“People, especially in Toronto, are always coming up to me and talking about my blood,” she said in the interview.
Just as music lovers pay attention to family ties among recording stars, voters follow family dynasties in politics. There were U.S. senators Bobby and Ted Kennedy, brothers of President John F. Kennedy. Cuban president Raúl Castro is the younger brother of the famous revolutionary and the country’s former, long-time leader Fidel Castro. Indira Gandhi, the third prime minister of India, was the daughter of her country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The current leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, is not just the son but also the grandson of his country’s previous leaders. Since the founding of the North Korean state in 1948, Kim Jong-un, his father, Kim Jong-il, and grandfather Kim Il-sung have been the only leaders. As North Korea escalated its bellicose anti-Western rhetoric in 2012 and early 2013, some Western observers wondered if the newly appointed supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army was trying to climb out from under the weight of his family dynasty and create his own identity as North Korea’s new leader.
When Justin Trudeau was elected to serve as a Liberal member of Parliament in Canada, and again when he won the leadership of the Liberal Party in April 2013, I could not help but wonder how he would hold up when constantly compared to his father. The late Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the flamboyant political superstar who was adored by some electors and detested by others, served as Canada’s fifteenth prime minister from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984. In the barrage of news coverage about Justin’s march toward the leadership of the Liberal Party, it became virtually impossible to read or hear any detailed news report that did not mention his father, and many speculated about the idea that politics ran in the younger Trudeau’s blood.
Perhaps some part of the contemporary voter’s soul longs to be ruled by dynasties. Even in anti-monarchist countries such as the United States, dynasties (think of presidents John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, and George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush) represent a sort of security, and harken back to ancient kingdoms in which a family could be counted upon to rule for generations.
Bloodlines formally ensure and dictate the continuation of royal families. You cannot aspire to be the queen or king of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth countries unless you are born or marry into the right family. Until recently, even if you had the requisite bloodlines, you could not be first in line to the throne if you were a woman who had a brother — regardless of your age or competence, or his.
The fixation on blood — be it in the realm of political dynasties or musical stardom — detracts from a level-headed analysis of the quality of a person’s leadership or art. By assuming that the traits of leadership or artistry are in the blood, we assume that the people so venerated have a right to lead (or sing), that we should pay attention to them, that they “come by it honestly,” that their extraordinary and individual hard work counts for less than their placement inside a family, and that they deserve to be elevated to a godlike status.
And what about the siblings and children who do not climb onto the same podium as their celebrated relatives? Have they disappointed us? Is there something deficient in their characters? What if you attempt to pursue the passion that made your parent or sibling famous, but you turn out to be not very good? There can be the sense that you have somehow violated or disrespected the dictates of your own blood. You have shamed yourself and your family, or so it is felt, and it would have been better if you had not undertaken the endeavour at all. On the other hand, one might say that an untalented child or sibling (or one with a different talent) might have been betrayed by his or her own blood, in that the family magic skipped over that person.
In my opinion, it is smug and self-satisfying to declare oneself special because of family blood. One is no more special because of the blood in the family than one is special by dint of the accident of one’s country of birth. Does being a Canadian, or being a member of the Hill family, make me more special — more deserving of privilege, more entitled to comfort, more valuable as a human being, than any person in any country? Of course not. The flip side of egregious pride in one’s family blood or luck of citizenship is the sense that others are less human, less valuable, less deserving than you.
Is a person entitled to lead a country because of his or her bloodline? No. The bloodline is a figment of our imagination. A president, prime minister, or dictator’s blood does not recirculate in the veins of his or her daughter or son. It’s time to move beyond our blood-based obsession with dynasties in politics, and genius in art. Roll over Hippocrates, and tell Galen the news.
ONE NIGHT, WHILE PREPARING to go to bed, my stepdaughter Beatrice Freedman — about six years old at the time — was discussing her own identity with her mom (my wife, Miranda). I was not in the room, but was told that the conversation first touched upon whether Beatrice was Jewish, given that her father was. This is a tricky issue, because Jewish ancestry is traditionally determined by matrilineal descent. Still, Miranda reiterated that Beatrice was related, through her family, to Jewish people. After pondering this for a moment, Beatrice — who had been in my life for about three years at this point — said: “And I’m a little bit black, right?” Miranda asked what Beatrice meant to say. Beatrice replied, “Well, Larry is black and I’m his stepdaughter, so that makes me a little bit black too.”
“No, that’s not how it works,” Miranda replied. She went on to explain that a person’s biological parents generally determine black identity. In other words, along lines of family blood.
Eight years have since passed, and in my family we have all had occasion to chuckle about that conversation. But it was more than merely funny. I find it touching to think of Beatrice identifying with people she loved — her father, and me — but running into social rules and barriers every step of the way. Who is to say that Beatrice could not be black or Jewish, if she wanted, and who can argue that others have not done so previously? Is one’s identity an absolute function of one’s family blood? Can one not create an identity for oneself? Given that identity arises largely from social (as opposed to biological) functions, who is to say that one’s identity cannot change — temporarily or permanently? Who is in charge of a person’s identity?
We have witnessed many moments in history in which identity gatekeepers held firmly to their posts. During the Holocaust, it was extraordinarily difficult to declare yourself an Aryan, if you were a Jew. Similarly, during slavery in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere, any person of African heritage would have had a huge uphill climb to successfully acquire a white identity.
Even today, some people attempt to control passage through the identity gates. “You’re not really black.” “You’re not completely white.” “Where are you from? Yes, but where are you really from?” “Isn’t your father Jewish?” “Are you a full-bloodied Indian, or mixed?” Many people in various countries have considerable experience answering these questions. In earlier times, being the target of some of these questions might have suggested that your life was in danger. Today, the questions mostly irritate, like flies that refuse to vacate a tent.
I would conclude that identity comes down to a delicate and sometimes ongoing negotiation between the individual in question and those who know him or her. In my own home, my view is that it was right to disabuse my stepdaughter Beatrice of the notion that she might be “a little bit black” given her relation to me. It seemed to me rather obvious that it could set up a white girl for nothing but confusion and trouble if we encouraged her to think that she was black, or partly black. And it seemed only right that she should understand how people, generally, see black identity as deriving from biological family ancestry.
On the other hand, despite the traditional rules of matrilineal descent when it comes to Jewish identity, some people with Jewish fathers (but not Jewish mothers) do indeed identify as Jewish. And others who have no Jewish people
in their family convert to Judaism — for a variety of personal reasons, including marriage — and therefore embrace very vigorously their new-found identity. I find the malleability around Jewish identity to be fascinating and inspiring, because it suggests that people can transcend rules of blood descent, when it comes to acquiring or switching their identity.
The late Canadian poet and professor Elizabeth Brewster, one of the founders of the literary journal the Fiddlehead and member of the Order of Canada, converted to Judaism. The African-American entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. was born to a Catholic mother and a Protestant father, but converted to Judaism in mid-life after losing his eye in a serious car accident, and never lived down having described himself as a “one-eyed Negro Jew.” In 2010, House of Anansi Press published the Canadian writer Alison Pick’s novel Far to Go, about efforts to transport Jewish children away from danger during the Holocaust. Pick’s paternal grandparents had narrowly avoided the Holocaust and, after they settled in Canada in 1941, decided to hide their Jewish identity and not to inform their son (Alison Pick’s father) that he was Jewish. Pick’s father put the clues together but raised his daughter in a secular family. In adulthood, Alison Pick discovered the family secret and converted to Judaism.
We are led to believe that racial identity is supposed to be clear-cut. But what is simple about the absurd task of defining racial identity? The very idea of race is so contested that some writers — academics in particular — always place the word in quotation marks, as if to say: “Others use this word but I am keeping it between quotes to contest its legitimacy.”
Sometimes we think we know all about our family blood, only to be surprised by an inconvenient truth. Catherine Slaney of Brampton, Ontario, grew up believing she was white, until one day she came across a newspaper article — which happened to be written by my father — referring to her great-great-grandfather. She had known that his name was Anderson Ruffin Abbott. She had known that he had been a physician. But she had not heard, until the appearance of the article, that Abbott was black. His descendants had passed so thoroughly for white that it came as a shock to Slaney to learn about a branch of the family that had been kept from her. She embarked on a mid-life quest to identify and meet her black relatives, which formed the basis of her book Family Secrets: Crossing the Colour Line.
Slaney’s adulthood discovery of her own complex family history hints at the ways that we have come to imagine the very concept of family, and at our eagerness to define it along lines of blood. Much remains to be said about “passing,” or slipping imperceptibly from one race into another, and I will return to this issue in chapter five, but it is worth noting that the ways we speak about race and family are unreasonably narrow. For the first many years of her life, Slaney believed that her ancestors were white. And then she learned a fact to the contrary. So how did that discovery change her? What was she, truly? She must have felt that she could walk through a brand new door. Wanting to recognize her family history, but not wanting to be too bold about assuming a brand new identity, she began to refer to herself as a white person with black ancestry.
