Race in Transnational and Transracial Adoption

Vilna Bashi Treitler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137275226
• eBook ISBN: 9781137275233
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Politique sociale

When parents form families by reaching across social barriers to adopt children, where and how does race enter the adoption process? How do agencies, parents, and the adopted children themselves deal with issues of difference in adoption? This volume engages writers from both sides of the Atlantic to take a close look at these issues.

1

Introduction: Race Is a Fiction ... Coloring Children and Parents Nonetheless

Vilna Bashi Treitler

Race is a 15th century invention, born of a marriage between European imperialism and white-supremacist pseudo-science, meant to explain the reasons for phenotypic differences found among humans in disparate parts of the planet Earth. Race survives and thrives in places where people of various nationalities meet because one or more of the persons involved in the encounter have been exposed to racial thinking beforehand. Racial thinking may be found at national borders, in neighborhoods and their boundaries, in schools, in policies shaping border/immigration, housing, and schooling processes, and in workplaces and places of worship. Race and racial thinking also rear their hydra-like heads in family formation practice and policy, including practices and policies related to adoption.

Childless couples, fully-formed families with room for more, and singles (mainly female) wishing to parent turn increasingly to adoption. Racialized politics brings up questions like these: If black children are ‘hard to place,’ what can be done to increase their rates of placement, and are any of these options inappropriate or unethical? Is it useful or even ethical to promote ‘colorblindness’ as a policy or parenting strategy? Under what conditions should a child ever be removed from his or her birth family? And is it right or ethical to deem someone inappropriate to parent a removed child because their race differs from that of the child? After the adoption takes place, how important is it to nurture some presupposed culture that is presumed to go hand-in-hand with a child’s birthplace or customs of an imagined family of origin? How much should outsiders care about and interfere with personal decisions made by individuals about what their family will ultimately look like, and the route they take to get it to look that way? And, last, how much of all of this has to do with race?¹

What race is, and what race is not

For over ten decades, the best science has assured us that there is no biological or genetic basis for the persistent belief that there are subspecies of the human race; the relevant facts are now widely known, even if not universally acknowledged. Neither the shape of one’s skull, the length or breadth of one’s nose, the texture of one’s hair, nor the pigment of one’s skin can determine one’s race; nor can these be related to particular cultural traits. (Said another way, one’s ‘race’ neither provides nor proves one’s ability to play musical instruments or basketball or hockey, facility with mathematics or martial arts or makeup, or propensity to steal, fornicate, or lie.) Races do not exist in any real form, other than to distinguish among human beings by linking culture with phenotype in order to create a systematic and stratified scale of human deservedness.

The unequal treatment of human beings persists despite repeated scholarly and scientific proofs about the falsity of racial difference. In attempting to explain the persistence of beliefs in racial difference where biological and genetic scientists have found none, social scientists have developed a body of scientific inquiry focused on the ways race is socially constructed. This social constructionist school, if it can be called that, codifies research on the creation and maintenance of racial categories and racial hierarchies, and develops theories or traces histories that will teach us about the persistence of racial privilege and deprivation.

Race (the system) and racism (the practices that cause racially stratified privilege and deprivation) persist because we create and recreate them every day in our interactions with one another. Most people in the more economically developed ‘Western’ world wrongly think that race hovers up somewhere at the ‘societal level’ or somewhere else in the stratosphere, far away from where we live, eat, love, and make decisions. We like to think that race is something we inherited from previous generations but did not create and certainly have no part in maintaining.

While there is a truth to the idea that the existence of race (the concept) and racism (beliefs and actions) preceded the births of all who read this text, it does not follow that we have no role in perpetuating racial systems. Racism and racial ideology do not persist because we all slavishly follow racial rules dictated to us. Nor can we believe the ‘race problem’ is solved because humans have seen brief periods of social upheaval marked by World War II, the US Civil Rights Movement, or the end of South African apartheid. These upheavals are only varyingly effective in changing the rules of race. The reality is that we are born into social systems that stratify people by race, and we, by our own actions (sometimes knowingly, sometime not), keep racial ideology alive.

Race – that 500-year old fiction we use to keep up divisions among humans where none existed before – lives on because we reshape its properties and practices every day. We either reuse the categories we know, or create new racial types when the needs arise, for example, when we meet persons too different to fit our current ideas of ‘who is who.’ If an individual person does not readily fit our known categories, we interrogate them until we find an answer that pleases us and fits what we know (Kilomba, 2012). We decide to which group each person belongs, choosing for them – and for their group – a place in our ranking schemes; this is racialization. We regulate others’ behaviors, declaring them appropriate or inappropriate depending on an actor’s racial type; when our esteem for a group changes, we denigrate or uplift them accordingly in our hierarchical systems of thought (Bashi Treitler, 2013). All this thinking amounts to our creating a hierarchy of humans that everyone eventually learns. In racialized societies, racial thinking colors (literally) the way humans treat one another. Our concerns about forming families across ‘the races’ led us to create terms for it: transracial adoption, interracial marriage, miscegenation. These terms identify as abnormal the families formed in these ways.

