[IBARW] Interracial Adoption: Random Thoughts & Advice

[marydell]

This week is International Blog Against Racism Week - go over here to read a pile of awesome stuff.

My contribution is scatterbrained--motherhood has been kicking my ass recently. But here is some stuff I can share.

A few thoughts for white people who are not adoptive parents: 

1. Some babies who are ethnically Chinese are actually born in America! It's amazing but it's true.  Stop being so startled.


My son Charlie, a gentleman and a patriot.

2. Chinese children come in "boy" as well as "girl" versions, even the ones who are adopted. Stop being so startled.

3. Asian children in America are of multiple different ethnicities and nationalities, including the ones who are adopted.  Stop saying Ni Hao to random Asian kids.

4. You are seriously going to tell my my son "doesn't look Chinese?" What the hell do you think Chinese people look like?  This?

5. Black birth mothers who place infants for adoption generally do so because they cannot afford to add a child to their family, not because they don't care about their baby.  Stop talking shit about them.

6. The law is unfair to black people.  And poverty, with its associated ills, disproportionately affects black people.  Black parents who lose custody of their children are not necessarily bad parents.  Stop talking shit about them.

6. Oh hey I know, how about you just stop talking shit about  ALL black people? 

And thoughts for my fellow white interracially-adoptive parents:

1. Black mothers do stuff with their daughters' hair. Look here, here, here, here.  If you have a black daughter, for God's sake, do some stuff with her hair. Your average black mom would no more send her daughter to school with her hair in a mess than she would send her son in without a shirt.

2. Your child loses something of value when they are placed in a family that doesn't share their race. You can and should take steps to mitigate that loss and help them to develop as healthy of a racial identity as possible, so they don't feel like a fraud. But don't kid yourself that they haven't lost anything.

3. Chinese people in America do not, actually, stick their kids in adorable tiny silk outfits with frog closures at every fucking opportunity. 

4. Know your ethnic slurs! Do not, for example, put your Asian child in a shirt with bananas on it, like I did once upon a time. If you are white and have a black son, notice that monkeys are ubiquitous on boys' clothing, and then NEVER BUY ANY OF THAT SHIT. 

5. Be aware that many proper names have ethnic or racial baggage attached.  "Charlie" is such a name (Charlie Chan, 5 o'clock Charlie...).  If you're naming your child (as opposed to keeping their birth name) (which is what we opted to do), make sure you vet their name thoroughly before settling on it (You should probably check their birth name too, just in case there's baggage their birth parents are unaware of).

6. That "red thread" saying is not about adoption. Please stop repeating it. Also? Most adoptions involve some level of personal tragedy for the birth parents, and also for the child. Chinese adoptions in particular involve quite a lot of pressure on the birth parents.  Sentimentalizing that as "destiny" denies your child the truth of their story.

7. Did you know that Hinduism is an actual religion, where they revere their gods and stuff, and probably don't like blasphemy any more than other religious people? IKR? If you put your Indian kid in a Siva/Shiva tee shirt  because "he's my little destroyer--he's in the terrible twos and he destroys EVERYTHING!" I hope someone is very rude to you.  (ETA: Not because it's bad to put your kid in a Shiva tee shirt, but because if you do it you should be able to explain who Shiva is for real, and not be glib and reductive about it).

8. If you name your kid "Martin Luther King Smith" people will know that MLK is the only black person you've ever heard of.

9. If your home is going to be a safe space for your child--and it really, really should be--you are going to have to work hard to fight racism, and to overcome your own prejudices, and to understand and check your own privilege--EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. 

10. People of color who are against interracial adoption often have good reasons based in sociology, history, and personal experience, and are worth listening to even if you don't agree.  White people who are against interracial adoption often have a bunch of dumbass bullshit reasons based on racial biases.

11. In cases where a child is actually "saved" from poverty or oppression by being adopted, the credit and gratitude for that should go to their birth parents, who made an excruciating personal sacrifice in order to give the child a better life.

12. Going to a poor country to adopt a child and then complaing about all the poverty?  Makes you an asshole.  If you return from a poor country and say "the building where they finalized our adoption was so run-down, it was like something you would see in the projects!" you are an asshole and also very obtuse.  If you complain that the child you brought home from a poor country had diarrhea for a whole month OMG, when the people from the orphanage swore he was healthy, you are an asshole.  If you refer to your adopted daughter's home village as "pretty much the armpit of India," you are an asshole.  (I met all of these people in my adoption training; they were giving us advice about how to be parents. I also met awesome adoptive parents who do stuff like take their son to visit his birth mom in prison--it seems like it was 50/50 assholes/not assholes.  Kinda like humanity in general.)

