Friday, March 1, 2013
A Family is…Raceless - Guest-Post by Shannon LC Cate
I've asked several adoption and social work bloggers to share about films that have impacted them, either positively or negatively. Shannon LC Cate, whose work appears in several places including Peter's Cross Station, shares about Rosie O'Donnell's documentary, "A Family is a Family is a Family."
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When Rosie O’Donnell released her documentary “A Family is a Family is a Family,"
it
was largely celebrated as a tribute to family diversity and the power of love
to triumph over social differences and misunderstandings.
I
anticipated the movie hopefully, and in some ways it was a nice affirmation for
families like my own. But ultimately, I found it disappointing.
The
fact is that although “love makes a family” as the slogan goes, it is also true
that “love is not enough” – as another slogan goes.
To
watch Rosie’s movie, you would think that “love” was a band-aid adequate to
cover and cure all kinds of traumas and challenges that families outside the
normative, mainstream model face.
For
example:
Unless
I missed it in three viewings, the film contained not ONE single mention of
race. There were loads of colorful examples of interracial families both
by marriage and birth and by adoption, but not one single mention of this or
why it might require discussion. It was the typical White Liberal
colorblind approach to the topic of race which–have we not learned by now?–is
the wrong approach.
When
a film sets itself up as an unwincing account of the beauty of family
difference and variety, not mentioning that families can contain people of
different races–and discussing that–is a glaring oversight. The film
discusses single-parent, same-sex parent, ART, internationally and domestically
adoptive families but not one word is spoken about race.
If
you can ask a little girl to talk about her abandonment, institutionalization
and adoption, it seems you can broach the topic of how it feels to be the black
child of two white men, right?
Guess
not.
But
not to talk about it—while everyone can see it—is to send the message that race
is a shameful topic, or that racial difference in families doesn’t matter. And
it does.
As
long as race is a category by which our society (U.S. American society
specifically, but many other Western societies too) allots privileges and
denies them, it is critical to make race clear and give children who don’t
share their parents’ race a voice to explore what this means to them—let alone
to give parents who don’t share their children’s race to show their full
support of their kids’ struggles (when, as is usually the case, at least one
parent is white, while the children are not).
Complicating
this problematic silence in the film, is the parroting by children, of grownup
explanations of various family forms. It reminds me of the times I hear
other same-sex parents, or adoptive parents talk about how their kids have
"no problem at all!" with their family differences; how they
willingly volunteer the story of their family to strangers with pride, etc.
And
I think it’s fairly common for young children—under five or six—to willingly
accept and repeat whatever they’ve been told about their family and its meaning.
But much older than that, children begin to develop their own complicated
feelings about their difference from others—including, often, sad stories about
what made them available for adoption. It seems likely that platitudes like, "a
family is love!" sends a message that these more complicated feelings are
shameful, wrong, or at the very least unacceptable to express.
Sure,
a family is love. But kids still live in a world in which there's a lot
more than love–and more than family, for that matter–influencing their daily
experiences of life. A loving family should be a place where it is safe
to air the difficulties that arise from being different without fear of
upsetting your parents. But when those parents keep declaring that those
differences don't matter, it might very well make a kid wonder if they aren’t
protesting a bit too much.
The
only thing that salvaged the film for me were the musical performances by kids
and their families. My own children loved that aspect of the show and it
was cute and well done. But children in nontraditional families need meat
and potatoes, not cotton candy fluff when it comes to negotiating their
differences from the mainstream culture, if they are to learn real pride and
real spokesmanship for what matters in a family.
Shannon
LC Cate has been writing about family, parenting, politics and religion since
2000. Her work has appeared on Babble.com,
BlogHer.com, Literary
Mama.com,
Lesbian Family.com, in Adoptive
Families Magazine, Gay Chicago Magazine and elsewhere. Her
debut novel, Jack, is forthcoming from Musa Publishing in September 2013.
She
lives in Chicago with her partner, CL Cole and their daughters, Nat and Selina.
New to Adoption at the Movies?
You might also like these other posts:
Review of "Precious" by Social Jerk
Review of "The Blindside" by Lori Holden
Review of "Les Miserables" by Adoption at the Movies
Also check out Adoption at the Movies on Facebook, or Sit in the Front Row - top righthand corner.
New to Adoption at the Movies?
You might also like these other posts:
Review of "Precious" by Social Jerk
Review of "The Blindside" by Lori Holden
Review of "Les Miserables" by Adoption at the Movies
Also check out Adoption at the Movies on Facebook, or Sit in the Front Row - top righthand corner.
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Thank you for this. I pinned it on my Challenging Children Board.http://pinterest.com/pin/147141112797768793/
ReplyDeleteAs perhaps the most experienced foster parent in the world I have strong feelings that race cannot be denied in a racial society. Stay strong.
Thanks Katherine. I quite agree!
ReplyDeleteThis is a great reminder that equally important to what we DO talk about is what we DON'T talk about. I agree with you that "not to talk about it...is to send the message that race is a shameful topic, or that racial difference in families doesn’t matter."
ReplyDeleteThis is a very helpful review. Thank you, Shannon.
I think what you said there captures my thoughts on any adoption issue --- "not to talk about it is to send the message that it's a shameful topic, or that it doesn't matter."
DeleteThanks for the shares, Lori!
ReplyDelete