The Problem With 'Not Seeing Race'

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With us now is the former WNYC culture critic, Rebecca Carroll, now devoting herself full-time to projects related to her new memoir. Her story of growing up as a Black child adopted by white parents in a small New Hampshire town, where she was the only Black person and then on into adulthood.

Rebecca, many of you will remember did regular culture commentaries on All Things Considered and hosted the podcast Come Through with Rebecca Carroll. She was also editor of Special Projects, hosted events at the Green Space, and some of you listening now may have attended those and more. The book, which is getting beyond rave reviews is called Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir. The white gaze is a Toni Morrison reference, and we'll get into that. Hi, Rebecca, welcome back to the show for the first time who's not a WNYC employee, and congratulations on the book.

Rebecca: Hi, Brian. It's so nice to be here. As soon as I heard the theme song, my face just lit up. I'm delighted to be here.

Brian: First of all, start by telling some of the story of how you came to be adopted by this particular family?

Rebecca: Sure. It's a convoluted story, which is why it required a book to really parse it all out because it's quite complicated, but my parents, white artists very young, started a family, very young, had two biological children, and decided that they'd like to have another, they were hippies, Bohemians who believed in what was called zero population growth.

They believe you had two biological kids and then replaced yourself and didn't bring any more people into the world. They had tried to adopt through formal proper channels without much success because they were artists without much conventional framework in place. My father was a high school art teacher and had a student who got pregnant with her older boyfriend who was a Black man, and she didn't really have a plan in place and so he suggested that maybe they could work out an arrangement where he and my mom adopted me and that's the short story.

Brian: Part of the hippie ethic that they lived by as you describe it is kind of free of group attachments or very light relationship to group attachments, and that really becomes part of the story. Can you just put some meat on the bones there with respect to them?

Rebecca: My parents both were raised in strict Catholic families and so as a rebellion against that and because they were artists and wanted to shape their lives the way they wanted to shape their lives and were very idealistic. My father liked to refer to us as pre-Garibaldi Italy in reference to the set of states that were loosely affiliated, but not necessarily connected. It was this idea of independent states but loosely affiliated which gave us a lot of free-range, which affected the three of us each very differently, but very impactfully.

Brian: It's the glorification of the individual. On that mindset, it's funny because I come from a conservative, libertarian place or this hippie place that your parents were coming from, but is there a difference here that matters that getting away from group identity is progressive if you're in the majority, in this case, white in America, but if you're in the minority, whatever minority, in this case, being Black in America, maybe also being adopted, it's more complicated.

Rebecca: Oh, absolutely. There is this notion of somehow the individuality is somehow also intellectually superior is also somehow speaks to your strength and integrity and sense of self whereas what I only came to discover in my teens in 20s and 30s really was that for Black folks, yes, individuality is important what community is what lifts and buoys the individuality, which is one of the reasons why Black folks and Black communities were always trying to flip this notion of a monolith while also maintaining a loyalty to our sense of community.

Brian: That's where the white gaze comes into play to some degree as well. When you're in a minority, that's always under the gaze and therefore the assessment and not just assessment, but assessment with power to enforce their assessment in a culture?

Rebecca: Yes. The white gaze is that thing. That thing that is the default in this country and sets the tone and the tenor and the structure and the standards of what is valuable, what is smart, what the canon of literature is, what mainstream media is, what all of these things are and so when you apply that in the context of adoption, interracial adoption, transracial adoption, it is a foundational dynamic where these kinds of standards are being set for Black children.

Certainly, in my case, that's why I opened with the chapter that I opened with, which is the first six years of my life where we lived on this bucolic Hill in a beautiful farmhouse with no neighbors, nary a neighbor, and just a world of imagination and art and play and high tea and that was the white gaze. The white gaze created this world, this bubble completely void of race and Blackness saved for me.

Brian: Listeners, I wonder if anyone else is out there right now who was a Black child raised by white adoptive parents? That's not all there is to Rebecca's memoir to be sure, but it is a central aspect of it. Anyone else in the group right now who has had that experience and might like to say how it contributed to shaping your sense of your own identity or how you view race in the world?

646-435-7280, first priority now if you were a Black child raised by white adoptive parents and how that shaped your identity or worldview 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, for Rebecca Carroll, whose new book is called Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir. You described your memory of meeting another Black person for the first time, which wasn't until you were six. Would you tell the listeners some of what that was like for you or what it changed for you?

