< Growing Up Black in a White Family

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Heard on News & Notes

June 3, 2008 - FARAI CHIDEYA, host:

Aaron Stigger personifies colorblind adoption. He is African-American, and as a young child, he was adopted into a white family, in the Chicago area. Now, as a young man, he reflects on what it has meant to be part of a transracial family. To tell us more about his experience, Aaron joins us now. Hey, Aaron.

Mr. AARON STIGGER (Actor): How are you doing?

CHIDEYA: I'm doing great. I'm glad to have you here in our studios. So, you are an actor now and clearly grown. You have been through the walk of childhood. Tell us a little bit about that walk.

Mr. STIGGER: The walk was cool. I think my sister and I, who are both biracial, made a little bit of a hipper walk for my Caucasian parents, but it wasn't that difficult. I think the biggest thing growing up as a kid was explaining that, OK, my mom's white and my dad's white.

You know, you come home from class, and your mom's there, and she makes you a sandwich, and she is white, so your friends are like, so your dad must be black, and I'm like, kind of. Which is kind of truth, because my birth father is black, so it is not a full lie.

Then dad comes home, at like six o'clock, then he is going to have to explain it, and then it's all good, and then, you know, for the rest of the play time, you know, you don't have to worry about it. And that was only an issue that I had to confront with new friends.

Another issue was walking in the mall with your mom. You know, it is already kind of weird being in the mall with your mom, anyway, as kid, but you just feel like a sore thumb, you know, you are not very incognito at the mall. But those two instances are really the only race related things that I ever had to run across.

My mom is my mom, and my dad is my dad, and there is nobody else that could take that part, and even though I don't look anything like my parents, I'm more athletic than my parents, it just, it never comes across my mind unless I'm talking about the issue of adoption, that these are my adoptive parents.

CHIDEYA: What did your parents teach you about race? And I mean everything from black history to attitudes about race, and then, what do you think you taught them?

Mr. STIGGER: Well, one thing they didn't teach me was how to pick my hair. Dad used a comb and that's pretty fun, because you know when white people get their hair wet and you put the comb through it, you get the nice little streaks. When black people get their hair wet, you know, you might get a little bead of water at the top of the fro, but that's about it, so that was a fun learning experience of them, because I always wanted the white people's hair. My sister and I tired to mousse our hair back like the people on MTV and my mom always wanted our hair so that she could pick it and it would stay like in one shape and what not.

So, there was a lot of things like that. You know, we celebrated Kwanzaa a few years. My mom started to integrate our Christmas tree with black Santas and black angels to the point where there's no white angels anymore so, you know, I started to incorporate some Native American angels and bring back some of the white angels to the neighborhood, so that we could have a nice...

CHIDEYA: Christmas integration.

Mr. STIGGER: Multi-ethnic Christmas celebration. You know, the biggest thing that my parents did was to raise my sister and I in a very diverse neighborhood. It's really, really important, if you're going to adopt a kid that's a different race, to have neighbors that look like that kid.

You know, the study that came out I think is scaring people in thinking that you're going to have to through like a two year master program to learn how to have black kids, if you're white parents. And it's honestly, you could probably knock it out in two hours. It's really not that difficult, there's a few things that you should know. And bringing your kids up in a diverse neighborhood is the most important of that.

And then, you know, if you have friends that are the same race of your kids, you just, you ask them for questions, and it's helpful to have them as a resource, it's something you definitely want to keep next to you when you're raising your kids.

My sister and I made my parents cooler by bringing in some color to the Stigger family. And that's the benefit of it. It is a little more work as parent, but you get so much more out of it. And it definitely helped me and my sister to have the viewpoints of two white people and still have the viewpoints of us as biracial kids.

CHIDEYA: If you were talking to someone who was, you know, say 10-years-old, what kind of advice would you give that age a person for dealing with an experience like yours?

Mr. STIGGER: The most important thing is just to tell them that you have someone to talk to. It's always, even if I don't know the person, I'm always down to let them know, here's my email, if you ever need to talk about racial questions or whatnot, you know, I'll type you back.

It wasn't a big issue that I had, it's just always helpful to know that there was someone else there that was sharing my story. I never needed to talk to anybody about it, but it was just really comforting in knowing that I wasn't the only one.

And one of the things that my neighborhood Oak Park did, which is a suburb of Chicago, is to create a group called Project Unity, and it was just a whole bunch of trans-racial families that got together every once in awhile and had picnics and just talked and it was just nice to see that there are other biracial kids out there, other kids that had white parents or parents that were different colors than them. And that was really it. There wasn't any lesson that I needed or advice that I needed. It was just to know that I wasn't the only one out there.

CHIDEYA: Aaron, thanks so much.

Mr. STIGGER: Thank you.

CHIDEYA: Aaron Stigger is an L.A. based actor, and he spoke with us today from the studios of NPR West.

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