On Sunday, Will, 36, posted what he thought was a harmless TikTok video of him brushing his infant daughter’s hair. In it, he calls on “Black TikTok” for advice about caring for the little girl.
“We have adopted a Black baby, her name is Zoë, and I don’t know what to do for her hair,” he said in the since-deleted video. “Please, any Black parents or anyone who knows what to do with Black children’s hair, please help me in the comments.”
Along with sprinklings of advice about caring for Zoë’s hair, most of the social media users who responded accused him and his husband of adopting a Black child solely for social media content and asked pointed questions in videos of their own: Did they not have Black friends they could talk to? Is Zoë just for show? Why didn’t they prepare to raise a Black child?
“I could have the best intentions and still mess up,” Will said on the condition that his last name not be used to protect his family’s privacy amid the backlash. He added that he regrets sending the wrong message through his video and exposing his daughter “to the world in that way.”
“I’ve learned that I need to be very intentional about the community that surrounds us and her on a consistent basis and have people who look like her talk to her,” he said. “I want Zoë to grow up to love herself. That includes her personality, her skin color, her hair, everything.”
White people adopting Black children, a form of transracial adoption, has been a topic of debate for decades, and fears of adoptive children’s being exploited on social media have only added fuel to the fire. Most adoptive parents in the U.S. are white, and about 30% of adoptions are transracial, with white parents of nonwhite children accounting for a majority of them, according to the University of Nevada, Reno, and the Institute for Family Studies. Research has shown that Black adopted children with strong senses of ethnic and racial identity experience positive…
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