Creole Son by E. Kay Trimberger

Author:E. Kay Trimberger
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2020-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Addiction

As a teenager, Marco chose his friends and peer groups—at school and in extracurricular activities, in our neighborhood, and in the city. This was when our worlds began to diverge. Mine was a mixed-race neighborhood, close to the Oakland border, which facilitated Marco’s exposure to people who looked like him. I was pleased when I learned that this was exactly the type of neighborhood that adoption professionals advocated for transracially adoptive families.

In looking at the friends he made in this neighborhood, at the public junior high school within walking distance, and the after-school activities in which he engaged, I will try to evaluate whether they met the criteria of behavioral geneticists who have found factors that can discourage or mitigate substance use in teenagers: participation in religious and after-school activities, a high degree of commitment to school, and peers who do not use drugs or alcohol.1

While still in the private elementary school, Marco began to play with the white, middle-class children who lived on our block. The girl next door was the daughter of two professors, and the boy and girl across the street had a stay-at-home mom and an engineer father. This couple began to ask the girl next door and Marco to accompany them to Sunday school at their Protestant church. The girl became a devoted Christian while Marco soon lost interest. Was this because of race? Would it have had a positive impact on Marco if I had found a church, especially a black church, that we could have attended together? In any case, Marco’s minimal exposure to religion did not have a deterrent effect on his early teen substance abuse.

Through eighth grade, Marco participated in a number of extracurricular activities, but it turned out that they did not prevent substance abuse. During elementary school, Marco discovered another mixed-race boy being raised by a single white mom who lived on our street, a couple of blocks away. Marco met Matt when they were eight, not in the neighborhood or in school, but in the Young Explorer program run by the regional park district. They were the only two black kids. The YEs (as they called themselves) met most Saturdays during the school year for hikes in the East Bay hills and once a month they went on an overnight backpacking trip. The program culminated in the summer with a one-week trip to other parts of California. I liked the program because the male rangers, although white, were wonderful role models and the Asian American woman ranger modeled a competent woman. Half of the YEs were girls who demonstrated that they were as capable as the boys. Marco loved the program, and I saw it as a good environment.

Because I have always valued public education, I decided to switch Marco to public school starting in seventh grade, as many of his private-school classmates were doing. Marco could now walk to one of three public junior highs in Berkeley, one which was integrated by race and class. He often stopped to pick up Matt, whose house was on the way.

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