February: Love That Protects — The Gap Between Loving and Protecting Transracially Adopted Children

February holds Valentine's Day and Black History Month — tenderness and truth, celebration and resistance. In this powerful February episode of Calendar Conversations with June in April, April Dinwoodie explores the gap between loving and protecting transracially adopted children. As a Black woman raised in a white adoptive family, April reflects on growing up deeply loved — and yet not always protected from racism in extended family spaces, schools, and the broader culture. She shares how children absorb what adults interrupt… and what they allow. In a moment when racism is more explicit and family separation is visible in public life, transracially adopted children are navigating layers of identity, belonging, grief, and racialized harm — often without adults realizing what is landing in their bodies. This episode invites white adoptive parents to examine: Do you love Blackness beyond your child? Have you confronted racism within your own family systems? Have you built authentic relationships in communities that reflect your child's identity? Have you chosen your child's dignity over your own comfort? Because loving the child entrusted to you through adoption is not the same as being prepared to protect them. This conversation is about activist love — love that interrupts harm, aligns publicly, builds community, and stands between a child and the world. Transracially adopted children deserve more than affection. They deserve protection.