Thread by @autistichoya

One of the worst harms done to transracial adoptees of color, especially transracial AND transnational adoptees of color, is stealing us from our homelands while depriving us of cultural connection and community.

#TransracialTrauma

We are permanent outcasts. Isolated. At the margins of the margins.

I don't belong anywhere.

White people want me to be a safe (to be openly racist to/around), palatable (to white respectability), assimilated (into whiteness) East Asian.

#TransracialTrauma

At the same time AsAm communities feel out of reach.

I don't belong to AsAm family that's been here for generations.

I'm not the AsAm (grand)child of immigrants.

I am culturally illiterate. My attempts to reclaim heritage+ancestral wisdom feel artificial.

#TransracialTrauma

I have been negatively racialized every day of my life.

Transracial+transnational adoption is often international child abduction, and full of white Christian saviorism.

Every day, I am reminded that I am not supposed to belong here because I am a PoC.

#TransracialTrauma

And yes, it's not just completely incorrect to use the word "transracial" for white people who claim to identify as people of color...

But it's incredibly fucking insulting to us, when that has been OUR word for decades before racist white folks stole it.

#TransracialTrauma

BTW, the most notorious offender here, Rachel Dolezal, is a white woman who had several transracially adopted Black siblings.

I would be shocked if she did not first encounter the word "transracial" because of this, before she went and co-opted it.

#TransracialTrauma

Fellow PoC+white accomplices who keep insisting "transracial" is not a real thing are buying directly into an ongoing white supremacist existential threat against actual transracial adoptees of color.

Every time you do this, you participate in our erasure.

#TransracialTrauma

Many of us begin to face white supremacist cultural theft and erasure from the moments we become transracial adoptees, when our names are exchanged for white ones.

I was born Xinzhen Zhang. That is my name but it also feels like it isn't my name anymore.

#TransracialTrauma

I've noticed that for many of us, white adoptive parents will keep part of our birth names as middle names.

This can be a legitimate attempt to keep part of our heritage while melding with new family.

It still requires renaming though. And names carry power.

#TransracialTrauma

Anti-Asian racism is why many East, Southeast, AND South Asians adopt white-coded western European language names.

To minimize burden on white people who can't pronounce our actual names+save ourselves burden of names mangled and futile explanations.

#TransracialTrauma

Yet anti-Asian racist voyeurism is also why many white people (and sometimes non-Asian PoC) constantly demand to know my "real" name when I introduce myself.

Each instance is also a painful reminder that only Lydia feels like my name while Xinzhen does not.

#TransracialTrauma

I had a white lady at a conference once ask me to my face, "But wait, you're not white. Why is your last name Brown?"

Not even considering the many many reasons an East Asian might have this name.

And why should I have to explain centuries of cultural theft?

#TransracialTrauma

To be a transracial transnational adoptee of color born in China and involuntarily migrated (passive voice intentional here) to the U.S. means that I face everyday racism targeting East Asians and nonetheless still feel inauthentically Asian American.

#TransracialTrauma

Attempts to reconnect with my own cultural heritage+ancestral wisdom in, Chinese American or broader AsAm communities, end up feeling fake+artificial+forced.

Like I am closer to a white settler+colonizer+voyeur, than a culturally diasporic Chinese American.

#TransracialTrauma

But white communities, white family, white neighbors, white dominant culture?

They will never see me as anything other than negatively racialized aberration.

I am not your well-behaved, compliant token or model minority or adoption inspoporn story.

#TransracialTrauma

Transracial adoptees of color in white families are simultaneously raised w/i white obliviousness to race AND as spectacles/freak shows for whiteness.

I have so much to say about this but can't figure out language for what this bizarre juxtaposition is like.

#TransracialTrauma

White adoptive families can love us as their children, believe we should be brought up connected to our heritage, and also still create an environment where our cultures are still othered/exotic/tokenized/appropriated/fetishized.

#TransracialTrauma