Racial Literacy: An Analysis of How Transracial Adoptees View Their Racial Identity


Jennifer Peruniak, University of Toronto

This research traces how transracial adoptees from diverse racial backgrounds in Canada conceptualize and articulate their sense of racial identity through the life course from early childhood to adulthood. It engages with theorization of the self from a racialized outsider’s perspective to ask: what does it mean to be a racialized person in Canada, and how does this function to socialize someone who occupies an outsider position due to their inherent circumstances of adoption? Transracial adoptees (TRA’s) are a fascinating case study that can speak to many areas within race literature. Primarily, TRA’s expand theorization of how BIPOC people come to understand their own racial identity on a micro everyday level. This paper utilizes 42 semi-structured interviews with transracial adoptees that took place over Zoom lasting between 1-2 hours. Participants were from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds with a mix of domestic and international adoptees. The family unit plays an essential role in how TRA’s understand their own racial identity. This paper contributes research that is in conversation with France Twine’s concept of racial literacy. Twine (2004) coins the concept of racial literacy as one that theorizes parental labour as an anti-racist project, which encompasses their actions toward raising their children with understandings of racism. This paper applies this concept to unpack how transracial adoptees attain racial literacy (or not), and how this affects their internalized perceptions and feelings of themselves as racialized people. Participants in this sample articulate the cyclical nature of how outsider status functions to create and reproduce itself even within marginalized groups, and more broadly, within the Canadian cultural landscape. It highlights the push-pull dynamic central to transracial adoptees understandings of their own sense of racial identity as one occupying an “in-between” status. By theorizing from those on the margin, this research will contribute nuance and complexity to scholarship on the boundaries and constructions of racial identity, and how racial identity is understood by those on the fringe. It unpacks the symbiotic relationship between belonging and identity; it examines how belonging is felt and understood in two major contexts, belonging within the family unit, and belonging within a particular racial group. This paper breaks the data into two major phases of transracial adoptees’ experiences: one is the everyday process of othering they encounter, second is the impact these experiences have over time and how it affects transracial adoptees’ sense of identity. The lack of belonging of this specific group of transracial adoptees shows how difficult acquiring racial literacy is, especially with a white family who does not have shared lived experiences. TRA’s lived experiences show the strength of racial boundaries and categorization, through positioning themselves as not belonging to either white groups or racialized groups. Transracial adoptees exist as outsiders, both on the white side of the colour line, and the racialized side of the colourline. Their lived experiences on the colourline as outsiders illuminates the real world implications of not belonging and its impact on identity and the self. Consequently, the outsiders of these groups function to show the inner workings of how belonging operates within the in-groups, as well as the salient role of external perception (based on phenotype, racial codes, and culture) towards a racialized person. These work to reinforce the significance of race (racial identity) and display how complex the processes of learning about what it means to be a racialized person in Canadian society.

This paper will be presented at the following session: