Rachel Dolezal has done it again. She has alienated a whole new set of people: adoptive parents and their adopted children. She claims that one aspect of her decision to "be" black was to be able to say to her African-American adopted sons, "Now I'm your real mother." ("Ex-NAACP leader Rachel Dolezal: 'I identify as black,'" June 16)
Excuse me? Has she overlooked the fact that, by law, legally adoptive parents are the real parents of the adopted child: a new birth certificate is issued for the child with their names on it as the parents, and the parents must then set about the joyful task of making that legal status real with their deep love for their child and total gut-level identification with her or him. I speak as a person who has one adored adoptive child and one adored "natural" child. I am the real mother of both of them, and over the past 40-plus years I haven't had to take any extraordinary measures (beyond those required of every parent) to convince them of that.
Clarinda Harriss, Baltimore