Race and adoption

Most people seeking to make adoption happen (prospective and adoptive parents, agency staff, social workers, child welfare workers, and immigration officials) reside in the wealthiest and most industrialized nations of the world, and these nations are all racialized societies. Thus, racial thinking most certainly colors the way the agents in adoption perform and understand it.

We decide whether a country is ‘white’ or not before we can know if adopting a child from that country would make the transnational adoption also transracial. To decide if a child is ‘non-white,’ agents in adoption first must refer to their ideas about the hierarchies of nations and phenotypes of the people that inhabit them before they decide on what race any given child is, but even these ideas are socially constructed differently for adoptions that are ‘transnational’ (instead of ‘transracial’). When the international adoptions involve racially white parents adopting a foreign-born child who would be considered non-white if migrating as an adult from his/her birth parents’ nation, those involved in adoption would not normally call this adoption ‘transracial.’ But if the child is born in the United States of foreign-born (‘non-white’) parents, such an adoption is labeled ‘transracial.’ Surely all children and the humans who birth them are racialized, but apparently we are willing to make exceptions about the meaning of ‘foreigner’ and ‘other’ where adoption of the foreign-born is concerned. Indeed, with transnational adoption, agents construct available children’s races continually, depending on the mix of nations from which available children come at any given time, and the size of the gap between supply and demand for children of different ‘racial types.’ Thus, even while we refrain from naming ‘transracial’ all transnational adoptions between parents and children of different national origins and phenotypes, racial thinking is present in those adoptions all the same.

Research on adoption from China is just one set of scholarship that queries the place race has in adoption processes. When parents (most often, racially white) give their reasons for adopting from China, their language (not always consciously) touches on their conceptions of an ancient but accessible culture to which they (for various reasons) have a ‘natural’ connection, and a racial discourse referencing in a relative way both model minority status for Chinese/Asians and concerns about the value of racialized blacks’ culture and blacks’ inassimilable difference (Dorow, 2006a). Mothers who adopt from China are subject to a ‘near constant trickle of inquiries’ that amount to ‘interracial surveillance,’ leaving the families ‘scrutinized, monitored, or harassed because [as a group of interracial others] they embody multiple racial positions’ (Jacobson, 2008, pp. 147–148). Jacobson (2008, pp. 148–163) argues that the surveillance applied to white/Asian family members normally lacks the hostility applied to US white/black intimates, involving instead a near-constant curiosity, and of course, those who adopted from Russia were absolved of such racializing scrutiny by imagined biological links made possible by perceptions of shared whiteness.

Agency staff often tell adopting mothers that infusion of the national culture from the child’s birthplace is best, or even required; an entire industry (from adoption-targeted videos, CDs, trinkets and goods for ethnic home decor, and culture camps) has emerged to aid them (Jacobson, 2008, p. 2). But mothers of Russian-born children chose overwhelmingly not to practice birth culture, perhaps because family can be clothed in a racial whiteness that ignores ethnic difference. These parents chose instead to signal ethnicity through naming (i.e., 31 percent of mothers of Russian-born adoptees kept the child’s original name and an additional 21 percent made it a middle name; several more changed it, selecting a ‘Russian-sounding’ name). By contrast only 19 percent of parents of Chinese adoptees kept the child’s given Chinese name (Jacobson, 2008, pp. 167–169), perhaps because racial (i.e., phenotypic) difference was evidence enough of ethnic difference for them. Finally, when adopting parents chose to reinforce their children’s perceived birth cultures, they were consumerist in their ‘culture keeping’ – hiring Chinese/Russian nannies or language tutors, instead of reaching across the ethnic divide to link their families to Chinese and Russian communities in the US. Moreover, adopting mothers see as like their family other families who adopted just like they did (i.e., from the same countries, and perhaps the same regions); ironically reinforcing the idea that kinship is racialized in the ways that they have racialized it (Jacobson, 2008, p. 174).

These mothers proceed unaware that race is an outdated notion, that all families with children are alike despite their phenotypic composition, etcetera. Moreover, these transnationally adopting parents may speak little of race as they raise their adopted child, but race appears where ‘the culture question’ gets decided about the child’s upbringing; for ‘the “culture question” [is] the main and most friendly passage through [the] minefield of racial imaginaries toward [national and familial] belonging’ (Dorow, 2006a, p. 206). It is difficult to say concretely whether we have progressed from the time prior to the 1970s, when public sentiment leaned toward the idea that cultural difference between adoptive children and other members in the adopting family should be downplayed (Jacobson, 2008a), or whether instead we are in new ways re-inscribing race on the faces, bodies, and minds of the next generation.

