Book Review: Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir by Rebecca Carroll
We asked a transracial adoptee and a white adoptive parent to write reviews of Rebecca Carroll’s new memoir, “Surviving the White Gaze.” We think it’s important to always elevate the voice of adoptees and welcome their reviews, feedback and input. To read the review by adoptee Ari Schill, go HERE.
Review by Tanya E. Friedman
Tanya E. Friedman is a white adoptive mother, educator and writer who spends a lot of time thinking about the impact of white supremacy on our inner and outer worlds and what to do about it. Her memoir about becoming an anti-racist white teacher is almost done. Tanya lives in Brooklyn with her daughter and partner.
Rebecca Carroll’s timely memoir, “Surviving the White Gaze,” traces her complicated path toward wholeness as a Black child adopted by white parents. Through beautifully rendered scenes and incisive analysis, Carroll’s intimate, truth-seeking voice grants us a front row seat to her hard-won growth. The raw honesty of her memories combined with her astute reflection produce a gripping read which does what I most want in a memoir: It invites me deep into an individual experience that delivers broad insight into larger questions about the world and about myself. As a white adoptive mother of a Black daughter, I read “Surviving the White Gaze” as a gift for parents like me and for everyone who wants to better understand what it means to grow up Black in white America.
Although Carroll’s adoptive parents carefully curated her early childhood to inspire creativity and confidence, their lack of race consciousness and willful denial about racism left a gaping hole for the author, one that her narcissistic birth mother swept in to fill with her own misguided ideas. Without adults to help her navigate the racialized world, Carroll was abandoned to make sense on her own of the daily onslaught of overt and covert racism that were part of the landscape in her all-white (minus one) town, racism that remains part of the landscape everywhere in this country.
When Carroll wonders if the only Black people she knows (Easy Reader on TV and a Black ballet teacher) are related to her, when someone first calls her the N-word, when a teacher says she’s pretty for a Black girl, she doesn’t tell her adoptive parents or anyone else. When a group of breakdancing Black boys give a performance at her school and she turns away from them to preserve her status with the popular white girls, an invisible moment that seers her internally and highlights her isolation, she has no one to help her understand the conflict and confusion she feels. As Carroll struggles to mold herself into the person her birth mother wants her to be, her adoptive parents — preoccupied with their own lives and committed to giving Carroll more space than any adolescent could manage — fail to recognize how manipulative her birth mother is and offer no protection or support. Fortunately, the author’s powerful sense of self and formidable determination shine and carry her through even the darkest moments.
White adoptive parents of children of color could easily read Carroll’s sparkling writing and heartfelt story and check off the mistakes we haven’t made. But reading “Surviving the White Gaze” as an affirmation of my parenting choices would miss the incredible generosity of Carroll’s words and just how instructive a single examined life can be. While I am not raising my daughter in an all-white town and we regularly talk about race and racism, the window into Carroll’s inner world reminded me how fully entwined racial identity development is with every aspect of experience. When various people in Carroll’s life directly or indirectly accuse her of making everything about race, we can hear the insidiousness of asking anyone to separate themselves from parts of themselves. When none of the adults in her life step up as loving witnesses to the particular challenges she faces in developing a positive racial identity, I thought hard about the ways I can do this better for my child. I thought more deeply about conflicts my daughter might be experiencing related to race and identity, about messages she may be internalizing, especially the unconscious messages I’m giving, and how to build her critical consciousness to combat them. I considered how to give space for my daughter to forge her own identity and to develop her own independent relationship with her birth family without stepping too far back.
When Carroll’s son asks if the lack of evidence in her parents’ home that they raised a Black child hurts her feelings, she pauses before acknowledging that it does. This moment encapsulates much of the pain of Carroll’s childhood but also poignantly illustrates her triumph. Carroll’s parents didn’t understand what it would mean to their Black child to have the excellence, creativity and resilience of people who looked like her acknowledged, celebrated and valued in her home. But Carroll does. And she’s raised a son who does; a son who has the consciousness, language and pride to understand and name some of what’s missing in his grandparents’ home. This, ultimately, is the surest sign that Carroll overcame the color evasion of her beginning, and is what all of us raising children of color should aspire to.