Rebecca: It was a ballet teacher, a dance teacher that had moved with her family about three towns over and had been suggested to my mom for me from a neighbor and I remember walking into the class and I described it in the book, just seeing this figure across the room in this elegant darkness. There was an immediate sense of connection, but also of total cognitive dissonance. I didn't understand what the connection was. It was like when I saw on TV, Easy Reader played by a young Morgan Freeman on Electric Company. It was this visceral reaction and connection, but it was almost scary.

It was almost terrifying because it was so foreign but familiar and there was nowhere to turn to square that feeling, there was no real resource and it never occurred to me this is a theme throughout that I would-- When I started experiencing racism at a very young age, it didn't occur to me to talk with my white parents about it because it had never been a point of discussion and so it was almost just like-- When I met this dance teacher, there was this just all flood of thoughts and fears and questions that I just kept inside.

I wrote bits and pieces of it in my diary, then it was before more sophisticated term called journal, but it was the very beginning of reconciling my relationship to Blackness in the form of this really elegant towering figure who I couldn't really make sense of.

Brian: Fascinating. You refer in the book to being given a certain amount of white privilege by your family circumstances. Can you describe what kind of white privilege and how you look back on the mix of that and the white gaze all around you, which contributed to making you feel less than in a lot of ways as a kid?

Rebecca: What happens or what happened for me, but I think that it is prevalent in similar stories is that my white family, my white parents and their friends, their liberal artist friends, these would be the white gaze decided that I was exotic, that I was precocious, that I was brown-skinned, that I was MOCA skinned. I was not Black until I started thinking about my Blackness and started to bring that to the table. Before that, I was very much ushered into rooms and environments under the white gaze, by way of the white gaze and the white gaze decided that I was exotic, thereby I could be not Black and favored.

It was until when I started, I guess, I would say when the prom incident happened when I was 14 or 15 and my friend's father who was our US history teacher forbid him to take me to the prom because I'm Black. That's when I started to really push back and walk into a room and say, "I'm Black," and then everybody was really inconvenienced. I went from being this kind of fun and precocious and social and very, very buoyant and loved fashion and outfits and to suddenly, in their eyes, a 14-year-old militant.

Brian: There's this tension before we go to some phone calls. Deb, in Brooklyn, we see you you'll be first. There's a tension that begins when you're 11, between the love that you felt from your adoptive parents and your birth mother, Tess, who's also white, who you start to spend some time with, and who tries to undermine your trust in your adoptive parents. If I understand your writing correctly, tries to convince you that they don't love you for who you are. They like the fact that you are this Black precocious kid because they find it exotic. Is that how you would put it and how did that affect you?

Rebecca: Well, it was real confusing. I was also, and I say this, and I'll be eager to hear from other adoptees, but I was just way too young to meet my birth mother. That was also a function of my parents' liberal hippie ideology, which was that they gave me the power to decide whether I could or should meet my birth mother. I was just too young. I was 11 years old. I was just, just starting to think about my identity.

At that moment, is when my birth mother came in and just completely unceremoniously devalued, deconstructed everything I thought I knew about myself and my parents, but I was so, so, so eager and determined to have to win her love and her acceptance that I just ping-ponged back and forth between feeling like this special, loved, adopted child, and this daughter birth daughter of a woman who was giving me a second chance.

Brian: Rebecca Carroll, our guest. Her memoir is called Surviving the White Gaze. We're going to tell you at the end of the segment about a book event that you can attend online with her tomorrow. Also, about how-- Looks like this is going to be made into a TV series. Deb in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with former WNYC culture critic, Rebecca Caroll. Hi, Deb.

Deb: Hi, thank you for having me on love you, Brian.

Brian: Thank you.

Deb: This has been quite the eye-opening. I hope I can attend tomorrow's book event. I was actually raised in Great Britain with an adoptive British mom and my uncle, my actual birth uncle. They didn't tell me that I was adopted so I chose to believe that they were my parents until I learned differently when I was like 18, which is pretty old to be learning that you're adopted. What is resonating with me right now is that we moved to Maine about two years ago and last year I felt the gaze so intensely that brought me back to Brooklyn for a short period of time. I'd never experienced it before, not in Great Britain, not in Washington, DC, nowhere, that I experienced in Maine.

