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Transracial adoption: China
May 25, 2007 - 3:59am
Waiting for all my life: from the blog Resist Racism
And if you're not joking, then I may release a torrent of information indicating how completely different the two are from each other.
The reason china is popular is because there are babies available. From what I hear, it's hard to adopt. If I were to adopt, I would adopt a baby. And china is one of the few options for that. Somebody has to take care of these kids. Or should they stay in state-run care for all their childhood, like the Duplessis orphans?
And since you're against interracial adoption bigcitygal, should an agnostic sephardic jew of morrocan-tunisian descent like myself be allowed to adopt, or should it be criminal for me to adopt? Because I doubt there are many kids of my ethnicity available for adoption.
Anyhow, I'm a long way off from that kind of decision, but I like to believe I'd raise the kid as my own.
[ 25 May 2007: Message edited by: 500_Apples ]
Specifically, did you read the part about "owning" a child, that's been "purchased"? The notion of children as commodity? The author doesn't go into this in a huge way, but the idea is that privileged white parents in the West/North feel entitled to raise children, and then entitled to just go and "get" a child/baby from whatever country they choose. It's highly problematic, and grounded in First World privilege. Shall we go a level deeper and examine the role of the West in contributing to impoverishment in poorer countries, thereby producing the effects that there are poor children without parents?
And why do so many people want to adopt babies, rather than children? So that they get a baby that's, and please excuse how disrespectful this sounds, a "blank slate"? Not a young child who's survived war and poverty, they would be, what, "tainted"? This of course has NOTHING to do with what's best for the child, by the way, and all about ego and ownership and control. There are children all over the world without parents. Adoption by parents from the West/North may not, in fact, be what's best for them.
The guise of "Look how nice and generous we've been, proven by the expense and effort we've gone through to get you, Baby" is crap. Paternalistic, entitled, colonialist, and in the case of babies of colour, racist, crap.
Read up on adult transracial adoptees why dontcha? Stuff I've read of people in their 20s and 30s is pretty intense and fraught with issues they'll have to deal with all their lives. In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories
This link's a bit more perky.Transracial Adoptees and Adopters give us their views. From Intermix.org.uk
I'm not calling for a stop to transracial adoptions, although this could eventually be a position I hold. I'm asking babblers to critically look at this issue, from an anti-racist perspective.
I'll read the other links later.
I think the prefference for a baby is that it might be easier. You get to know the child, instead of inheriting all this stuff you know nothing about and are not equiped to deal with. I think if I started with a four year old I'd probably fuck it up. That's not what our evolutionary instincts are fine-tuned for.
A friend's brother wanted to adopt a chinese baby (he's wasp). Apparently he could not because he was gay (or maybe because he was single?). I'm not sure if that was China's or Canada's restriction. I understand why he wanted a baby, it would be his first child and he might want to watch and enjoy every step of the child development process.
I start with the assumption that child-rearing is very much a selfish act. The natural instinct is to spread your genes - how much more selfish can you get? Adoption is an emergent alternative. I'm not surprised it has the same underlying selfishness.
I agree with you that adoption from north/west is not necessarily the best option. But perhaps it is the best option available.
This statement made me consider interracial adoption as a fetishization of babies of colour in order to compensate for the larger narrative of white privilege, guilt and so on. An adoption of a Chinese baby is a relatively easy way to dissolve psychically the systemic inequality and symbolically integrate two races while not actually doing anything at all. In fact, the onerous bureaucracy that makes Chinese adoption "difficult" just valourizes the effort that much more, even though it's not difficult, just time-consuming. Clearly, by burdening a baby with this kind of fetishization, you laden the child with irreconcilable baggage, on top of the already impossibility of white parents truly understanding what it's like to be a POC in America.
Although, I am tempted to say that interracial adoption is possible, but I question under what terms it would be. How does it compare to a single father raising a woman? Is that a reasonable, though less intense analogy?
Consider the following two concepts: transracial adoption, and miscegenation. Both concepts depend on the highly problematic concept of race and of racial essentialism.
The same is true with intraracial adoptions. In fact, the same often happens with ordinary biological children.
