The Politics of Adoption and Race: Seattlest Interviews Lisa Marie Rollins

Lisa Marie Rollins. Photo from her website, A Birth Project.

In the emotionally touchy issue of adoption, how do we open a public conversation about the politics of adoption and race, especially for adult adoptees? Writer, activist, actress, and playwright Lisa Marie Rollins is returning to her Seattle/Tacoma area roots this weekend to do just that. She’s part of the organizing team behind a conference called ‘The Gathering,” for Adopted and Fostered Adults of the African Diaspora (AFAAD).

We caught up with Lisa Marie Rollins just before her whirlwind weekend begins, and asked her about the event. (When she’s not organizing events like this one, or teaching writing workshops, she’s working on her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley.) Here is an abbreviated version of the conversation.

Tell us a bit more about your roots here.
I was born in Renton WA and adopted to and raised in Tacoma. T-Town represent! I was raised on the north side of town, where there were not really any black folks, and went to all white schools and all white churches and basically was raised in an all white community. My entire family on my mom’s side is here, and the community that supported me once I escaped from private school, going to public schools and started making black and brown friends.

An additional significant layer is that my birthfather and birthmother’s families are from Seattle’s Central district. It’s actually kind of strange to be holding the Gathering here, for me personally, being immersed in an entire weekend about adoption, knowing that I may have family walking around in the streets right this minute. It was kind of a tough decision for me to have it here, and honestly, it wasn’t my first choice. Being in a national leadership role and planning a conference from top to bottom with my other Board members is crazy enough, but add the general psychic energy of adoptive and birth families in close proximity, I think it scared me a little.

It scared me because as most adoptees know, we spend a lot of our lives taking care of other people’s emotions around what is essentially something that happened to us. Not saying that our coming into our families lives or being absent from our birth families lives doesn’t have impact on them. But when we begin to push ourselves to consider and articulate our own feelings and our own emotions around our adoption, without putting our families or birth families feelings first, things change radically. Truths start to be told, questions start to be asked and but for me, most importantly, disconnections and distances begin to be healed, whatever they may be and I think they are different for every adoptee.

Those distances and disconnections that adoptees share are why the Gathering became a vision for me and the AFAAD Board in the first place. I searched for awhile, looking for a black adoptee group, but it was almost as if we were invisible population in the black community. As if same race and transracial adoptees were ‘all okay’ because we made it ‘out of foster care’, we all should be so lucky considering the histories of black communities in the the diaspora - right?

These disconnections for so many of us are small and huge, the secrets in our families, the way so many of us who were same race adopted were never told until late in life, or the way that so many of us who were adopted across race were isolated from other black people, or the way that the social welfare system has institutionalized the distance between adoptees and foster care alumni.

What does it mean to you to hold the Gathering here?
I have to say, it’s especially meaningful to me to hold the Gathering here because of my roots in the area, but also because it will give me and those of us in our adoptee community who have also been touched, a chance to mourn the loss of one of our numbers. I’ve been completely obsessed with the story of Hana Grace Williams, the young girl adopted from Ethiopia, brought to WA state and murdered by her adoptive parents. For me, this story raises all the right questions about pre and post adoption screening, human trafficking of black and brown bodies for white desire, and the way that the neocolonial ‘savior’ narrative of Christianity can go horribly, horribly wrong. I know that’s a lot of academic talk for a news article, but I’m so overwhelmed with grief and pain about this story, I can’t do anything but speak loudly with the weapons that I have [and the] Gathering gives us space to do this kind of thinking and this kind of healing work without justifying ourselves to anyone.

Why hold a Public Education event?
The Annual Public education event is a huge part of our weekend. As you know, the Gathering itself offers workshops, discussions and support specifically for adult foster care alumni and adoptees of African descent. But there were two things happening when we had the Gatherings each year - first, we realized there was a huge lack of information and education out there in the general public about the politics of adoption and race, and AFAAD as an organization wanted to offer something to communities that would open up space for discussion outside of popular images like Angelina Jolie or The Blind Side. Second, we had questions from birth parents or adoptive families, potential adoptive parents, siblings, partners and other allies, who wanted to know what they could do to support the adoptees and foster care alumni in their lives and our public education event is one of the few places that I know that positions the voices of adoptee and foster care alumni artists, researchers, activists at the lead in these conversations about what exactly it is that we need.

This year, the film is a powerful documentary that features Daryl ‘DMC’ Mc Daniel from Run DMC, who is a same race, late notification adoptee. Once again we hope to offer a great opportunity to have these conversations in the community and to provide support for adoptive families in the larger Seattle, Tacoma and Pacific Northwest community.

The documentary screening and its larger conference will be held at The 2100 Building, 2100 South 24th Street. For more information about the conference and Adopted and Fostered Adults of the African Diaspora (AFAAD), read here.