Families formed through transracial adoption face communicative challenges not faced by single-race families. Drawing upon communication privacy management theory and research on topic avoidance, this paper explores Korean adult adoptees’ reports of racial derogation in their youth and the extent to which they avoided discussing these interactions with their White adoptive parents. Results from qualitative interviews and surveys suggest that adoptee participants reported having received a range of racially derogatory messages, including appearance attacks, ethnicity attacks, and physical attacks. Most participants reported avoiding discussing these occurrences with their adoptive parents due to parent unresponsiveness and/or self-protection. This study extends the work on topic avoidance by offering sub-themes for parent unresponsiveness and sheds light on privacy management in transracially adoptive families.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.