A similar fetishization is likely in place in some cases of transracial romance. But, despite the fact that some transracial romances involve this, I would not argue that there's something necessarily wrong with transracial romances.
Overseas adoption has become a billion dollar industry. These babies are certainly treated like commodities by agents, go betweens and lawyers. There is also a thriving black market.
Although an older article, it provides lots of details of how the business of baby trading is conducted:
Adoption: The World Baby Boom
The article is very sympathetic to the plight of the predominantly white, affluent married couples looking to adopt which is bothersome. The role of birth mothers and their children is reduced to producer and product. And these agencies, lawyers and prospective parents are circumventing social and cultural concerns that limit transracial adoptions in North America.
There is definitely a shortage of indepth analysis of this issue. One commonality that seems to be ignored is that poverty is a key factor in both domestic and overseas adoptions.
However problematic the concept of race may be (and I hve found, not assuming anything about your social location, Martha, that white people have the biggest "problem" with the concept of race), cultural differences do exist, especially across the colour line. When the power only flows in one directions, as it does here in the colonized, stolen West/North, we have ourselves a set-up of affluent white het couples having access to children all over the world. Whether it's characterized as fetishization, ownership, modern-day kidnapping, or all of those things, it needs to be critically examined.
Racism does exist and it can't be argued away with an intellectual argument. It isn't "essentialist" to talk about racism. I agree with you, Martha, that race is socially constructed. Nonetheless, racism and colonialism are inherent in the, as laine lowe has indicated, international and billion dollar industry of transracial adoptees/abductees.
Though my own social location is not relevant to the cogency of my claims, it might explain my own personal point of view to point out that I have ancestors from Europe, Africa and Asia. I have never identified myself "racially" -- am I white? black? Asian?
Cultural differences exist both across and within colour lines. Culturally, I have more in common with my peer group of Torontonian university students than I do with my distant African relatives and my less distant Carribean cousins. But, if we are talking about adopting babies, we should bear in mind that babies have no culture. Culture is learned, not acquired genetically.
There are problems, I agree, with first world couples -- het or not -- adopting children from much poorer countries, whether or not this is across colour lines. There can be plenty of fetishization and commodification involved when a white het middle-class Canadian couple adopts a Romanian or Russian baby, or when a black het middle-class Canadian couple adopts a Congoan baby. Any comodification and fetishization of human beings needs to be critically examined.
I agree that racism exists and that it isn't essentialist to talk about racism. But I fear that it borders on essentialism to claim that transracial adoption is "transracial abduction" (in Makwa's words). Intraracial adoption can be equally problematic, and interracial adoption can, properly carried out, be relatively unproblematic. The problem is with objectification/fetishization/commidification, regardless of whether the adoption is intra- or interracial.
I agree that one might ask some hard questions of adoptive parents, beginning with this: Why a Chinese baby? Why a Guatemalan baby? Why a North American baby?
One last remark: If a white het middle class couple insisted on a white baby, turning down opportunities to adopt, say, a black baby, I would also be a little concerned.
No it isn't. 'Nuff said.
Actually, it isn't enough to just state your opinion in that sort of preemptory fashion; babble is interesting when we go beyond just shouting what we "know".
Since I don't think rights and wrongs are determined by the race of the person doing them, I couldn't agree that a white person commits abduction when legally adopting a baby, while a native person doesn't.
To have a society organized that way, you'd have to have racial laws.
I would say that it is important for a baby to be brought up in his or her own culture, to the extent possible. So as long as people from within the culture step up to the plate, they should have an extra advantage in being able to adopt.
But it would have to be fact-based, not based on a racial ideology. We know where that leads.
I think you underestimate how this is true of nearly all parents.
My parents were immigrants and grew up in a different country and time (they were 42 and 49 when I was born). They don't really have any idea what my world was like.
The same, I notice, is true for so many parents. The kids are differently religious, have different aims... etc. I think it's quasi-univeral for parents not to be able to relate to kids. I'm surprised you would point to this racial aspect like it's something out of the ordinary.
This economic power dynamic still persists and taints the whole practice of adoption IMO. It is mired in a patriarchal and philanthropic approach to dealing with the underlying issues of poverty and racism.