Step-relationships and adoption also force us to rethink traditional, comfortable notions of blood and belonging in the family. Beatrice and Eve came into my life as “stepdaughters” about eleven years ago, when they were three and six years old. Many parts of their personalities were formed long before they came to know me. As we came to live together, I had to learn to build loving relationships on the fly. We had to cultivate our own connections, even though we had no shared biology. Because their biological parents divorced, and because I’m their stepfather and have a different last name, I had to obtain notarized permissions to take Eve on a trip to Germany, and Beatrice on a trip to Norway. These days, to prevent abductions, when one parent travels alone with a child across a border, he or she generally requires signed permission from the other parent. So I, like others, needed formal paperwork to establish my relationship to my stepdaughters, and my right to travel internationally with them. Obtaining the paperwork, and undertaking the trips helped to cement our very real family connections.
When you declare that you are a child’s mother or father, it is assumed that you are saying you share blood. You are thought to share a biology. You helped create the child. And when you announce to the world that you are a child’s stepmother or stepfather, some people will assume that you do not count, and that your relationship is not fully authentic. You may have to formally establish your relationship, if you are travelling with a stepchild across an international border. And you may encounter subtle but pernicious rejection when you are picking up a stepchild at a daycare or cheering him or her on in a hockey arena or on a soccer pitch. It may hurt, and it may be annoying or insulting, precisely because you resent another person’s value judgement on the quality of your family relationships.
One hardly needs a university degree to observe that whether a relationship is terrific or toxic depends not on biology but on the type of family that you have created. A year or so after my wife, Miranda, and I blended families, I remember being struck to hear Eve stating publicly and proudly that my (biological) son, Andrew, was her brother. She did not call him a stepbrother, because she believed that they were no less siblings than if they had the same biological parents.
I have been much more cautious about dropping the use of the term stepdaughter. Beatrice and Eve love and are loved by their father, and when the girls were young I never wanted to give the impression that I was trying to supplant him. They always called me “Larry,” instead of “Dad.” Over time, however, I have resorted less and less to calling them my stepdaughters, and more and more to just introducing or describing them as my daughters. The precise nature of our relationship, and whether we are “blood relatives,” is nobody’s business. All people need to know is that we are family.
WHETHER YOU ADOPT A CHILD, blend families with a new partner, or develop any other alternative family structure, you have the ability to say to the world that you believe in the beauty and power of relationships that exist beyond the ties of blood. Blood isn’t everything. It doesn’t have to be anything. Some people related by blood have such toxic and negative relationships that they would be far better off apart. Most of us can think of a child whom we hope will never have to see a certain parent again. Other people forge deep and enduring relationships with friends they have chosen to declare as family. They know, all too well, that family need have nothing to do with blood, and can have everything to do with choice.
Transracial adoption — domestic or international — complicates this conversation. Many have decried the adoption of Aboriginal or black children by white families in North America, for example, and even likened it to forms of cultural genocide. In Canada, the adoption of thousands of First Nations children into white families has been compared to the impact of residential schools, in terms of the destruction of First Nations culture and identity. In Manitoba, for example, thousands of Aboriginal children were removed from their families and placed in foster care or adopted homes — often in the United States or in eastern Canada — from the 1960s to the 1980s. The problem — dubbed the “Sixties Scoop” — became so severe that in the 1980s, the Manitoba government appointed Justice Edwin Kimelman to oversee a review of Indian and Métis adoptions and placements. Kimelman, a family court judge, declared that people approaching child welfare agencies for help found “their families torn asunder and siblings separated.” Child welfare authorities had not intended to perpetuate an injustice, he said, but the forcible removal of thousands of children from their families diminished the lives of individuals and dealt a serious blow to First Nations culture. Kimelman described the placement of thousands of Aboriginal children in white homes outside Manitoba as systemic, routine cultural genocide, and his report in 1985 attempted to stop the trend.
In the United States, the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) has openly favoured in-race adoptio
n and opposed the adoption of black children by white families. In 1972, for example, the NABSW issued a position paper saying: “Black children belong physically and psychologically and culturally in black families where they receive the total sense of themselves and develop a sound projection of their future. Only a black family can transmit the emotional and sensitive subtleties of perceptions and reactions essential for a black child’s survival in a racist society.” More recently, a public report in 2008 by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in the United States echoed some of the same concerns but took a more cautious position, arguing that race should be “one factor, but not the sole factor” in selecting a foster or adoptive parent for a child. “In order for children of color to be placed with families who can meet their long-term needs, consideration must be given to needs arising from racial/ethnic differences,” the institute’s report said. “Consequently, when workers choose permanent families for children, and when they seek to prepare and support them in addressing the children’s needs, race must be one consideration — such as promoting the connection of the child to adults and children from their own racial/ethnic group, developing a positive racial/ethnic identity, and learning to deal with discrimination they may experience.”
Clearly, what Edwin Kimelman and the NABSW have in common is a concern that the systematic removal of large numbers of children from a group that is already marginalized is damaging to individual children and destructive to their culture. Even the Donaldson report argued that adoption agencies should recruit families who represent the racial and ethnic identities of children in foster care.
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