Can you imagine not knowing your ethnicity, your race? Now imagine walking into a vital records office and asking the clerk for your original birth certificate only to be told “No, you can’t have it, it’s sealed.”

How about being presented with a “family history form” to fill out at every single doctor’s office visit and having to put “N/A Adopted” where life saving information should be?

Imagine being asked what your nationality is and having to respond with “I don’t know”.

It is time that the archaic practice of sealing and altering birth certificates of adopted persons stops.

Adoption is a 5 billion dollar, unregulated industry that profits from the sale and redistribution of children. It turns children into chattel who are re-labeled and sold as “blank slates”.

Genealogy, a modern-day fascination, cannot be enjoyed by adopted persons with sealed identities. Family trees are exclusive to the non-adopted persons in our society.

If adoption is truly to return to what is best for a child, then the rights of children to their biological identities should NEVER be violated. Every single judge that finalizes an adoption and orders a child’s birth certificate to be sealed should be ashamed of him/herself.

I challenge all readers: Ask the adopted persons that you know if their original birth certificates are sealed.

(blank stare) Okay, and?

I thought I was the only person who simply did not have a problem with the addition. I refer to myself as black, african-american, negro… interchangeably. I do not have a problem with the word and it doesn’t make me feel stripped of anything at all. All of the political correctness of this term and that is just useless posturing which amounts to nothing. Eh. So what?

I am an uppity negro and if I’m not now, I certainly aspire to be.

Incidentally, columnist Leonard Pitts often refers to “African America.” He’s the only one I’ve happened to see use that. Can’t be the only one, period, though.

Interesting to say “Americans of African descent.”

I always tend to say “descendant of Africans in America” simply because at times we’re not always afforded the privileges of being native born Americans.

Depending on how I skew my thinking, “Negro” conjures up images of oppressed people in rags or a proud dignified people united in purpose.** And I have to work harder to make the first one click mentally. So…yeah. But that’s me. Speaking for anyone else, especially for anyone outside one’s own race, puts one in Glenn Beck territory. And I don’t want to go there, so.

About the census—-great. So some [Americans of African desecent] have decided to join the idiot TeaBaggers in boycotting the census, though for different reasons. Wonderful. How much stupid can there possibly be to pass around? There is WAY too much sharing going on. Why hasn’t the Surgeon General issued a warning yet?

**For me, [the n-word] conjures up a sneering, frecklefaced white boy with jug ears snickering to himself as he spits the word out. Search me. Maybe it was a movie I saw once.

There it is…

I’ve been having this discussion on my FB page for days now and this is exactly what I expressed. But yet, niggas don’t hear me tho!

lol

Excellent post and breakdown, my brother.