How to Love a Transracially Adopted Person Part 10: Loving Protection Ten Years at the Intersection

For ten years, every February at the intersection of Valentine’s Day and Black History Month, I have opened my heart in this series. What began as an exploration of romantic love, and how being adopted and raised in a family of a different race shaped how I understood intimacy and belonging, has become something much bigger.

Over the years, I have written these pieces partnered and single, grounded and untethered, healing and hurting. As the world continues to reveal how casually it can dismiss Black lives, distort adoption, and normalize harm, I have become clearer about what love must require.

This series has become a reckoning with:

Identity
Loss
Belonging
Safety
protection

It has become an annual tradition I both look forward to and dread.

For this tenth installment, I am not writing about love in a soft way. I am writing about love that protects. Because in 2026, in a world that still prefers tidy adoption narratives and uncomplicated racial myths, love without protection is no longer enough.

I am writing this first for myself. To say with conviction what I believe based on my lived experience.

I am writing for adopted people and transracially adopted people who deserve to feel seen, validated, and deeply loved in their full complexity.

I am writing for adoptive parents and parents of origin who are willing to be enlightened by the perspective of an adopted person who longs for more elevated and authentic love within the extended family of adoption.

I am writing for professionals whose decisions restructure families and whose language shapes how adoption is understood and practiced.

And I am writing for the world. Because if adoption and racial difference teach us anything, it is this: love that avoids truth is fragile, and love that refuses protection is incomplete.

Section I

THE INCOMPLETE LOVING

Narrative of Adoption

This section is about adoption broadly, the myth of simplicity, and how tying adoption too tightly to love without context creates confusion and emotional tension.

Adoption is often told as a simple love story because simplicity is more comfortable for adults. It allows everyone to pretend there is resolution and completion. It avoids complexity and tension. It avoids questions that do not have easy answers.

But simplicity from parents and professionals creates a fragile foundation for an adopted person trying to understand love.

Adoption has never been the simple love story everyone around me wanted it to be. I knew that early on, long before I had language for it. I felt it before I could articulate it. I did not know what to ask for to soothe the ache, but I knew something about the story I was being told did not add up.

The broader culture reinforces this simplicity. Adoption is frequently presented as a solution. A remedy. A generous act. A loving alternative in moments of crisis. Especially in abortion debates, adoption is often lifted up as the uncomplicated answer.

When adoption is presented as a simple solution, it becomes a conditional transaction rather than a transformational human experience.

As an adopted person, that framing is not theoretical. It is deeply personal.

During one of only two conversations I ever had with my mother of origin, she told me, “I could have made a different decision.”

Hearing that sentence knocked me on my ass. Today, it still lives in my body. It reminds me that my existence is often framed as conditional, rooted in choice, sacrifice, and circumstance rather than in the universal truth that I am entitled to be here simply because I was born.

Research has shown for decades that many women who relinquished children for adoption wanted to parent but lacked resources, support, or freedom from pressure. Adoption is often chosen within constraint, not empowerment.

Adoption without context turns love into propaganda.

For me, my early love story absent facts became a wound dressed up as comfort.

For a child trying to understand love, this was foundational.

When I was young, I understood love in tangible ways. Love meant holding something close. Love meant staying. I held my stuffed animals tightly. I protected my pets. I guarded the books that meant something to me.

So I wrestled with a question that many adopted children quietly carry: If she loved me, why didn’t she keep me?

I had visible proof of love from the family raising me. I did not have proof of the love I was told existed at my beginning. That absence created confusion. It created tension between what I was told and what I could feel.

Adoption taught my body to expect goodbye, even when my heart wanted to believe in forever.

The love of my adoptive family does not erase the loss of my family of origin. It never has. It has never been either/or. It has always been both/and.

Even before I could articulate that duality, I felt it in my body. Love next to loss. Gratitude next to grief. Belonging next to rupture.

What I needed earlier in life was permission to hold both. Permission to feel sad about the family I did not grow up with while feeling grateful for the family I did. Permission to say that love and loss were intertwined from the beginning of my life.

When we flatten adoption into a tidy narrative, we deny adopted people the language they need to understand their emotional landscape. We make love feel fragile, questions feel disloyal, and grief feel inappropriate.

But love built on truth can hold complexity. It creates steadiness rather than confusion.

Adoption is not a simple love story. It is a human story. And human stories deserve honesty and fullness.

