For the people that care: Dolezal stole the term transracial & bent it to fit her. The term was coined in the 1960s by BLACK & INDIGENOUS adoptees who experienced erasure from being adopted by white people who didn't care about their adopted kids' heritage & culture.
If you do a search "transracial adoptees" you'll find:
1) A lot of recent & not recent articles confirming this isn't a new term;
and
2) Not one transracial adoptee ever took it to mean you "pick your race."
1) A lot of recent & not recent articles confirming this isn't a new term;
and
2) Not one transracial adoptee ever took it to mean you "pick your race."
"Transracial" was always about describing the experience of knowing that you're different but being raised in a family/community that was doing it's darnedest to assimilate non-white kids into whiteness.
It legit makes me mad that Dolezal columbus'd the term "transracial", because indigenous people were stolen from their families, adopted out to whites & raised as white as a deliberate genocidal tactic.
I know people trying to search & unseal adoption records to find their real, non-white family. People who've been othered because some whites could tell they weren't fully white. It's not funny that we let Dolezal get away with stealing the term & making it about Black face.
Not to mention how much work transracial activists have done. If you ever read anything about the problems of Western adoption agencies in Asia and/or Africa, or white fetishization of adopting kids from the Global South, I guarantee it was thanks to a transracial adoptee.
In case it's not clear: transracial != transgender. No transracial adoptee would ever claim that.
Transgender means your gender doesn't match the gender forced on you at birth.
Transracial means one's adopted parents are not of the same ethnicity & culture as the person.
Transgender means your gender doesn't match the gender forced on you at birth.
Transracial means one's adopted parents are not of the same ethnicity & culture as the person.
Rachel Dolezal has a Black adopted sister, so I think we know where she discovered the term. It's just incredible (as in I don't buy it) that she would be a college professor and somehow wouldn't know that transracial described a method of adoption.
