When you think of adopting a underprivileged child, you usually hear of some celebrity couple importing kids like Honda imports cars.? A few months ago, I had a discussion with some friends about adoption.? They wanted to know if it was acceptable for a white family to adopt a black child.? Personal opinions were over shadowed by the needs of the children.? It’s not a matter of taking them away from their culture or detaching them everything they identify with.? It’s much more than that.
As I was preparing to watch the Cotton Bowl game this year, the pregame show featured a player that experienced this exact thing.? His name is Michael Oher.? Michael is the left tackle at Ole Miss.? He’s an amazing athlete.? But the last 10 years of his life is twice as amazing.? Michael lived in one of the worst neighborhoods in town.? At the age of 14, he didn’t know his mother (crackhead).? He didn’t know his birthday.? He wasn’t sure about his own name.? He didn’t know his father.? He was sleeping in a room on a air mattress.
Sean Tuohy saw Michael Oher sitting on the bleachers in the gymnasium of Briarcrest Christian School. He just saw a kid who might need some help. Oher had been admitted to the school?which was mostly white, academically rigorous and well-to-do?on the basis of his size. Tuohy and his wife, Leigh Anne? spotted Oher walking through the cold. ?Where are you going?? they asked. ?To basketball practice,? Oher replied. ?Michael, you don?t have basketball practice,? Tuohy said. ?I know,? said Oher, ?but they got heat there.?? From that moment on, they moved Michael into their home and accepted him as one of the family.
The interesting thing about the Tuohy family is their background.? Leigh Anne Tuohy says, “I had grown up with a firm set of beliefs about black people but had shed them for another–and could not tell you exactly how it happened, other than to say that “I married a man who doesn’t know his own color.” Her father, a United States Marshal based in Memphis, raised her to fear and loathe blacks as much as he did. (Friends who saw Tommy Lee Jones in the movie U.S. Marshal would say to her, “Oh my God, that’s your father!”) The moment the courts ordered the Memphis Public School system integrated, in 1973, he pulled her out of public school and put her into the newly founded Briarcrest Christian School, where she’d become a member of the first graduating class. “I was raised in a very racist household,” she said. As her father walked her up the aisle so that she might wed Sean, he looked around the church, filled with Sean’s black ex-teammates, and asked, “Why are all these niggers here?” Even as an adult, when she mentioned in passing that she was on her way into a black neighborhood on the west side of Memphis for some piece of business, he insisted on escorting her. “And when he comes to get me, he shows up with this magnum strapped to his chest.”
Talk about a 180 degree change for the next generation.
Leigh Anne even mentioned that she received resistance from her fellow affluent friends.? “How can you take in a black teenage boy in the same house with your white teenage daughter?”? “Are you afraid?”
Her answer was a defiant, “NO!”
I have to applaud her and her family.? With her background and how she was raised, they did what no one else wanted to do.? They moved a inner city black male to an affluent suburb.? They provided for him as if he was their own son.? They say the biggest challenge wasn’t his race, it was finding cloths for the 6’5″, 300lbs teenager.? He proudly calls her Momma and refers to them as his sister & brother.
For a kid who didn’t know anything about himself and now to be a man that has a defined by the triumphs that he’s conquered, he has a great future ahead.
So if you’re asking me if it’s OK for a white family to adopt outside of their race, I have to say yes.? Adoption is about improving someones life.? It’s about giving them the opportunity to have a better life.? It’s about helping someone who isn’t able to help himself.? As a society we spend a lot of time worrying about what others think of us.? If we put our own concerns aside, you’ll find that someone else can use our help.? No matter what race we/they are.
Would you adopt a child of another race?? Would you adopt a teenager of another race?
If you want to read more on this read the book Blind Side by Michael Lewis.? I heard there is a movie in the works also.
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