Joy Katz

Feb 10, 2024 | aprweb.org | Joy Katz

Twelve years ago, I adopted a young baby in Vietnam and made myself a firm but vague promise not to “raise him white.” But what did that mean? To figure it out, I started to educate myself about race, trying to see how I, a white mother, might not mess up raising a brown boy. I assumed he would face racism (I didn’t yet grasp that he would also face my own racism1). Then, when he was around 3, I started trying to write poems about whiteness.