Two Articles

I'd like to recommend this very thought-provoking article on transracial adoption from The Stranger: "Black Kids in White Houses." It raises many of the difficult issues we need to think about as white adoptive parents--even if we'd rather not. (Hat tip: Habesha Child.)

I also recommend this short article by Gwen Ifil, "The Malia and Sasha Effect."

I am taken by what America will now see in these two little brown girls. Not victims, like the little girls who died at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963. Not hoochie mamas, like the Black girls who shake their rumps in music videos. Just two happy, playful, well-adjusted future Black women. . . .

[Barack Obama] mused about what it would mean for other children to see his daughters running around on the South Lawn. "That changes how America looks at itself," he said. "It changes how White children think about Black children, and it changes how Black children think about Black children."

Symbols can be powerful, I agree.