A two-year search prompted Seattle’s Angela Tucker to start a national dialogue lifting up the voices of transracial adoptees, or adoptees of a different race than their adoptive parents.
The blogger, speaker and educator created “The Adopted Life,” a multimedia platform and transracial adoption consulting business that started out as a blog of the same name in 2009. After appearing in the 2013 documentary film, “CLOSURE,” which follows Tucker in her search for her birth parents, hundreds of adoptive parents were clamoring for her insight — particularly white parents of black children worried about police brutality against their kids. “The Adopted Life” blog soon grew into consulting with parents across the nation and, last month, a video series of one-on-one conversations with transracial adoptees.
To learn more about her advocacy, I met her one recent Friday afternoon at Seattle Pacific University (SPU), where she works as a program coordinator for Disability Support Services. July 7 update: Angela Tucker left her position at SPU a few weeks ago and is now working full-time as the Post-Adoption Support Manager at Amara, a nonprofit agency providing children in Washington state a path out of foster care.
Trekking home with her on her 20-minute daily walk home from SPU’s campus, we race across a crosswalk just seconds before the pulsing red hand disappears and the green walking man takes its place. Together, we chatted and sweated in 82-degree Fahrenheit weather near the Fremont Bridge, where the wind cooled us down.
How do you identify yourself and how has that changed overtime?
How do you educate prospective parents wanting to adopt kids of color? How do you encourage current transracial adoptive parents?
Where do want to take this? What comes next?
After crowdfunding $31,801 and debuting her first “Adopted Life” episode on May 16, “my goal is to do [an “Adopted Life” episode] in every major city in the United States,” says Tucker, who has already made plans to film two more episodes in New York and Los Angeles this summer.
This post was produced as part of the Globalist Youth Apprenticeship Program. The program is funded in part by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and the Community Technology Fund.
Tags: #FlipTheNarrative, Angela Tucker, Closure, Damme Getachew, Seattle's Smartest Global Women, The Adopted Life, transracial adoptees.
Damme Getachew is a writer, community organizer, educator, and independent creator. She likes to describe herself as a global storyteller, is a regular contributor at The Seattle Globalist, and freelances with a few local publications. After graduating from SPU in 2016, where she studied Global Development and Communication, she became a Youth Apprentice and won ‘Youth Journalist of the Year’ at the 2016 Globie Awards. As the Program Coordinator, she now consults on the Youth Apprenticeship Program and supports the Globalist’s community media workshops.
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