Getting Real About Inter-Racial Adoption

When things converge it often moves me to write.  I've been recently reading a special issue social journal (Jr of Social Distress and the Homeless Vol 17, Special Issue 1 & 2. Adoption across race, culture and class) that focuses on inter-racial and inter-national adoptions...when I came across a wonderfully honest and well written first person blog account of the subject.

In contrast to the professional articles and "studies" on the subject, the blog I read was not seeking the opinion of those who make the choice to create multi-cultural families through adoptions - asking how difficult it was for THEM. With adopters sharing how surprised they were to discover that racial discrimination actually still exists!

 I encourage all to read Interracial Adoption in Present-Racial Era, written by on of the real experts, a woman who lived it!  I also encourage you to read as many of the comments as you can bear, such as:

I'm a white woman. My husband (also white) and I are adopting an adorable little girl from Social Services. She's 11 years old and black. Should we not adopt her because she's a different race?? Should Social Services have left her with parents who let her beg door-to-door at the apartment complex for food just so she could be raised in a black family?? To many of us, race ~IS~ a NON-ISSUE! It's only people like this author and Al Sharpton that keep racism alive in America!

It is far too easy for liberal PRIVILEGED WHITES to say that color is a non-issue, or that they are "color blind." That is proof of their PRIVILEGE as race is only a non-issue for you when you are white in a white majority world! Get real!!

Not so easy when people are spewing their ugly prejudicial hate-filled comments or just their ignorant racial biases or assumptions, such as those about Asians being smart or Chinese girls being subservient or compliant or whatever...

People who adopt - and even those who give birth - are impervious to thinking about the child as a separate human being who grows up. They think only of a babe wrapped in the protection of their arms and their love. But children grow up and are subjected to the slings and arrows of a hostile world that no amount of parental love can protect them from.

We need to get real and to do that we need to hear more and more from the real experts on inter-racial adoption: those who have LIVED IT!  I hope the author of this blog post, Rebecca Carroll, and others keep writing, keep sharing, keep telling their truth to power!

Adoption is one great big experiment...and children - and the families from which they have come or been taken - are the guinea pigs who suffer.  If we have learned nothing in the decades of these experiments, it is that children are NOT blank slates; skin is not the color of water; and genetics and ethnicity DO count and are important.

The desire to know our roots drives a huge genealogy industry and is so important it is why the Judea-Christian bible starts with who begat who...and we think we can erase all that with adoption and love?

Note too, that MOST adoptions, begin like the writer's friends did. It is a last resort for those who adopt after often years of undergoing very expensive and painful treatments to try to have a child that is biologically connected to them - because that connection IS so damn important!  Then, when these same people WIND UP adopting, expect their child to live without those very important connections because they have to!?? Because they have now decided it's not important after-all? 

Additionally, after attempting every possible means to have a biologically connected offspring some of the study participants in Gidluck and Dwyer's Canadian study in the journal above remarking how unfair it is that others - the general public - look upon adoption as a second best choice to parenting a biologically connected child when adopters are ever so eager to share every detail of the pain and expense they suffered to avoid adopting!  And like the friend of the blog author, Gidlick and Dwyer's Canadian parents who adopted interracially, often hadn't "given much thought" to race prior to adopting their children (p 43).

There are some things in this journal that are really hard to read, even for a toughened veteran such as myself. For instance:

"Many well-meaning parents want to celebrate or exoticize their child's culture without dealing with the issue of race" Gidlick & Dwyer, p. 39.

And...some adoptive parents studied:

"...tended to deny their children's Chinese identity and Chinese culture. Children grew up in households that did not regard China as important or relevant to their children. Their parents intended to raise them as any other American child. According to several adoptive mom's accounts, it seemed this group saw China as a source for babies. They were eager to make their adoptive children Americans who need have nothing to do with China" Cao and Pitman, p. 71.

The adopted child becomes at once the consolation prize, the replacement for what might have been, and the healer to their parents, as well as in many cases, and a badge of honor for the liberalism of their adopters....and they are expected to be GRATEFUL enough not to hurt their feelings by seeking out their own kin....
 
All of this is perhaps in part why journal contributor and inter-racial adoptive mother Martha Satz now opposes "the general practice of trans-racial adoption" despite the education it gleaned her. 

Perhaps it is also why the journal editor, Rafeal Art. Javier concludes: "There seems to be much damage to identity formation than the benefit that these types of adoption may bring to the transnational adoptee...."


See also:  

• Transnational Adoptees Speak Out

•  Documentary Reveals Pain of Interracial Adoption and "Gratitude Complex" 

• Hubinette and Trenka on Transnational Adoption

What's Wrong With Adoption? Is Christianity THE ANSWER?

A far right religious extremist website entitled "What's Wrong With the World" (a right wing religious extremist site) broached the subject of adoption.

Outraged, the author of this post, Lydia McGrew, an adoptee professes:

"...adoption results from fornication, when a child is conceived out of wedlock....[and poverty yada yada]...In a very great number of cases, adoption is far and away the best possible gift the child could be given....in many, many cases not better for a mother--particularly an unwed mother--to keep her child rather than placing him for adoption...to say that it would be "ideal for children to be raised within their native cultures" seems to me to be, by and large, not true..."

