The impact of race on my life began before I was born. Conceived in the 1960s by unwed teenage parents, I was one of the millions of white babies placed for adoption during what is known as the Baby Scoop Era, a period in the United States between World War II and the early 1970s characterized by a rise in premarital pregnancies and a coinciding prevalence of (mostly white) newborn adoption. From the beginning, my existence was marked by contradiction and complexity. To my biological maternal grandmother, my conception was a source of shame, something to be hidden from the neighbors. My 17-year-old mother was withdrawn from school and sent into hiding with a cousin in the city as soon as her pregnancy was discovered. This cover-up came easily to a family that was already adept at hiding things (namely, my grandfather’s alcoholism) from outsiders, but it also occurred within a broader social context that was rooted in race: the preservation of white innocence. The “solution” to unwed motherhood at the time of my birth was different for white mothers and black mothers. Whereas young black women were culturally sexualized and assumed to be at the mercy of an uncontrolled libido, society clung to the illusion that nice, middle-class white girls did not have sex. …