In this powerful tenth installment of How to Love a Transracially Adopted Person, host April Dinwoodie marks ten years of writing at the intersection of Valentine’s Day and Black History Month with a clear and urgent message: love without protection is no longer enough.
What began as a reflection on romantic love and adoption has evolved into something deeper — a reckoning with identity, loss, belonging, race, safety, and responsibility.
In this episode of Born in June, Raised in April, April examines the incomplete love narrative often attached to adoption and challenges the cultural myth that adoption is a simple, tidy love story. Drawing from her lived experience as a Black woman raised in a white family, she explores how love without truth creates fragility — and how love without protection creates harm.
April shares personal reflections on growing up deeply loved, yet not always protected from racial harm. She unpacks the emotional tension between gratitude and grief, belonging and rupture, and calls parents, professionals, and institutions into a more courageous understanding of what real love requires.
This episode is both personal and universal — a call-in to anyone who claims to love Black and Brown people, especially Black and Brown children.
Because in this moment, protection is not optional.
It is the measure of love.
adoption, transracial adoption, protective love, identity, race, belonging, grief, Black identity, family dynamics, racial justice, advocacy, parenting, adoption narrative, loss, responsibility
Adoption is not a simple love story — it is a complex human story that requires truth.
Gratitude and grief can coexist from the very beginning of an adopted person’s life.
Silence in the face of racial harm is not neutral.
Loving a Black or Brown child requires racial awareness and active protection.
Protective love requires courage, advocacy, and structural accountability.
Love that avoids truth is fragile; love that refuses protection is incomplete.
“Love without protection is no longer enough.”
“Silence is not neutral to a Black child.”
“Exceptional love is not safe.”
“Survival skills are not the same as protection.”
“Protection is not a statement. It is structure.”
00:00 Ten Years at the Intersection
03:40 The Incomplete Love Narrative of Adoption
12:15 Gratitude, Grief, and the Both/And
18:30 When Love Isn’t Connected to Protection
25:10 The Responsibility of Transracial Adoption
32:45 Protection as the Measure of Love
36:50 A Call-In to Parents, Leaders, and Institutions