‘‘They don’t know what it’s like to be in my shoes’’: Topic avoidance about race in transracially adoptive families

Abstract

Families formed through transracial adoption face communicative challenges not faced by single-race families. Drawing upon communication privacy management theory and research on topic avoidance, this paper explores Korean adult adoptees’ reports of racial derogation in their youth and the extent to which they avoided discussing these interactions with their White adoptive parents. Results from qualitative interviews and surveys suggest that adoptee participants reported having received a range of racially derogatory messages, including appearance attacks, ethnicity attacks, and physical attacks. Most participants reported avoiding discussing these occurrences with their adoptive parents due to parent unresponsiveness and/or self-protection. This study extends the work on topic avoidance by offering sub-themes for parent unresponsiveness and sheds light on privacy management in transracially adoptive families.