Surviving the White Gaze

Rebecca Carroll, author, cultural critic, and podcast host, was adopted at birth by a white couple and raised in a predominantly white community in rural New Hampshire, where, as the only black resident, she’d see no one who looked like her until she was six years old. Growing up among her white relatives and white townspeople, she had no touchstone for what it meant to be black, no mirror of her own blackness to reflect and illuminate who she really was. And worse, no one cared. Her only point of reference as a child was the character Easy Reader from The Electric Company, whom she fantasized was her father. When she first encountered a black person in real life—her ballet teacher, Mrs. Rowland—she wondered, “Did she know Easy Reader from The Electric Company? Did she go home at night to live inside the TV with him and the words and letters he carried around with him in the pockets of his jacket?” As she grew older, Carroll was aware of being seen by this teacher in a way her parents did not, yet she was also aware of the differences. “I felt small pangs of fragile awareness regarding who I might be, what my skin color might mean. There were days when I wanted to be, or believed I was, black just like Mrs. Rowland, but it also seemed as though I would have to give something up in order for that to remain true.” She was increasingly aware that unlike her teacher, she moved through the world with the “benefits afforded by white stewardship.”

As a transracial adoptee, Carroll had to hurdle barrier after barrier merely to become who she was always meant to be. And considering that the most formidable obstacle to her ability to truly recognize and finally claim her authentic identity as a black woman was her family—both her adoptive parents and her white birthmother—it was an extraordinarily lonely struggle carried out by a force of one. How, isolated in an overwhelmingly white world, could she know what it meant to be black?

While Carroll’s adoptive parents were largely oblivious to her need to understand, absorb, and assert her racial identity, her birthmother aggressively denied her daughter’s racial and cultural heritage. When they began a relationship, 11-year-old Carroll was curious about and soon enamored of her mother, but learned there was a cost to the relationship. She carried that burden for a long time, making excuses and ignoring her intuition as her birthmother did everything possible to torpedo her growing attempt to construct an understanding of herself as a black woman—gaslighting her, subjecting her to blatantly racist comments, and effectively dispossessing her of the right to her own blackness. She straddled two worlds, ill-fitting in one and made to feel like an imposter in the other.

All adoptees are stripped of their histories and their genetic information, but in her powerful memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, Carroll shines a light on this additional theft of something equally fundamental—racial identity—and details the painful journey to take back what should always have been hers.

When she was writing the memoir, one the few black students she taught at an all-girls private school wrote to tell her what she meant to her. “This,” Carroll writes, “is what black folks are to one another—we are the light that affirms and illuminates ourselves to ourselves. A light that shines in its reflection of unbound blackness, brighter and beyond the white gaze. The path to fully understanding this, and my ultimate arrival at the complicated depths of my own blackness, was a decades-long, self-initiated rite of passage, wherein I both sought out and pushed away my reflection, listened to the wrong people, and harbored an overwhelming sense of convoluted grief—a grief that guided me here, to myself.”

In this moving coming of age story, Carroll illustrates the cost of feeling unseen, of being disregarded, not only by the community but by those closest to her who thwarted her at every turn. She pulls no punches, squarely placing the blame where it belongs, on everyone who failed her again and again. It’s the story of pride and persistence, of hard-won healing and redemption.

—BKJ