![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
littlebutfierceOutsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption - Edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin. This anthology was painful to read. I already knew a bit about the issues around transracial adoption (or as some call it, transracial abduction), but this book was so thorough in detailing the many, many issues around this practice; I learned a ton. It combines personal pieces with more academic ones (& some are not exclusively either, of course).
Several of the pieces argue for reframing the debate about transracial adoption: not is it right for white folks to adopt children of color, but why are all these children being taken from their parents to begin with, & why aren't we doing more to keep them w/their birth families? Most of the pieces are written by transracial adoptees, although there's one by the sibling of a transracially adopted person (who is herself the birth child of their parents), & I think some of the academics might not themselves be adoptees.
The essays offer sharp critiques of colonialism, war, racism, & capitalism as they affect supply & demand for certain types of babies (foreign-born over domestic, particularly African American). White Americans' desire for exoticness through foreign adopted children is discussed a lot; in one guidebook on international adoption (critiqued by Kim Park Nelson in "Shopping for Children in the International Marketplace"), an adoptive mother is cited as saying, "My daughter was born in China & is an adopted American. I was born in America & I'm an adopted Chinese." Um, NO. I also learned a lot about the trumped-up "crack baby epidemic" of recent years, as well as much more about how the US government systematically took American Indian children from their parents.
Several of the pieces argue for reframing the debate about transracial adoption: not is it right for white folks to adopt children of color, but why are all these children being taken from their parents to begin with, & why aren't we doing more to keep them w/their birth families? Most of the pieces are written by transracial adoptees, although there's one by the sibling of a transracially adopted person (who is herself the birth child of their parents), & I think some of the academics might not themselves be adoptees.
The essays offer sharp critiques of colonialism, war, racism, & capitalism as they affect supply & demand for certain types of babies (foreign-born over domestic, particularly African American). White Americans' desire for exoticness through foreign adopted children is discussed a lot; in one guidebook on international adoption (critiqued by Kim Park Nelson in "Shopping for Children in the International Marketplace"), an adoptive mother is cited as saying, "My daughter was born in China & is an adopted American. I was born in America & I'm an adopted Chinese." Um, NO. I also learned a lot about the trumped-up "crack baby epidemic" of recent years, as well as much more about how the US government systematically took American Indian children from their parents.