Focusing on domestic transracial adoption just as readily brings race to bear on the socioeconomic relations that create child availability, and shape prospective parents’ choice of child and of manner in which to raise the child (racially speaking). The public script about US domestic adoption (that rattles on about concerns for foster children’s well-being) differs grossly from its reality, where pro-transracial adoption notions are coupled with strong anti-black sentiments (Patton, 2000). For example, transracial adoption is touted as a ‘pro-family’ and ‘colorblind’ solution to social conditions framed as ethnic- or race-based ‘problems’ like rampant ‘illegitimacy.’ Moreover, racial politics linking the denigration of black mothers and their propensity to deliver ‘crack babies’ might have synced quite well with white parents’ ideologies about reaching overseas to more racially-ambiguous, -flexible, or -acceptable foreign-born children (Dorow, 2006a). This may explain why the public and scholarly discourse gives so much weight to the National Association of Black Social Workers’ 1972 statement that transracial adoption means genocide for black families – it comes just in time to justify middle class whites’ choices to adopt from outside of the large pool of black children available domestically (Briggs, 2012).

Complicating the idea of race in adoption is the circumstance of adoption itself. Both domestic and transnational adoption are colored by a legacy of racism, and by structural and intentional inequality that encompasses the globe and delivers different life chances and life expectancies to humans across the planet. ‘Adoption opens a window onto the relations between nations, inequalities between rich and poor within nations, the history of race and racialization since the end of slavery in Europe’s colonies and the United States, and relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous groups in the Americas and Australia’ (Marre and Briggs, 2009, p. 1). Further, whether transnational, or domestic transracial in form, ‘Stranger adoption is a national and international system whereby the children of impoverished or otherwise disenfranchised mothers are transferred to middle-class, wealthy mothers (and fathers). The relative power of these two groups, and the fact that stranger adoption almost never takes place in the opposite direction, sets the inescapable framework in which adoption is inserted. ... Symbolically and actually, the politics of adoption and what happens to the children of vulnerable populations, usually single mothers, have been critical to Native peoples’ sovereignty struggles, civil rights and the backlash against it, human rights, and the Cold War and its political and economic aftermath’ (Briggs, 2012, pp. 4–5). Children the world over are made available for adoption because of social upheaval, poverty, and war, including two US domestic wars: The War on Poverty and The War on Drugs.² And others have found (just as I have learned in my own interviews with adoptive parents) that adopting US parents often choose transnational adoption precisely because they fear contact from the birth mother, and the distance and closure of the adoption makes such contact less likely (Dorow, 2006a; Bashi Treitler, forthcoming). The Western ideology of exclusive (and I would say narrow) kinship also erases birth mothers as mothers, even sometimes relegating their role to that of incubator; yet a birth mother’s absence can be mourned both by the child transferred to adopting parents, and by those parents themselves (Dorow, 2006a). As we interrogate the dislocations that make the biological children of some parents ‘available’ to be adopted by others, race again becomes central, for race shapes the policies and socioeconomic inequities that make it so difficult for the disempowered to care for their own offspring.

Crossing racial borders for family formation – whether that be through the happy marriage of two ‘miscegenators’ or via adoption, where children acquired would not match the phenotype of the adopting parents – is a fact of US history and its present day: the result of continual negotiations around love and hate between men, women, and ethno-racial groups (Bashi Treitler, 2013; Staples, 2008.) The choices of child and from where to adopt may be best understood as a conflation of circumstances, institutional and collective practices, and individual preferences (Dorow, 2006a). Adoption is racialized in its most telling processes – from the root causes of child ‘availability’ to the choice of child (whether the adopting parents are matched race-consciously or in ‘colorblind’ fashion), to the decision of how to raise one’s child (be that race-consciously or in ‘colorblind’ fashion, as well). Because of this, I argue that adoption, in its overlapping sets of transnational and transracial varieties, offers cases through which we might study race-making as it occurs. Thus, in the remaining sections of this chapter, I offer two entrees into adoption and race-making analysis. First, I trace a history of international and domestic transracial adoption worldwide, using it to point to places where we might take note of how racial thinking and adoption intertwine. Next, I describe the collected works in this volume and show how they illuminate the ways adoption and contemporary racial dynamics shape one another.

Adoption as an index of vulnerability

Transnational adoption begins in a racialized climate

We could easily begin a history of international adoption by looking toward Europe for children displaced by WWI who crossed national borders to be taken in by parents elsewhere (Marre and Briggs, 2009). Save the Children, a network of organizations currently operating in 27 countries, is a new iteration of the Fight the Famine Council, created to save German and Austrian children from starvation when Allied blockades were meant to force these nations to accept the Treaty of Versailles (Marre and Briggs, 2009, p. 3). The famous kindertransport that brought 10,000 children from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia was only one route for the many children fleeing the race-based policies of Hitler’s Nazism who found adoptive homes elsewhere in Europe (Marre and Briggs, 2009, p. 3). Further, racist policies began under Spain’s dictator, Francisco Franco, included the abduction and adoption or sale of 300,000 children of Republican parents; carried out with the aid of the Catholic Church, these practices persisted for five decades (Dunbar, 2011; Tremlett, 2011).

When others were ad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Race Is a Fiction...Coloring Children and Parents Nonetheless
• Part I  Constructing Desire in the Adoption Market
• Part II  Constructing Ethno-Racial Identities in Adoption
• Note
• References
• Index