As a Black child adopted out of the New York foster care system as a toddler and raised by white evangelical parents, Rhonda Roorda had to learn how to walk in two different worlds. She often questioned "whether my skin was too dark" and if she "acted too white." She recalls being haunted by feelings of shame and not being enough. Torn from the Root is her illuminating story of identity, belonging, and purpose and lays bare the deep pain she felt navigating life as a vulnerable Black girl and how she healed herself.
Roorda suffered trauma and abuse in her youth, but she also developed resilience. Eventually, she resolves to find her birth family and takes readers on her exciting and agonizing journey.
Torn from the Root thinks critically about the child welfare system and the long-term impacts of transracial adoption. Roorda helps readers understand her experience, posing necessary questions about the challenges of transracial adoption. Her emotional story, full of wisdom and reflection, recounts how she accepted the truth of her adoption and found balance, not discomfort, in her own skin.
About the Author :
Rhonda M. Roorda, M.A., is a nationally recognized speaker, author, and consultant on transracial adoption whose insights have been featured on Good Morning America and ABC News, in People magazine, and in the Emmy Award–winning television series This Is Us. A transracial adoptee, she is the author of the acclaimed In Their Voices: Black Americans on Transracial Adoption, recognized as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and the coauthor of a groundbreaking trilogy on transracial adoption. Through her writing, research, and speaking, Roorda has become a leading voice exploring identity, belonging, and the lifelong impact of adoption across racial and cultural boundaries. She lives in Michigan with her family.
Review :
"Despite her own [disturbing] experiences as a transracial adoptee, Roorda highlights how such arrangements can sometimes work, particularly when adoptive parents respect the backgrounds of their children. Roorda has transformed her difficult journey into a teachable one."--Publishers Weekly
"In Torn from the Root, Rhonda Roorda delivers a searing meditation on family and belonging, boldly probing the complexities of transracial adoption and identity with raw honesty and deep love."--Julia Scheeres, New York Times best-selling author of Jesus Land: A Memoir
"In this unforgettable memoir, Roorda shatters the comforting myths that have long shielded U.S. transracial adoption from honest reckoning. Writing with rare courage and moral clarity, she traces her journey as a Black adoptee raised in a white evangelical family, exposing the spiritual, racial, and psychological costs of colorblind love. More than a memoir, Torn from the Root is a clear-eyed indictment of systems that silence adoptee truths--a bold reclamation of voice, history, and the right to forgive. Urgent, illuminating, and transformative, this book demands to be read by parents, practitioners, policymakers, and anyone committed to epistemically just family practice."--Gina E. Miranda Samuels, Professor at the University of Chicago's Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice; Faculty Director at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture; and Director of the Black Adoption Project/Roots Unbound: Returning Our Stories to Us
"Rhonda Roorda masterfully weaves her personal search for identity with powerful scholarship. As an adoptee approaching eighty years of life, I know what it means to be 'ripped from the root' and grafted elsewhere. For transracial adoptees, the challenge deepens--growing up unseen and unmirrored in one's own home. Torn from the Root is a brave and necessary book about loss, resilience, and identity--and the enduring question of what it costs to belong."--Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao, Lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School
