Released February 18, 2025
Adopting
Privilege
A Memoir of Reinventing My Adoptee Narrative
Released February 18, 2025
A Memoir of Reinventing My Adoptee Narrative
The adoption narrative is traditionally dominated by adoptive parent and agency voices. Left out are adoptees and birth parents. Dr. Hasberry happens to be both.
The premise of Adopting Privilege
About the Book
Privilege, in adoption as in life, refers to advantages granted not by merit but by belonging to a class, a race, a financial position. In adoption, those with privilege shape the narrative. Those without it live with the consequences.
Dr. Hasberry examines the haves and have-nots of the adoption system while turning the lens inward on the privileges she was afforded as a transracial adoptee raised adjacent to whiteness and affluence, and the profound costs those privileges extracted.
Order Now"I believed in nurture over nature. That's why I adopted you. But recently, your choice in music, the way you dress, the guys you're dating... I'm starting to believe I was wrong."
From Chapter One
At seventeen years old my white adoptive mother pretty much confessed that she thought she could nurture my black identity out of me. My challenge, beginning in early adolescence, was to figure out how to move from the eight-year-old who affixed a yellow towel to her head and danced around singing ABBA into her hairbrush to a fifty-something year old affirmed, self-assured woman who loves her black skin, is a member of the first and finest black sorority, and has immersed herself in Black culture.
My memoir details the struggle and the successes of being a transracial adoptee, a birth mother, and a black female professional. It is a story of the naivete of well-intended parents and the resilience and determination of my inner black child.
I wrote Adopting Privilege as a conversation starter for anyone out there who is part of the adoption constellation.
Inside the Memoir
Growing up as the only Black child in a white family and school, learning what it means to be Black from peers because her family had no connection to that culture.
Dr. Hasberry coins "birth mother grooming" to describe the coercive, identity-exploiting process she experienced as a teenage birth parent relinquishing her child.
The gaps in narrative and in self — the adoptee's particular experience of incompleteness — and the work of building wholeness without access to one's own origin story.
Reflect, Release, Reinvent. Each chapter ends with an affirmation designed to take the reader's trauma and rewrite it as agency.
The complexities of reunion with both biological families, the joys, the complications, and the ongoing work of a life that doesn't resolve when the book ends.
Not resilience as compliance. Resilience as refusal — the refusal to accept the adoption industry's narrative as the final word on her life.
Reader Response
There are many adoptee voices emerging through written narratives, which is wonderful. THIS ONE, however, pulled me in and I didn't just read it, I devoured it. Dr. Hasberry gives the reader an opportunity to pause at the end of each heart-wrenching, insightful chapter with an affirmation. Not a corny affirmation, but one that takes the trauma that she experienced and rewrites the narrative in a way I have not seen before. She is a voice for adoptees who may not have the ability to articulate the experience, the bewilderment, the injustice that is baked into adoption. While Dr. Hasberry speaks boldly about being isolated as the only Black child in a white family and the only Black student in a white school, she takes steps to remedy that isolation by learning and embracing things that are quintessentially Black. Music, clothing, and hair care were teenage basics she had to learn from peers, as her family had no connection to Black culture. Those of us from the Baby Scoop Era are coming out of the fog in droves, and those with the chops to write it all down and share this realization are rare. Many thanks to Dr. Hasberry for such a well written, articulate, beautiful, heart wrenching, soul crushing, exhilarating tale of resilience, reclamation of identity and purpose, and AFFIRMATIONS that are necessary and nurturing.
Diane S.
Adoptee
"I am convinced that this book is a tremendous gift for every Transracial Adoptee out there who feels that they are alone in their journey. It is equally a gift to child welfare professionals, therapists, foster and adoptive parents, non-adopted siblings and the public."
Rhonda Rorda · Award-Winning Author on Transracial Adoption
"Hasberry's contribution to the conversation is raw, honest, difficult, uplifting, profound, and reflective... with the space to Reflect, Release, Reinvent."
Katie Wynen · Pact, An Adoption Alliance
"A well written, articulate, beautiful, heart wrenching, soul crushing, exhilarating tale of resilience, reclamation of identity, and AFFIRMATIONS that are necessary and nurturing."
Adoptee Reader
Press & Media
Pact, An Adoption Alliance
Book Review by Katie Wynen
Activism in Adoption
A Conversation with Author, Adoptee, and Birthmother — Kristin Thomas
Adoption Knowledge Affiliates Book Club
Adopting Privilege Book Talk
Untangling Our Roots — Keynote
The Power of Owning Your Narrative
Thriving Adoptees Podcast
Profound Aha Moments on Racial Identity and Healing
Unraveling Adoption
Supporting Birth Mothers Through Informed Decisions
The adoption story has been told about us for long enough.
Available from Muse Publishing (print) · Audible/Amazon (audiobook) · $20
Also from Dr. Hasberry
Adoption Narrative Shift is an 11-episode documentary series currently in production. If this book moved you, the series goes deeper. Contributions are tax-deductible through Charm City Impact.
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