Debra Monroe’s Personal Essay of Interracial Adoption: “Gray Area”

An excerpt from this beautiful piece of writing…”A clerk once told my daughter to leave a store because she was loitering. I was nearby, looking at towels. “Is there a problem?” I countered. “I’m her mother.” Even when I was living in the country where people lived less diversely, I had clear advantages, a stable job, advanced training in rhetoric I find useful every time I object. But I think of people who can’t immediately say to the officer or clerk: hey, I’m white here. And how quaint I sound, a white woman who understands racism at last, selfishly, for her daughter’s sake. Yet I don’t understand. I understand only that I used to be clueless: the sense of ease in day-to-day interactions I once took for granted. I’m also not living with ancestral history as trauma: enslavement, violence, segregation. I’m touchy because I’m protecting my daughter. I don’t have an ocean of grief hundreds of years old.”

To read it all…

via Gray Area – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics.

Debra’s memoir On the Outskirts of Normal: Forging a Family                            Against the Grain. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 2010.