Growing Up Different in New Hampshire

BY NOUR HABIB

In 1969 Warner, little Rebecca Carroll was the only Black resident.

Adopted into a white family, living in a rural town of 1,400 people in the middle of a “lily-white” state, Carroll’s first encounter with another Black person was not until the age of 6, when her mother sent her to a ballet class, in part, because the teacher was Black.

“I studied ballet with Mrs. Rowland for five years, and often in her company, I felt small pangs of fragile awareness regarding who I might be, what my skin color might mean,” Carroll writes in her 2021 memoir, “Surviving the White Gaze.”

The book follows Carroll’s journey to form her racial identity, from those early years of wondering whether the few Black people she’d met or seen on TV possibly knew each other or were related, to her adolescent confusion at being attracted to a Black boy in a dance troupe but hiding it from her white friends and their “popular clique,” to a tumultuous relationship with her white birth mother who tried to dictate the terms of her Blackness and disparaged her Black birth father.

Carroll writes beautifully in a book that is hard to put down, as she shows us, incident by painful incident, the racist experiences that change her, that each make her “body shiver as a small cell of trauma began to metastasize.” The teacher who tells her, while she’s in fifth grade, that most Black girls are ugly. The white classmates and boyfriends and friends who do not confront their racist families, who want to know “why everything is about race” for Carroll. The loving parents who could not understand that there were repercussions to raising a Black girl in rural New Hampshire.

Carroll, who now lives in Brooklyn, New York, says she is grateful for the overwhelmingly positive critical response to her book. But it is people’s personal reactions that have really moved her, she said during an interview for 603 Diversity.

“It’s been pretty amazing, the response from the transracial adoption community,” she said. “I expected that I would hear from Black and brown and adoptees of color in white families, but I did not anticipate these breathtaking letters and emails from folks, who said ‘I feel seen’ and ‘You cracked me open’ and ‘I feel so much less alone.’”

Carroll has also heard from white adoptive parents.

“There is so much more consciousness around raising Black children now as white parents,” she said. “And so there is a real hunger and a real appetite for white parents to want to learn, and looking for tools and resources to be as culturally savvy and sophisticated as possible.”

Carroll is glad that white parents are taking time to do the research, but it frustrates her that many adoptive parents still do not consider these things before making the decision to adopt a child of a different race.

“I know that the heart is really in the right place, but I also know that the heart has to on some level defer to the brain, and it really does require a great deal of mindfulness when you’re raising a child of another race,” she said.

That mindfulness was virtually nonexistent in her adoptive family, according to her memoir.

“To be adopted into a white family that did not see or care or think about my Blackness or my experience navigating a racist country had always felt lonely and isolating,” she writes in the book.

Carroll said her book represents “the things we have done wrong, collectively as a country,” regarding race.

She hopes that during this time of racial reckoning, where there seems to be an openness to these conversations that was not there before, that her book can add to the discussion.

“I really do think that my story and the dynamic of Black children raised in white families presents a foundational relationship and example that can be used to speak more broadly about the ways Black folks and white folks coexist, or don’t.”