To adoptees Lydia says: "Balderdash. Don't spend your time in identity angst. Get a life instead. It may be perfectly legitimate to get to know your birth mother at some point and to find out things about yourself. You may profit from it. But keep the whole thing in balance and in perspective."

To transnational adoptees - many of whom according to Lydia "blow any such matters of identity out of proportion" she says:  "As Americans from infancy [major wrong assumption there], they should be instead encouraged in their original, spontaneous sense of themselves as full-fledged Americans, as much heirs of the American culture as any child born here originally. Assimilation in such cases can be complete and highly satisfactory," This of course is in direct opposition to the biblical lesson of Moses.

Bill Tingley agrees: "It should be obvious that an infant possesses no language, culture, or religion, and so loses nothing if his adoptive parents differ from his biological parents in that regard. The only thing he keeps is his racial identity, but then race is not destiny. In the scheme of things it is one of the least consequential differences among human beings."

Girl4708 responds:

Adoption in my country began as a Christian humanitarian effort. It was a good and noble thing. A decade after the war ended, however, the presence of adoption agencies in the face of post-war economic crisis lead to an epidemic of abandonment by overly large and hungry families hoping their children would have better lives - and often believing they would see their children again, as they didn't realize the permanent nature of adoption. Because the adoption agencies stayed, the government did not feel a need to help families in crisis and to this day there are almost no social services to adequately help its own people, despite being the 5th in ranking economically in the OECD. The majority of adoptions today are due to unwed pregnancies and, again, because unwed mothers get very little support and are socially stigmatized, the presence of adoption agencies becomes the default way in which the mothers are "helped."

Is this still the Christian thing to do? Jesus fed the multitudes. He didn't take a couple of them and take them with him to a better land. He cared for ALL of the people who were suffering. He shared. He cared for all of his people, and not just the infants that could fill the arms of those in another nation.

When Joseph and Mary stopped at the Inn, did the Innkeeper say to Mary - I'm sorry, that baby is illegitimate. You can't stay here. In fact, give me your baby and I will make him legitimate by giving him to someone in better circumstance than you. No. The innkeeper helped them out. The unwed mother is still one of God's children, too.

The Christian thing to do is to help people help themselves. The Christian thing to do is not to exploit those in dire circumstances, but to give them a hand and show them a better way. Adoption is the easy and self-serving way for those who are privileged. But adoption leaves a huge hole in the hearts of those who no longer have their children. It is the adoptive parent's joy, and the original parent's tragedy.

Is this really what Jesus wants? Really? Why don't those of you with so much instead donate to social programs which preserve families or prevent pregnancies in these other countries? Why don't you instead offer small loans to families in crisis, or sponsor individual children so they may lead a life without basic needs? Is it really necessary to remove the child from all they've known since birth? Is it right to introduce more trauma into their lives?

Expatriate Ibn Zayd says:

...adoption is a violence, based in inequality; it is candy-coated to make it seem about family and children, but it is an economic and political crime, a treating of symptoms and not of disease; it is a negation of families and an annihilation of communities that are not seen as having an intrinsic human value equal to that of those adopting, for reasons having to do with race, with class, and with a preconceived notion of what makes for a "valid" life in this world.

For those who are vocal concerning adoption and what it truly represents, it is problematic to frame the debate as if it is equal, two sides of equal position. It is not. You have a dominant discourse of a certain class of society (as revealed here), its adoption industry, its media, its legal system, its medical system, and its ability to stifle debate on the subject on one side. You have those who resist this on the other.

To posit this as a CNN-like debate, 50-50 and equal time is inherently invalid. The amount of time due to those who have remained silent for too long--mothers whose babies have been taken from them, the adopted who had no say in the matter, the communities missing their most vulnerable members--is therefore infinite. If the debate were one-sided for the next thousand years this might only start to equalize what has been one-sided for far too long. 

May I just ask, what kind of twisted concept is this "fully Americanized?" This is a fantasy; a myth. I'm not sure how old you are, but I can remember very clearly growing up and every state had its own culture; Northern New Jersey for example was very different from Southern New Jersey, as were rurally raised children from those raised in an urban environment. This posited concept then of what makes an "American", which immigrants have to assume, along with your reference to a "Tenth Crusade", are borderline Nazism, except that you pretend to welcome those from the outside when all the while you desire to destroy any and all cultures seen as "Other", as "Outsider". Which America, history shows, is exceedingly skilled at.

 And van Wijk adds:

An adopted Chinese boy or girl can have the most loving, dedicated, and colorblind parents in the world, and it simply won't matter all that much. His difference, his Otherness, will be staring back at him in the mirror every day of his life. The "all you need is love" attitude will not keep him afloat when he goes out into the world. A very few will grow up as Lydia hopes, but these will not be in the majority. Many will wander the wilderness for years in search of their identities; where will they find it if not in one of the minority grievance lobbies currently Balkanizing the West?

Some traditionalists believe that modern Christianity is incompatible with Western survival. Given the content (and tone) of some of the comments here, I wonder if there isn't a kernel of truth to that idea.

The entire post and all comments are available at this link. However, as noted, you can no longer comment there apparently - or at least I cannot. 

So...I suggest we continue the discussion HERE!

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” Mahatma Gandhi