Baden’s Reclaiming Culture: Reculturation of Transracial and International Adoptees does a phenomenal job of explaining some of the gray area and “dissonance” that transracial adoptees and transracial and international adoptees experience. I recently found a site here with a series of photos of two adopted girls holding a dry erase board with words that have been said to them and their mother regarding the girls’ identities, the adoption process, as well as the validity of their mother’s love. One could argue that these inappropriate comments are a major factor in the creation of dissonance in adoptees. The personal and enacted identity gap communicates to the adoptee that their relationship with their parents is different from a relationship a child would have with their biological parents. This is usually communicated via rude comments such as, “Do you have your own children?” or, “Where are your real parents?”
It is an interesting Freudian slip if you ask me. In a way the individual asking this question is really trying to make cheap small talk about an issue about which they have little understanding. They really want to know, 'what's your cultural line?' or some other impossibly difficult question to answer. By inserting 'real', into the question they are giving away their personal beliefs that a 'real' parent is one that keeps their children, and by association, a 'real' child is one who was kept by their parents.
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