Brian: How would you describe it?

Deb: It was quite simply, "What are you doing here? Why are you in my space?" There was some-- Like they had never seen a Black person before some of that, but mostly just, "You are not supposed to be here. This is Maine."

Brian: Rebecca, you want to talk to Deb?

Rebecca: Yes. I think Maine, New Hampshire, New England, it's statistically super white. When I was adopted and we moved to the small rural town in New Hampshire, I was literally the only Black person, the first Black person in that town. I think that the stat that I had that it was 99.9% and I was the 1%. I think it's also really important for your own sanity as a Black person or a person of color, but specifically Black person here is thinking about the white gaze in the context of race and racism. It sounds to me what Deb was just describing is just blatant racism. The white gaze is what births racism, there is a relationship to it.

I think that in some ways, the white gaze is more insidious because it's everywhere. It's the default. Again, I know I say that a lot, but it is literally the backdrop, the foundational backdrop of this country. I think that it's easier and I think important for folks to be able to call out racism which is what that sounded to me like, "What are you doing here?" Is racist if white folks are saying to a Black person, "You don't belong here." Then, thinking about the gaze which we internalize in myriad ways that isn't direct racism.

Brian: There's a larger lesson here for white liberals, generally who may sneer at white nationalists like the Capitol rioters or the people looking at our caller Deb like she doesn't belong here, but maybe don't get their own blind spots and how to keep opening their eyes to their own white gays that might replicate your parents in some ways and be different among different white liberals in other ways, but that is maybe even harder for a white liberal to see because they don't see it.

Rebecca: Well, exactly. That also is deeply problematic. This whole notion of colorblindness a restlessness or post racial, which is essentially saying, "There's no value in you as a Black person unless I strip you of your identity of something that's important to you." That is the white gaze and also racist.

Brian: Rebecca in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Rebecca Carroll. Hi, Rebecca.

Rebecca 2: Oh, my goodness. Hi, first thought, Brian, I really love the show. I'm a really consistent listener. Thank you. Rebecca, I can't believe that I'm speaking with you. I devoured your book. There's so many parallels. First of all, we have the same name, we're born the same year. I'm literally, I did a 23andMe, I'm 50% African, 50% Northern European and grew up in a family of artists.

For so long, just didn't know where I fit. I still am not sure that I do. I was raised at a time and I think in a family where my parents didn't want me to feel different. My race was never discussed. The differences that I saw between myself and my sister, especially was never ever talked about. Things that they just really felt like, "Yes, if we don't address it, then she won't feel different," but of course, I'm different than my siblings.

Rebecca: Rebecca are you adopted?

Rebecca 2: Yes. Oh my goodness. Yes. Completely adopted. Yes, absolutely adopted by a white family.

Brian: I didn't know. You could be a little adopted but go ahead.

Rebecca 2: Yes. I actually also found my birth parents. They both still live in the town I was born in, so a little bit of a different relationship and also my Black families actually, African. My father was born in Africa. His other kids were born there and immigrated young. It's a little bit of a different relationship to being Black in this country I think. Well, for them maybe a little bit. Yes, I'm adopted and I just don't even know where to start. There's so many parellels.

Brian: Let me help you because time is going to be an issue too, but pick one, literally pick a-- What were you going, "Me too, me too," before you called in other than all these demographics similarities, what experiential similarity? I thought I was making it easier for you. It made it harder for you.

Rebecca 2: Yes, I don't know. Yes, go ahead. Sorry.

Rebecca: I just wanted to say that this idea again which we talked about just before you came on of not addressing it or not seeing it is another function of the white gaze, which is that it's either you are different or other, or you are not. You are either the way that I assign your identity or your identity does not exist. Just the audacity of that presumption is a function of the white gaze.

Rebecca 2: How do you deal with-- So as I'm learning about being Black and being angry about being discriminated against and dealing with white people. I struggle reconciling that with being in a family with these white people that I love, who claim to be colorblind, how do you reconcile that? My family is lovely, but there's been some situations with little flaws.

Rebecca: Lovely is lovely, isn't it? I often think lovely is lovely and love is lovely. I think it's really up to you what feels comfortable and where you want to-- It's very much "pick your battles situation." Are there family members for whom it would be satisfying, gratifying, useful, will enhance your relationship to have a very straightforward conversation where upon you say, "Your color blindness does not help any of us here," then do that conversation.

