Huffington Post: 'Is There Temptation for Fathers of Interracial Daughters?'
To discuss "the plain and often uneasy facts of adoption," Huffington Post Black Voices editor Rebecca Carroll wrote an opinion column called "The Adoption Taboo." Subtitle: "Is There Temptation For Fathers of Interracial Daughters?" Uh oh. I'm not sure I like where this is going.
Carroll begins with a personal story. At the age of 19, as the adopted black daughter of a white man, she heard Woody Allen left wife Mia Farrow for her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn:
I didn't think too much of it, except "eeewwwww," like everyone else. My birth mother had a sharply different take. "Sound familiar?" she said with a sort of casual cruelty to me one afternoon. "Like how?" I asked. "You and (your father) are not all that different in your dynamic."
The shock of her insinuation, the shame I felt in the complicity she implied, the heinously unfair assessment of my father—I was devastated.
A despicable accusation and a heartbreaking episode. But you can't let the spiteful words of a lady who abandoned you destroy a lifelong, loving relationship with your own father, right?
In one moment, the safety and ease I felt as my father's daughter changed forever.
Ouch. Now, it's one thing to have a complicated relationship with your parents. But it's quite another to extrapolate, from a single childhood anecdote, a broad campaign of race-based fearmongering about how men of a certain race (in this case, white) cannot control their lust when left alone with young girls from another race (in this case, black or Asian):
Will people question Brad Pitt's relationship with Zahara when she gets older and turns into the gorgeous, statuesque young black woman she is sure to become? Is Woody Allen alone in his lust for a girl-child whom he didn't biologically father? Did he feel less like Previn's father because she is Korean?
Oh, I get it, because if your race does not match your child's, you are "less" of a parent. And because sexual abuse never occurs within families that share DNA. And because any man, if left alone for a long enough time with a young female, will eventually end up raping her. Why bother with verifiable data, when you could use grossly salacious hypothetical questions about celebrities instead?
Think about it.
And, as the Asian daughter of a white father, I was going to say "No fucking way," but then Rebecca Carroll said "Think about it," so I gave it a little extra thought and— No, nope, still going with "No fucking way," plus "Fuck you" and "Fuck these unnamed 'people' who 'question' mixed-race families, if these 'people' even exist."
Besides, if the logic is that daughters who do not physically resemble their fathers are at risk of getting raped, then interracial adoption is not the only problem! Daughters of mixed-race couples might get raped! Daughters who suffer facially disfiguring accidents might get raped! Daughters who inherit recessive traits might get raped! We should really just force all daughters to wear Xerox copies of their fathers' faces on their own faces at all times, to reduce the chance of rape. [HuffPost, Image via Bauer-Griffin]