Feel free to ask questions or add your own advice in comments (screened & lightly moderated)!

Comments

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

This was very refreshing after the last ten minutes I spent here on ell-jay today, reading some of the biggest FAIL I've ever read.

Oh! And Charlie is so cute. He still makes my uterus ache.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

As a person who is of mixed racial heritage, I dislike intensely being assigned a "race" by other people. This is because race is entirely a politico-social construct (the 2001 census in my native country had a mixed racial category as a result of political agitation).

Charlie gets 10/10 for cuteness.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Domestic US adoption looooves to categorize according to "race." Most agencies have separate programs for white & black babies, with other groups lumped into one or the other program according, apparently, to how European they appear. Asian babies are handled differently by different agencies; our tiny agency had never had an Asian baby in the program so they pulled parent profiles from both programs to show to his birth parents.

When you sign up as a prospective adoptive parent, there's a checklist for "races" where you say what you're open to. It's creepy.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I believe you. It is really creepy. I was told once that my first wife and I would have been deemed unsuitable by some as adoptive parents precisely because we were an interracial couple. Not because we weren't a stable couple, but because we were of different "races" and thus didn't provide an example of solid racial identity. Since all my marriages have been interracial, I'm clearly a problem for some people. My children, on the other hand don't seem to have a problem with identity.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Were you supposed to pick one aspect of your interracial identity and only marry the appropriate aspect, I wonder? Ugh.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Oh, of course. Only the black side (ignoring, in the process, the fact that the black side of the family was also halachically Jewish).

[marydell.livejournal.com]

thus didn't provide an example of solid racial identity

GAH. God forbid a child have a parent or two who actually know something about developing an identity beyond narrow categorizations. Fortunately, anti-discrimination laws make it easier for people to adopt regardless of their racial heritage nowadays, although that can sometimes facilitate clueless parenting.

Shiva T-shirt

[(Anonymous)]

Hinduism is a religion. A religion that I have followed for the past 30 years. I am Hindu. Shiva is a destroyer. The destroyer of what is the question. Study Shiva and you will learn that his mantra;
"OM MRITYUNJAYA MAHADEVA TRAHIM,
SHARNGATHAM, JANMA MRITYU JADAVYADI PIDITUM
KARMA BHANDAYE

Oh lord, the controller of all that lives and dies. I bow before you and leave in your hands my life, wellbeing, health and death. I leave everything in your hands for you to destroy my desires and bestow new life.

So yes he is the Destroyer of evil things.

I'm Hindu and I have no issues with the t-shirt idea, infact it's a very good idea. I can know teach my children about using the tshirts.

Rant ova, but I think you should look at the context before you class everything that maybe be different as a bad idea.

Thanks for finding this website, I know Ill be shopping there. Its great!

Re: Shiva T-shirt

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I think the site looks great, too - I'm just pointing out that if you're going to put images of deities on your kids, you should know a substantial amount about those deities, and do it respectfully. If I bought a tee-shirt from that site (and I might; they are nice) it would be one of the non-religious images, since I am not a Hindu and am not well-educated about Hinduism. I find images of Hindu deities compelling, like a lot of non-Hindu people, but I don't want to misuse them. (I edited the post to clarify this, since what you say here shows me I wasn't clear. I definitely think teaching children about religions in a fun way is a good thing).

A similar problem would be if I put my son in a shirt with Chinese calligraphy on it, but did not know what the words said. It's not that I shouldn't get him a tee-shirt like that, but I should learn about what it says, and teach him, instead of guessing.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

8. If you name your kid "Martin Luther King Smith" people will know that MLK is the only black person you've ever heard of.

I kind of love you for this one.

Also, another item for adoptive parents:

-- Do not assume you know more than any other person you know about your child's birth culture. You might! You probably should, at least compared to white folks in your social circle. But be willing to listen to people who are telling you things, especially when you know they aren't idiots.

Oh, and I should also join in the chorus of 'WOW CHARLIE IS CUTE' comments, because he totally, totally is.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

When my children were born, their names were the result of a long period of discussion between their mother and myself. As a result, they each have middle names that reflect some interesting history. One has middle names in honour of Frederick Douglass and Unison Whiteman (http://www.thegrenadarevolutiononline.com/uni.html). The other has a middle name in honour of John Maxwell (this pleased John considerably). Part of what we were avoiding was what we call the "Mara Liasson" problem (never having seen her name written down we couldn't tell for a long time whether the NPR reporter was "Mara Liasson" or "Mar Elliason", either name was plausible)

[real-gone-girl.livejournal.com]

ha, i had the same issue with a different npr reporter. i always thought "christina morgan" was "christie namorgan" when i was little cause of the way she pronounced it.

this was plausible to me, cause i had a playmate called nell morgan (compound first name) whom i thought was named "namorgan," because of how we'd pronounce it in ohioan.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Interesting! That is plausible.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Hahah YES it took me YEARS to figure out her name.

