Safe, not scarred like me and Greg Horn’s daughters.