‘Families don’t have to match’ – Black couple share their journey to adopting three white children
Sadie and Jarvis Sampson are spreading the message that “families don’t have to match.”
“It’s our motto,” Sadie, 26, told TODAY Parents.
Sadie and Jarvis, 28, are Black, while their 3-year-old son, Ezra is white. The couple’s 18-month-old twin daughters, Journee and Destinee, are white and Mexican. The Sampsons, who live in Houston, Texas, struggled for more than two years with infertility before adopting Ezra when he was 5 days old in 2019.
Sadie recalled how her husband initially had concerns about adopting transracially.
“I went to a predominantly white school, but Jarvis grew up in an inner city and white people were almost foreign to him,” Sadie revealed. “I remember he said, ‘How are we supposed to raise a white child?’ And I was like, ‘Dude, you raise them just like you would any other kid.’”
As soon as Jarvis held Ezra in his arms, his concerns melted away.
“He knew that this was exactly what God intended. He was meant to be Ezra’s daddy,” Sadie said.
The Sampson brood grew again in April 2021, when Sadie gave birth to Destinee and Journee. Sadie became pregnant using donated embryos created by a couple who were successful in having a family through in vitro fertilization. She wanted the experience of carrying a pregnancy.
Sadie said she connected with the couple, who live nearby in Texas, after posting on Peanut, an online community for women. She was blown away by the amount of responses she received from strangers wanting to help.
“We didn’t care about race, ethnicity or anything like that. We just wanted an open relationship with the donor family, one where they’d come to birthday parties and holidays,” Sadie explained. “And that’s exactly what we have.”
When Sadie is out in public with her three kids, she finds herself announcing her relationship to them. She’ll often repeat phrases such as “Come to Mommy” and “Give Mommy a kiss.”
“I do it just just so people are aware that they are my children,” she said. “I’ve had strangers ask if I’m the nanny, if I’m babysitting. We get lots of looks because it’s so taboo that a Black woman could have kids that aren’t Black.”
Sadie’s close friend, Keia Jones-Baldwin, a Black woman with a white child, has on two occasions been accused of kidnapping. For that reason, she carries her son’s adoption papers with her everywhere she goes. Jones-Baldwin shared her story with TODAY in 2020.
“That has never happened to me,” Sadie said. “But I’m sure that it’s coming.”
Sadie, who has a YouTube channel, teaches viewers that families are made up of all different sizes, sexes, shapes and colors.
As she wrote on Instagram, “Families DON’T have to match! They are built on LOVE!”