If we can learn to hold adoption with accuracy and humility, we learn something larger about love itself. Love is not proven by rescue, good intention, or sentiment. It is strengthened by truth and deepened when it makes room for all the dimensions of life.

What adoption can teach the world about love is this: when we avoid complexity, we create fragility. When we face it with honesty, we create something that can endure.

And when race is layered into adoption, the stakes become even higher.

Section II

LOVING PROTECTION:

What Transracial Adoption

Reveals about blackness & Love

When race is layered into adoption, love becomes racial, cultural, embodied, and public.

As a Black woman raised in a white family and a majority white community, I know what it feels like to be deeply loved by white people. I also know what it feels like when that love is not consistently connected to protection.

My parents had every reason to be actively anti-racist. They loved a Black daughter. And yet, like many white families, they were not always equipped to recognize and interrupt harm. Sometimes the harm was subtle. Sometimes it was overt. Sometimes it was silence.

Silence is not neutral to a Black child.

Over ten years of writing this series, through different seasons of my life, I have returned to one central truth: in transracial adoption, love must include protection or it becomes fragile at best and harmful at worst.

Protection begins with being seen.

See me fully. Not as the grateful exception. Not as proof that love conquers all. See me as a Black woman shaped by adoption, navigating race in a country that does not treat Blackness gently.

Seeing me requires awareness. If you are white, it requires understanding your privilege and what it means to move through the world with me and without me by your side. It requires noticing what you do not have to think about that I must calculate daily.

Being seen is not about affection. It is about awareness.

Protection also requires recognizing the labor I carry.

As a woman. As a Black person. As an adopted person. Often all at once. There is an invisible vigilance that lives inside me, scanning rooms, interpreting tone, adjusting posture, bracing for dismissal. That vigilance is not dramatic. It is adaptive.

Protective love helps me rest from that vigilance. It does not argue with it. It does not belittle it. It does not tell me I am imagining it.

Protection means telling the truth about race, even when it disrupts family comfort. It means interrupting racial jokes at the holiday table. It means questioning school discipline policies. It means believing me the first time I name harm.

Protection is active.

It is not enough to love me privately while remaining passive publicly. If I do not see you loving other Black people, advocating for Black children, building real relationships across difference, your love for me feels exceptional. And exceptional love is not safe.

We are living in a time when racial disregard feels louder and less hidden. Public language has grown coarser. Policies further exclude. Black and Brown children are absorbing this climate in their bodies long before they can articulate it.

Transracial adoption makes this reality unavoidable. White parents of Black and Brown children cannot pretend race is abstract. Their children’s safety depends on how they respond to it.

But this is not only about adoptive families. It is about the broader society.

If you claim to love Black and Brown people, your love must show up in protection. It must show up in what you tolerate and what you interrupt. It must show up in decision-making spaces. It must show up when silence would be easier.

Protective love costs something. It may cost comfort. It may cost approval. It may cost proximity to power. But love that refuses to risk anything is not protection. It is preference.

Adoption enfolded me into a family that did not fully understand how to love me as a Black person. It also placed me at the intersection of intimacy and racial difference. That intersection sharpened my awareness and strengthened my discernment.

Surviving and sometimes thriving in this reality has served me as I navigate majority white spaces from the classroom to the boardroom. I know how to read a room. I know how to code-switch. I know how to carry myself in spaces not designed with me in mind.

But survival skills are not the same as protection.

The next generation of Black and Brown children should not have to become experts in vigilance in order to feel safe. They deserve adults who do the work so their bodies do not have to.

So here is the broader call-in.

To white parents,
To white partners,
To white leaders,
To white friends,

If you love Black and Brown people, study what harms them. Interrupt what harms them. Build relationships beyond the one Black or Brown person closest to you. Let your love expand into advocacy. Let it mature into courage.

To institutions that claim diversity as a value, measure your love by your policies. Protection is not a statement. It is structure.

To a world that sentimentalizes adoption while ignoring race, understand this: transracial adoption is not a redemption story. It is a responsibility story.

What ten years has clarified for me is this: love that protects is the only love that builds trust in a world where Black and Brown lives are too often treated as expendable.

Love is not proven by words.
It is proven by who stays engaged.
It is proven by who interrupts harm.
It is proven by who protects.

And in this moment, protection is not optional.

It is the measure.