Description:
As a Black child adopted out of the New York foster care system as a toddler and raised by white evangelical parents, Rhonda Roorda had to learn how to walk in two different worlds. She often questioned "whether my skin was too dark" and if she "acted too white." She recalls being haunted by feelings of shame and not being enough. Torn from the Root is her illuminating story of identity, belonging, and purpose and lays bare the deep pain she felt navigating life as a vulnerable Black girl and how she healed herself.
Roorda suffered trauma and abuse in her youth, but she also developed resilience. Eventually, she resolves to find her birth family and takes readers on her exciting and agonizing journey.
Torn from the Root thinks critically about the child welfare system and the long-term impacts of transracial adoption. Roorda helps readers understand her experience, posing necessary questions about the challenges of transracial adoption. Her emotional story, full of wisdom and reflection, recounts how she accepted the truth of her adoption and found balance, not discomfort, in her own skin.
Review Quotes:
"In this unforgettable memoir, Roorda shatters the comforting myths that have long shielded U.S. transracial adoption from honest reckoning. Writing with rare courage and moral clarity, she traces her journey as a Black adoptee raised in a white evangelical family, exposing the spiritual, racial, and psychological costs of colorblind love. More than a memoir, Torn from the Root is a clear-eyed indictment of systems that silence adoptee truths--a bold reclamation of voice, history, and the right to forgive. Urgent, illuminating, and transformative, this book demands to be read by parents, practitioners, policymakers, and anyone committed to epistemically just family practice."--Gina E. Miranda Samuels, Professor at the University of Chicago's Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice; Faculty Director at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture; and Director of the Black Adoption Project/Roots Unbound: Returning Our Stories to Us