This episode with Hannah Jackson Matthews is powerful and loving. Cynthia saw Hannah’s impactful instagram posts and wanted to take a deeper dive into the experience of transracial adoptees and Hannah’s own story of advocacy and reclaiming her cultural identity and inner child dreams. This episodes highlights the impact of “white saviorism” in adoption, re-claiming cultural identity as an adult adoptee, and how music and books have often had the notes, words and rhythms to nurture our younger parts when we may not have the words.
Hannah Jackson Matthews is an author, educator, and speaker who designs and presents educational content for transracial adoptees (people raised by families whose race and ethnicity are different than their own) and their families in order to better navigate race, embrace racial identity, and combat racism and white supremacy. She is an adult transracial adoptee: a biracial woman who was domestically and privately adopted as an infant by white parents. The racial difference between her and her parents made navigating race, racism, and culture, along with developing a positive racial identity, notably challenging. Her experience informed her her first career as a high school English teacher, during which she earned her master’s degree in Urban Education from the University of Pennsylvania. Although she’s no longer teaching in the traditional sense, Hannah uses education as a means to combat racial and cultural ignorance especially within in the context of transracial adoption.
Find Hannah on IG:hannahjacksonmatthews