If it feels like you're just not getting anywhere at all, then leave that conversation. You arrive at a certain point in your life, and you said that you were born the same year as me, where you really, really have to say, "I have reached this place where I own my story. I own my identity. It is mine. I don't need your infiltration." I had a lot of white friends who didn't make it to this point with me for all of these reasons and that's okay.

I don't need to bring them all with me. Not everybody wants to evolve, but I can't go back. I can't backpedal the ways in which I have learned about my Blackness and embraced my Blackness, especially as the mother of a Black and mixed-race child, I have to be fine with that. It's incredibly difficult. It's incredibly exhausting and it's very, very anger-provoking. I encourage you to feel that anger and to feel that rage and to move forward in agency of that.

Brian: Rebecca, thank you so--

Rebecca 2: Can I just ask one more thing though? The gaze issue, but how do you reconcile that with the white side of you? That's the other thing for me is that I'm going to be one without the other or can-- You don't?

Rebecca: No, I don't. I divested entirely from my whiteness probably 10 years ago. It's just not useful to me. It's done more damage than good. It's also, isn't a thing, we talk about this-- My husband, who is white, it's like not a thing. There's much more dignity and power and grace for me in Blackness and that is what I hope to pass on to my son.

Rebecca 2: Right. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense.

Brian: Rebecca. Thank you very much for your call. Just to touch a couple of things, Rebecca, real quick, before we run out of time, does your childhood make you oppose interracial adoption at all? Some Black people do thinking it can rarely go well for the adopted child, or does your experience make you think more of a set of principles and actions that white people who adopt Black kids should be guided by?

Rebecca: I can't lie. I'm very, very skeptical about the success of interracial adoption. I do believe though that if there is a sort of proper kind of protocol community making, ask the right questions, immersiveness, deference, yes, I think it can happen. It can work. I feel like it is a replicant in many ways or symbolic of the foundational relationship in this country between Black folks and white folks and that is not to say that adoption is the same as slavery.

It is to say that what happens in an interracial dynamic with white parents and Black folks, white parents essentially setting the tone, the structure, the standards for this Black person, when really unless those white parents are properly for lack of a better word culturally conversant with Black culture then yes that Black child is going to suffer. I think as I did you feel very bereft at a certain point bereft and lonely and angry. Yes. Proceed with caution, I would say.

Brian: One thing you've said that I'll pick out of the many things you've said is, "Please don't make your children have to convince you that racism exists."

Rebecca: Yes.

Brian: Were you in that position with your parents?

Rebecca: Absolutely. I still am. Yes. As I was saying to Rebecca, our last caller, we have to arrive at a place where we feel we can stand tall in who we are, that sounds really cliché, but own who you are and walk through the rest of your life and lean into your squad and the people who see who you are. Time is short and we can't change everybody. I have spent the better part of my life writing and talking about race and racism and Blackness and working in all white environments and to some avail and some not. I think you have to just be in agency of your truth and your identity. Nobody else can do that for you or tell you how to be.

Brian: All right. For a little fun at the end. Many people get asked just to play who they would like to play them on TV. I see that MGM/UA has contracted with you to executive produce a TV series based on the book.

Rebecca: And write, Brian.

Brian: And write the series. Sorry, for leaving that out. Is it premature to talk about when or how or with whom?

Rebecca: It is premature. It's fun to think about it. Yes, I'm very much still in the sort of thinking about what parts of the book I'm going to adapt. It's for a limited series. I'm still really trying to figure out the parts that are going to translate best into television. That'll also dictate who would play me at what age and so on and so forth. I love Zendaya [laughs]. The teen me, the early 20s me.

Brian: There you go. Rebecca Carroll will be doing a virtual book event, for those of you who want to hear more with the California bookstore, Book Passage, that'll be on Thursday at eight o'clock Eastern Time. Bookpassage.com, event, and you'll find it, the California bookstore, Book Passage Event, with Rebecca Carroll, eight o'clock Eastern Time, this Thursday. The book is called, Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir.

It's gotten unbelievable reviews like, "The most important memoir of the 21st century was longer than [unintelligible 00:31:01] " Things like that. Rebecca, congratulations. It was great to work with you when you were at WNYC. Congratulations on your success in the book. Can't wait to see the TV show.

Rebecca: Brian, thank you so much. It was really such a pleasure.

 

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