I grew up in a very close blue-collar Italian, Democratic and Catholic family.  Pasta on Sundays was our God-given right, and we wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Along with this package came the Yankees.  As far as we were concerned they were America’s team. With Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra and a number of other Italians playing for them, how could you go wrong?

My grandfather emigrated from Italy in the early 1920s and he loved America.  It was the land of opportunity and he made sure we never forgot that.  One of the few times anyone ever saw him cry was when the twin towers came down on 9/11.  “Can you believe what they’ve done to this country?” was all he could say.

That upbringing had a tremendous amount to do with the entire family’s worldview of the country.  We could do whatever we wanted on this land and my grandfather was our constant inspiration as the backbone of our family.

I was adopted.  I cannot remember a time when I did not know that.  It was never a big deal.  It didn’t matter.  I never had any OUTWARD interest in finding my birth family because, well…everything was so wonderful, why would I?  Life was great.

During my wife’s first pregnancy and with her encouragement, I put out a search for my birth mother.  My wife brought me the paperwork already filled out; I signed it and totally forgot about it.  Three years passed and my daughter was 2 when I got the call.  “We found your birth mother,” the voice on the telephone informed me.

I don’t know how I was expecting that moment to go but the most surprising thing about it was that it all seemed so normal.  I expected it to be magical with tear jerking music in the background.  The camera was supposed to zoom in on a deep close up of my eyes as the reality of it all set in.  

There was none of that.  This wasn’t the child’s fantasy moment I had imagined innumerable times growing up.  This was a simple phone call in my car while I was driving home.  

The normalness of it was probably the thing that made it all the stranger.  “OK, we found your mother, here’s her name, number and e-mail.”  That’s it??  Don’t I need a counselor here with me or something? 

Adoptees daydream all the time about their lost past and imaginary “real” family.  This moment was so normal it had to be real, really real, which is probably what made it so strange.  Adoptees aren’t used to normal. 

I took all the usual steps.  Googled her, called her and started an e-mail chain discussing everything we could think to discuss.

We talked about my father.  She wasn’t exactly sure of his ethnicity or race.  She knew him from her college classes but the relationship was not long term.  She mentioned that some of her friends thought he might have been a little Black but really didn’t know.  He was fairly light skinned and she told me he could have easily been Middle Eastern or Italian. 

She sent me a black and white college photo of him.  I agreed.  He didn’t “look black”, maybe an eighth or a sixteenth. 

Meanwhile, within the package I received from the state with my identifying information was a transcript of the court hearing where my birth mother relinquished her rights to me.

Suddenly I was transported back to reality from 40+ years ago.

I slowly read the transcript envisioning a courtroom with my birth mother standing before the judge and him looking down at her from his position of honor.  He confirmed her name and basic information and then asked, “Are you are the mother of this Negro child?”  “Yes.” was her response. 

“Negro child?  Who was he talking about?  Me?  I’m not Black, I’m Italian.” I thought.  It took me several seconds to realize it was me he was talking about.  I was knocked further into the surrealistic realm of Alice’s rabbit hole.

If my birth mother wasn’t sure, and I wasn’t sure from his photo, how did the judge seem to know to call me “this Negro Child”?  This was my first ever mention in the United States courts system.  (Fortunately there weren’t any more other than a few speeding tickets.)  I was really shocked that even without knowing for sure, he was able to so boldly make that statement.  Clearly, the judge was just trying to further embarrass her.  This was 1966 and in Pennsylvania.  I really had no idea racism was that overt at that point and place in time.  I was lucky I didn’t know.

We eventually met and established a slow but steady covert relationship away from the knowledge of my adoptive family.  Life went on. 

Twelve years later, at 51, only 6 months after moving to North Carolina and despite knowing my father had passed, I initiated a search for his side of the family.  Within a month, I found a cousin living just over an hour from my new home.  He wouldn’t answer my calls initially so instead of leaving a message, I found his address and decided to take a drive. (You gotta love the internet.)  I dropped a note in his door and finally left a message on his phone stating who I was.  He quickly returned my call.  

We met in a parking lot outside of a Men’s Warehouse and there was no doubt about it, he was Black and very suspicious of me showing up on such short notice.  He slowly softened up and shared some information.  Turns out my father was approximately 75% Black.  He had 7 biological brothers who ran the range of lighter than him to darker.  One was even a Black Panther, back in the day.  

I had no apparently Italian genes in my mix at all.  He gave me some photos and said he would call around to the family to see if anyone knew anything else about my father.   

On my drive home he called again suddenly very excited to share.  “Hey man, call me back!  I got some info.  Call me back man, this is important.”  He spoke to an aunt and notified me that I had four half siblings all living within 3 hours.  My mind was blown.

During the process of digesting all this new information I thought deeply about what “being Black” meant.  I grew up like most middle class white or ethnic people of my generation.  I was aware of race and the social differences but oblivious to the deeper generational understanding of it. 

 Given that it all seemed much more relevant to me personally I began reading Black history.  I read, not as a student trying to pass a test, but as a newly anointed partially Black man, if I can even say that, trying to figure out what it meant.   

I educated myself on the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.  I learned about Emmett Till and Harriet Tubman.  I read James Baldwin and W.E. Dubois and tried to put myself into the shoes of my birth father and his father during those periods of their lives. 

I learned how the Jim Crow laws quickly erased any progress of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution.   I learned how the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned these laws as being legal under the “separate but equal” doctrine.  It was never equal; even I knew that much but the Supreme Court deemed it so and there for legally, it was.

I’ve heard the argument that slavery ended 150 years ago so, “Why do we have to keep bringing it up?”  This may be true but the Jim Crow laws were fully in place until 1965 and many American’s still remember and bear the scars of those days. 

I thought about my “other grandfather”.  What would he have taught me about America?  How would that have changed my view of this land of opportunity?  How would that have changed the view of myself and MY opportunities?  Would I have felt so strongly that I could do “whatever I wanted.”  How would that have changed the person I later became?  I had a sense of the answers but they were truly unanswerable yet profound and not nearly as optimistic as I had been raised.

It wasn’t until that education and awareness when I more completely understood and recognized the concept of the two Americas.  At birth, I was right on the fence and could have easily fallen to either side based on so many uncontrollable circumstances.

As an adoptee we are all aware of the duality of our lives, always wondering about the you that never was.  The “vanishing twin” that was lost at birth before you went on to become the chosen one, the special child.  That twin of mine would have certainly been “special” in 1966 being born out of wedlock to a single mother.  Despite that twin’s identical skin tone to mine, it probably wouldn’t have been to his advantage to be known as a Negro child of the 1970s.

Adoption is certainly a blessing but it is also a curse.  What did I do to deserve this special privilege of not knowing my genetic race?  NOTHING.  George Floyd’s murder recently made me feel horrible for my successes and naiveté.  What did any of us do to deserve this special privilege granted by a lighter skin tone?  NOTHING.  

How did finding out I was 37.5% black (or whatever it is) change my Italian-ness?  Not one bit.  I still love the Yankees and America but have to admit they each need more than a little work.   Pasta on Sundays is still fine just the way it is.  

I don’t have the answers, but in moving forward during these times of change and struggle let us think about what any of us have done to deserve this special privilege based on skin color.  Black Lives do matter and it’s a shame we even have to say it.  The shade may be subtle and even indistinguishable from other more privileged classes but that should never be the ultimate measure of a man.

(Note from Anne: As a Red Sox fan, I can not believe I posted something written by someone who uses the word Yankee without swearing beforehand. The world really is shifting.)