This excerpt is not about adoption (it focuses on a reform school for girls) but it does reflect the attitude of children's aid agencies who intervened to help disadvantaged children. Obviously, we have progressed as a society since earlier days but we have failed to address the underlying causes that give rise to adoption.
Ontario Training School for Girls
If the people doing the abduction get to write the laws. Don't forget adduction and enlsavement of Africans and FN peoples was aslo legal, according to the same Eurocentric laws. Do the laws respect the laws and traditions of the culture from which this children are being adducted from?
We already have racial laws. The laws of this county were written with racial (Eurocentric) preferences.
Hmm ok .. So by that logic. White kids should be abducted out from thier families. Since mainstream canada has failed to step up to the plate and properly educate thier offspring in how to end the racist, colonial and genocide of indigouse peoples.
Who gets to decide what stepping up to the plate is? Of course its the Eurocentric model that is supported, as opposed to respecting our cultures.
On a separate but related note. The concept of babies being born as a blank slate also does not respect other cultures, whose world view includes re-incarnation and spiritual knowledge transfer.
Always proud of the ancient wisdom, which our ancestors continue to reveal to us.
Aforhealer
As for the "blank slate" comment, that was me, and I did put it in quotes, and I did flag that it would sound offensive.
I do respect the belief that children are born with a cultural connection, even though this is not a belief that I hold. Thank you for what you said about this point. It's something I need to do more thinking, talking and reading about.
I don't understand this. What about multi-racial people? Should a person with Chinese, white and FN ancestry not adopt a person with Hispanic and African ancestry?
Right. I read them. They have nothing to do with the issue of whether transmultiracial adoptions should or should not occur (i.e., whether such adoptions are "abductions").
This being said as my opinion, I would also say that the evil side of trans-racial adoption will not go away anytime soon. As long as there are unscrupulous people involved in the baby trade for profit ONLY, there will be shadowy trans-racial adoptions and a black market for them.
Only ALSO please consider: I have an Xian friend who has adopted two beautiful baby girls from an Xian organization in China over the past ten years. They cost him and his wife about $20000 each. I realize this was a callous way to put it, and I apologise for it, but this $40000 or so goes to ensuring better food, living conditions and health care for the rest of the (mostly female) orphans cared for by the organizations running the orphanages. Is that such a bad thing?
[ 01 June 2007: Message edited by: Atavist ]
I realize that I opened this post with a simple and blunt message. I wanted to wait before I posted more comprehensive discussion, mostly because the topic is particularly painful to me, and partly because I felt a stark simple statement felt good by itself.
I have seen some remarkable discussion here, and some of the same tired rationalizations from the same names, but overall it has been a broadening discussion, and I am grateful to see it open up.
PS: for a dated but an irreverent look at some of the arguments around 'transracial abduction', check out these angry pissed ungrateful little transracially abducted motherfuckers from hell. Tee hee.
[ 01 June 2007: Message edited by: Makwa ]
Since you mean "third world" rather than "third word" I will tell you this, as the moderator: This is racist language and I won't allow it in the anti-racism forum. Stop it. Now.
This is on the border of being racist, since in fact many people in developing/third world countries (notice how the language itself is comparative and demeaning?) live in poverty. However, many people in the so-called developed/First world live in poverty as well. Your phrasing, esp the use of the word "misreable", reinforces Eurocentric liberal notions of "those poor souls living in such dire conditions. Let's pity them. Awww.". Blech.
Comparing a life of poverty to a life of relative wealth, it may seem obvious that anyone, including progressives, would choose the former. There's tons of problems with this framework. First of all, not all orphans can be "saved" in this manner. What about the non-adopted ones? Tough shit for them? I don't support that. Plus, what this framework doesn't cover is the notion of culture, identity and belonging being stolen from the child, as the child is stolen from his/her culture and extended family/community.
Again, summoning patience, I'm looking to have an anti-racist discussion on the phenomenon of affluent white parents-to-be from the north/west having access to children of colour around the world, but mostly in the globalized south and east.
To quote my bud Makwa, 'nuff said.