The Family Who Tried to End Racism Through Adoption

Growing up as the adopted Korean daughter of white parents in a predominantly white community, I discovered early on that my presence was often a surprise, a question to which others expected answers. I soon learned how to respond to the curiosity of teachers at school, strangers at Sears, friends who had finally worked up the nerve to ask Who are your real parents? Why did they give you up? Are you going to try to find them someday? I told them the same story my adoptive parents had told me: My birth parents were unable to take care of a fragile, premature baby. They believed that another family would provide me with a better life. And so I was adopted and became my parents’ beloved only child—a “miracle,” they called it, evidence of God’s goodness. When your family is formed by divine will, who are you to question it? To wonder about the family you never knew?

Like Matthew Pratt Guterl, I know what it is to be raised in the belief that your family represents something far greater than itself. Whereas my parents saw our adoptive family as proof of God’s handiwork, Bob and Sheryl Guterl saw theirs as a new kind of “ark for the age of the nuclear bomb, of race riots, of war,” one that could change the world by example: They would raise a family of white biological children and adopted children of color—“two of every race”—and all would live in, Guterl, a professor of Africana studies and American studies at Brown University, assigns himself the task of reckoning with the experiment his white parents confidently embarked on.