The Three Types of Diversity

How finding out I was adopted called into question my identity and how it relates to diversity in literature

Previously, I told you about how I found out I was adopted. I told you about my experienced history, my learned history, and how it all fit together. I recounted how I decided that I would treat this discovery like a new unexpected room in a home I love, not a cage.

What I didn’t get into in that last post is how that discovery affected not how I reacted, but how I interacted with the discourse around identity in literature. I had spent most of my life writing under the assumption that the census and my doctors would define me as one thing, but that I liked to define myself as “part of the human race” instead of white or Black or anything else.

But then I found out how much of my ancestral history had been hidden from me, which called into question both the relevance and irrelevance of those details. My beloved parents who had raised me were not my biological parents; they had adopted me and had passed on without ever telling me the truth. In truth: I was most likely bought in a legal arrangement which was common at the time. And more, my birth mother was white, and my father was Black. And my birth mother had most likely decided to put me up for adoption because of that.

Watching my kids react to the news helped me piece together some questions I had for myself and for the world I wrote in.