THE TOKEN POC

I glanced around the room, hoping something would be different this time. Entering yet another door into yet another room. The same kind of room I was just in, funny enough. Crowded, chattery, even a little bit welcoming. But still the same room with the same. Exact. People.
“Oh, you know Abha, right?...Yep, she was adopted!”
“She’s right over there! She’s from India.”
“I think she’s the only one here.”
Each sentence wraps vines around the cold reality that everywhere I went as a child, I was the token POC. The choice kid of color, the “adopted” kid, the “shortest,” “smallest,” or “darkest.” I shivered with nervousness whenever we left the city, wishing with all my heart to avoid the rural individuals’ stares and double-takes.
Heads turned, whether they meant to or not. I couldn’t change it, the looks, the stares, the color. I scrubbed soap into my skin, my six-year-old body begging to become white to blend in. To “look like my family.”
I listened quietly as White people in my upbringing remained the center of conversations revolving around social justice, Black lives matter, and other movements. It felt backwards, but who was I to know?
I bit my tongue as White mommas asked me “when I came here” and if I “felt lucky to be in a loving family?” I strained my ears to overhear judgment and pity kissing pride and White saviorism.
“An expensive matter, adoption was,” they’d say.
Opening doors years down the road looked the same, speaking volumes to how stalled a society is. I continue to sit as the token POC in my career. I exist as the only POC in my household, with my childhood friends, in the average White church. I’d go on, but I think you get the picture.
These rooms are disheartening and soon enough, I found myself avoiding entering them at all.
White-washed walls have an unpleasant glare.
Transracial adoption isn’t easy or pretty or perfect. It’s messy and painful and hard. But hold room for something unexpected and beautiful because amidst these shallow realities can live love and patience and boldness. Speak boldly for your children, listen carefully when they don’t want to visit your friends again, think deeply when you bring them places where they’re a minority. The world has much to offer. Don’t shrink its size by taking away all the types of people in it for your children.
They need to see themselves in others. Implement that, even when it feels unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Let them grow up and confide in someone that looks like them, even when it feels painful. Model for them what a diverse society best looks like, what painting white walls and breaking glass ceilings looks like.
Let them explore their origins, their roots, their cultures and religions and countries. Let them decide who they will be, who they want to be. This in itself is the most loved version of themselves you can give them.