I send my youngest adopted daughter Instagram memes and Tik Toks: If you know these eight songs, you’re Blackity Black. Three ways to lose your Black card. What Black parents do when you’re sick… when you’re in trouble… when you bring a white friend to your house… when you’re going to a party.
Sometimes, she replies with a thumbs up or a cry-laugh emoji, and sometimes just an eye roll. When she does, I feel content for a moment. I want us to bond over our love of Black humor and culture, especially knowing she might not consider me Black.
To some, our racial status is as ambiguous as our skin color. We are both mixed-race, but out in the world, I pass for white while she, just a shade darker, sometimes faces questions of whether she’s Latina or Asian. I think it has been far easier for me to stake my racial identity, having grown up in an all-Black family while she has had to find her position in a rainbow family that’s white, Black, gay, and Jewish.
For years, she is content to live in the in-between. Until one day, I spot her leaving for middle school with her hair, normally gelled and pulled back in a bun, now sprung free in an Afro. Large gold hoop earrings hug the sides of her copper-colored face above her camo-patterned crop top.
An image of the 1970s activist Angela Davis clicks into my head, and I show it to her on my phone. I laugh and ask her if she’s trying to show off her Black power.
“I am Black, Poppy,” she says seriously. “Aren’t you?”
It’s a question I have long thought about and resolved. Of course, I’m Black, I think. It’s who my family is and how I was raised. It’s what I’ve told the world on standardized tests, job applications, medical documents, and census forms.
But her question lingers. Is she really asking me, ”Are you Black enough?”
My self-doubt grows as she grows more confident in expressing her identity. I listen as her taste in music slowly progresses, like movement along a color spectrum, from Taylor Swift to Drake to Da Baby. Suddenly, we can no longer sing together to the radio because I don’t know the lyrics. She stops asking me to help pull her puff balls back with hair ties now that her hair is styled with intricate braids and slick edges. Her consuming passion for basketball replaces our shared love of watching soccer.
But it is her sense of ease in the Black community and level of comfort with Black culture that leaves me feeling left out. Though I have a Black family, I grew up in a rural, predominantly white community. My husband and I have raised her and her sister in diverse communities where they’ve had Black neighbors, friends, and teachers their entire lives. But I have few friends, and those that I have are white.
It’s no wonder that she grimaces at me when I fumble a dap with her favorite Black male teacher or asks me to stay in the car when I drop her at the beauty salon.
Her older sister, who is darker than us both, openly questions my identity.
“Poppy, are you sure you’re Black?” she asks with a giggle. She invites her younger sister to critique my cooking skills, wardrobe, and lack of rhythm. Although they both tell me it’s good-natured, it feels as if I’m compared to the Black dad they would have had, should have had, if they’d not been adopted. As a result, I look at Black men of all shades and worry that I don’t measure up to my kids’ expectations.
Yet, they take pains to tell friends and even strangers that one of their dads — me — is Black: “He doesn’t look it, but he is. His mom was Black, really.” “My one dad would know that song; he’s mixed, so he knows old Black music.” “When he talks to his family, his voice sounds Black.”
I’ve become their favorite living meme — When your parent is Black but looks and acts white.
With time, I see the only doubts about my Blackness lie within me, not my kids. To my Black daughters, I am no different than other fathers. As dads, all of us are invariably set side by side against some ideal in our children’s eyes and found wanting. Sometimes, we are perceived to be missing something on the outside: not cool enough, not tall enough, not skinny enough, or not handsome enough. Other times, it’s on the inside, and we’re just not self-aware enough.
Whatever we lack, we cannot convince our kids that we can be anything but who we are. We just have to convince them that we’re just like them — still learning, growing, sometimes failing, and ultimately still trying to find our own identities in this world.
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From the forthcoming book Man Made: Searching for Dads, Daddies, Father Figures, and Fatherhood by Steve Majors. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2025 by Steve Majors. All rights reserved.
