by April Dinwoodie
TRJ Executive Director
February holds Valentine’s Day and Black History Month, making it both tender and complex. It carries messages of romance and belonging alongside reminders of racial harm, resistance, and resilience. It holds celebration and grief, connection and questions—often all at the same time.
This year, February arrives in a moment when life in the United States feels especially unsteady. We are witnessing more public harm to Black and Brown communities, more overt racism in leadership, more family separation, and more fear layered into daily life. Children are not shielded from this. They are seeing it. They are absorbing it. They are asking questions—out loud and silently, through their behavior, their bodies, and their relationships.
For parents who deeply love the children entrusted to them through adoption, this is not the moment for silence.
Growing up, my parents loved me deeply. They did not realize that as a Black child raised in a white family, I needed a different kind of protection than my siblings who were white and born to them. That gap between love and protection is not about blame—it is about awareness, history, and responsibility. And it is one that many transracially adopted people carry quietly into adulthood.
Many adopted people grow up hearing, “You were so loved.” Love is often named as the motivation for adoption—by parents of origin and by adoptive parents. That can be true and still deeply incomplete. As an adopted person, I wanted proof. I was told my mother of origin loved me, but my adoptive parents had never met her. How could anyone know something so important about someone they had never known? And what about children separated from family because of abuse, neglect, poverty, or systemic failure—can love exist alongside fear, shame, or harm? How does a child build a grounded understanding of love when so much of their beginning is unknown, simplified, or withheld?
This is why love must now be practiced as protection.
Many transracially adopted people grew up in majority-white environments where they were included but not truly protected. Racism showed up in daily life—sometimes loud, often subtle, always cumulative—and adults missed it, minimized it, or explained it away. Protection was not just about slurs. It was about the accumulation of moments: being stared at or singled out, comments brushed off as “no big deal,” teachers misreading tone or intent, friends’ parents treating you differently, being the only one who looks like you again and again.
There is another layer families don’t always name—sexualization and exposure. Black and Brown children, especially Black girls and mixed-race girls, are often treated as older than they are, watched differently, commented on differently, and perceived through stereotypes they did not create. In white spaces, they can be invisible and hyper-visible at the same time. This is not oversensitivity. It is a lived reality.
So love must ask a harder question: Is my child protected—not just inside our home, but in the spaces our home sends them into, and in the world they are watching unfold?
There is another truth transracially adopted people often carry quietly: Black children raised in white households need to see their parents loving Black people—not just loving them. Because loving your child is not the same as loving Blackness. It is not the same as loving Black community. It is not the same as being safe or trusted in Black spaces. Children can feel the difference.
So I want to ask a question that may land hard, especially at this moment: White adoptive parents—have you ever loved a Black person? Not admired from afar. Not worked alongside. Not supported in theory. Have you loved a Black person in a way that required something of you—accountability, consistency, humility, change? Have you stayed in spaces where you were not centered? Have you loved in a way that cost you comfort or approval?
If the answer is no, this is not a shameful question. It is a protection question. Because if your child is the first Black person you have ever deeply loved, your child may also become your first teacher, your first mirror, your first real proximity to Blackness. That is too much for a child to carry—especially in a world that is already asking too much of them.
This moment calls for activist love. For white adoptive parents raising Black and Brown children, being “not racist” is not enough. Being nice is not enough. Private love is not enough. Racism is not private, and children cannot love their way out of systems that were never built to protect them.
Activist love is not performative. It is daily and practiced. It shows up in believing your child the first time. In interrupting racism even when it is uncomfortable. In advocating in schools, faith spaces, teams, neighborhoods, and extended family. In choosing your child over other people’s comfort. In building real, mutual relationships with Black adults. In repairing harm without asking children to carry it.
February reminds us that love is something we feel and it’s something we must practice. And in transracial adoption, love must be practiced as protection. Let this month be both an invitation and challenge. Choose love that tells the truth. Choose love that stretches beyond your child. Choose love that becomes action.
Because your child deserves more than celebration. They deserve a family willing to stand between them and harm—with courage, consistency, and a love big enough to act.
This post is from our January 2026 newsletter. If you would like to get our newsletter in your inbox each month, as well as information about our annual TRJ Family Camp and our monthly Zoom call providing support for our transracial adoption parents, please subscribe.