Adopting Technologies: Producing Race in Trans-racial Adoption

Technologies of racialization are powerful in trans-racial adoption in particular, because:

1. the person in question is a child, who has relatively little power over the conditions of its existence and;
2. because that child is often “the only one,” seen as originally racially “other” in relation to the family and often in the larger social world the child inhabits.

The “assimilation” model of trans-racial adoption, exemplified in my first story, has been prevalent in adoption since the 1950s to the 1970s, with the first wave of Korean-to-U.S. adoptions associated with the Korean War.¹ The second story corresponds to more recently developed models, in which technologies of “cultural competence” work to bind adoptees to their cultural “heritage.” While culture appears to replace race in this model, here the child also begins with a racial makeup that is established or attributed to it through the logic of biological reproduction and phenotype. The “race” that the child carries as a natural fact then gets linked to a racio-cultural heritage perceived as carrying a force of its own, one that requires action on its behalf.

The second story, like the model to which it corresponds, invokes culture in a way that appears not to have anything to do with race at all. I use the term “racio-cultural” to describe the technological process at work insofar as the child’s race becomes the mark of a “different” culture that both already “belongs to” the child and with which it must be imbued. While all adoptees might be seen as carrying with them a different culture than solely that of the adoptive family, by virtue of their birth “elsewhere,” in trans-racial trans-national adoption, race comes to require attention in the form of culture. Culture becomes significant because of racial difference; culture stands in for race.

While it may seem that immersion and other culturally based models are preferable to assimilation, they too have their limitations. Making race and culture interchangeable can ultimately entail the displacement of race, and usher in the ugly specter of racism. As Andrea Louie has put it, there can be a tendency for adoptive parents to “educate their children about their ‘birth cultures’ at the expense of attention to race and other issues of social inequality.”² Furthermore, in her study of families with children adopted from China, Lisa Falvey proposes that the immersion approach involves exposing girls—again, gender plays a role in the availability of children from China and elsewhere—to Orientalist versions of Chinese culture, including dance and music. She argues that the immersion model “unintentionally stresses the need to accentuate difference as a way to perform it for white culture,” and therefore also “reinscribes and reinforces hegemonic anxiety over the [racial and cultural] other.”³ So too, Ann Anagnost has argued that the focus on culture can take the form of a “domestication of differences emptied of history.”⁴

The technologies of race employed in culturally based models of adoption are much more explicitly defined that in the immersion model, and not surprisingly, they too re-racialize the adoptee in terms of the very racial or racio-cultural origin—which is itself based on concepts of blood, nation, and so on—that the assimilation model overwhelms, or renders insignificant. The twist on racialization here is that race is simultaneously transformed into culture—it is culturalized, but still bears the mark of race as a feature of the material body of the surface features of skin color, hair texture, and so on. So the foreign adoptee both “is” already raced and cultured by virtue of birth (blood and nation, again), and becomes so through a particular childhood enculturation—trips to the birth country; dolls with appropriate skin and hair color available on adoption websites; culturally matched music; and the learning of language, dance, and holiday rituals.

The second story I have recounted clearly bears the mark of culturally based models, but it also arguably tells a rather different story of the way children can be re-racialized and encultured in these models. Rather than being exposed to a Euro-U.S.-centric version of her own culture, as in the cases Falvey describes, this young woman has developed a relationship with her birth country to the extent that she now sees it as “home.” Her bond with Colombia is equally premised on a material racio-cultural origin in Colombia, and her racio-cultural selfhood has been generated through repeated engagement with Colombia in actual time and space. Her own racialization and enculturation have taken place in relation to this engagement, such that her parents see her as “being” Colombian, and they therefore also “make” her Colombian or “sustain” her Colombianness through repeated exposure. She too has been re-racialized, but in a particular and different way from either the Korean young woman in the first story, or the Chinese girls in Falvey’s account.

Without the model minority status of Asians, Latino (or indigenous) adoptees, most of whom come from Central America, are not as flexibly re-racialized as their Asian counterparts. In this sense, and in the context of a more culturally oriented approach to trans-national adoption generally, this may exert a greater pressure for Latino adoptees and their parents to embrace the “home” country and culture. At the same time, the self-consciousness of the relevant technologies and practices in the immersion model is partly a result of the gap between seemingly automatic or “natural” forms of racialization that take place in non-adoptive families, and the “unnaturalness” of trans-racially adoptive families. A discussion from the world of domestic U.S. trans-racial adoption about hair among trans-racially adoptive parents of black children, to which entire blogs are devoted, makes this strikingly evident:

If you adopt an African American child or a biracial child, one of the hottest topics is hair care. It’s not just a matter of childcare; hair is also a matter of great pride in the African American community. If you take your blonde haired daughter out in public with a head full of messy hair, chances are no one will say anything to you. But if you take your AA [African American] daughter out in public without her hair done, your chances of hearing comments are good, and the chances are especially good if you are a Caucasian mother.

So what’s a newly adoptive mom to do?? If you grew up in a traditional Caucasian family, the chances of you knowing anything at all about cornrows, hot combs, relaxers or twists are slim to none. The differences in washing, brushing and care in general are big and there is an outrageous number of products out there for AA hair. Luckily, there are lots of great resources out there, and with a little practice, even this Irish lass can cornrow and twist with the best of them.

What is especially interesting to me about this blog entry is the adoptive mother’s willingness to articulate her whiteness and to learn to employ what is for her a new technology of race: corn-rowing and twisting of hair. In employing this new skill, interestingly, she does not see herself as being transformed racially. She is only learning a new skill, and new cultural rules. She remains white while her child becomes, in a sense more properly African American. However, trans-racial adoption (domestic and trans-national) does arguably create the (not necessarily realized) possibility of a re-racialized whiteness.

1. Lisa Falvey, “Rejecting Assimilation, Immersion and Chinoserie: Reconstructing Identity for Children Adopted from China,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 4.2 (2008): 275-286. [↩]
2. Andrea Louie, “Pandas, Lions, and Dragons, oh my! How White Adoptive Parents Construct Chineseness,” Journal of Asian American Studies 12.3 (2009): 286. [↩]
3. See Falvey above. [↩]
4. Ann Anagnost, “Scenes of Misrecognition: Maternal Citizenship in the Age of Transnational Adoption,” positions 8.2 (2000): 391. [↩]