[elizabeth perry (from livejournal.com)]

Thank you for this! It will be very useful in a few years.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this.

#10 made me laugh because you so perfectly articulated something I have often thought. I remember, in particular, a bunch of white liberals all agreeing that, in contrast to U.S. birthmothers who place children for adoption for a variety of personal and social reasons, all birthmothers in developing countries are motivated solely by poverty caused by U.S. imperialism.

Sadly, I think that some internationally-adopting parents buy into that same Noble Savage myth, and think that because their child is coming from the developing world there won't be any history of family pathology, drug or alcohol use, etc.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting! I have friends who are adopting, and I find it helpful

[karnythia.livejournal.com]

This post is why you're hot. Just so you know.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

:)

[kate_nepveu]

This post about black women's hair came across my RSS feed today. It is a subject I am pretty ignorant on but I thought it relevant to your second #1.

http://www.antiracistparent.com/2009/07/31/nappy-hair-in-the-jolie-pitt-world/

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link! I'll keep an eye on that blog, it looks cool. My $0.02 isn't in favor of straighted hair, just hair that has had *something* done to it to make it look right to the eyes of the child's same-race peers. Well meaning white parents who want their child to have "natural black hair," sometimes think that means "do nothing at all with it" instead of "put it in a style that suits its natural propensities."

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

(ETA: Not because it's bad to put your kid in a Shiva tee shirt, but because if you do it you should be able to explain who Shiva is for real, and not be glib and reductive about it).

Yes, this.

And that shirt made me want a li'l Jesus shirt for my nephew. But all three of his grandparents (two churchgoing LDS folks and one secular Jew raised Orthodox) would freak.

Because li'l Jesus was AWESOME, what with the "I'm here about my father's business" and what-not.

[real-gone-girl.livejournal.com]

three of my girl-cousins (siblings) are adopted, two african-american, one european-american (well, she's white anyhow). my aunt picked up on how to braid hair pretty quick, & took them to salons when they got older.

one thing she never did was straighten their hair, though... they always had cornrows of one sort or another. i think it might be harder for white-liberal parents to feel ok about a hairstyle that they'd/we'd perceive as "trying to look white."

[illariy.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this post. *bookmarks*

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Great post. (Charlie is ADORABLE.) I winced a lot, especially at "ni hao." (No, I don't do it, but the idea of strangers 'ni hao'-ing every random Asian baby they see -- oog.)

[rockingchairsandatricycle.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Fantastic post. I linked to you, as I wanted the (few) folks that read my blog to see this. Thanks to Tonggu Momma for linking to you this week so I could find you!

Kiy

Thoughts and Advice

[blackbeltoma.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

LMAO. Not in a ha ha way but a "you are so right on I totally agree I'm amazed" way. I would NEVER communicate the way you do, but I certainly FEEL the way you do!! Thanks for swearing for me! ;-)

[celestialsoda.livejournal.com]

I can't begin to describe right now how much this post nourishes me. Suffice to say, I'm friending you and will most harass at several points in the future.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm sorry, but #10 definitely made you sound like a hypocrite. How do you change tunes so fast?
Sooo.... white people aren't allowed to have past experiences?
You do say 'often', I'll give you that, but the problem with the whole statement is that you're fostering a stereotype.
And then race isn't important, people should be civil... equal rights. All well and good, but only if you practice them instead of flipping from one side of the coin to the other.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I said "often" because I meant "often," not "always."

I did not say, and never would say, that race isn't important. And when it comes to opinions of what is right for children of color, I absolutely value the opinions of people of color more than those of white people. Not "to the exclusion of those of white people;" just "more."

(I also am speaking from my own experience; as a member of a conspicuous family, I am treated to random strangers' opinions about adoption.)

[invader-jim.livejournal.com]

Hi, you don't know me (I clicked over from haddayr's journal), but I find this and other of your posts very interesting, and would like to friend you to read your posts regularly, if you don't mind. I have dietary sensitivities and would love to adopt some day, too.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Absolutely, open friending here. Nice to meet you!