The conscious articulation and production of race in trans-racial adoption can include an explicit reference not just to culture, but also to racism. In the context of U.S. racism, racio-cultural identity becomes a necessary antidote to the harm that racism will necessarily cause to non-white children adopted into white families. As M. Elizabeth Vonk puts it in an article in the journal Social Work titled “Cultural Competence for Transracial Adoptive Parents”:
Both supporters and critics of the practice [of trans-racial adoption] strongly recommend that TRA [trans-racially adoptive] parents need to acquire the attitudes, skills and knowledge that enable them to help their children develop positive racial attitudes and survival skills for life in a racist society.” 1
The turn to “cultural competence” is offered as one way to ensure that children develop such skills. But how effective is this approach?
In her work on Chinese adoptees and their families, Lisa Falvey identifies the problematic assumptions behind the immersion model in cultural terms, writing that:
Although idealistic in nature, to approach “integration,” parents must first be willing to understand that culture is not transmitted through commodification. Second, parents must realize that no matter how many Chinese culture classes to which their children are exposed, these classes cannot replace “real” exposure to a culture, Chinese or otherwise. […] At best, this cultural education cannot make up for actual cultural transmission.
Falvey establishes a difference here between “authentic” and “inauthentic” cultural transmission that has its own problems, but I want to focus on her proposed solution, the “integration” model, which, she argues, “would offer adoptees optimal choices to either embrace or reject identities (either American or their country’s of birth) at will.” In addition to resolving the problem of imposing an essentialized, Orientalist culture on adoptees who in Falvey’s account often actively resist this imposition in favor of claiming an “authentic” American identity, the “integration” model is more explicitly resistant to racism than the immersion model. Falvey writes:
Integration … asks that adoptive parents begin to challenge sites of difference, to agitate effectively for change, to stand up to Orientalism in all of its forms. Even the most simple act of refusing to answer the “where is she from … no, where is she really from?” question with anything but the child’s American hometown is an act of defiance that shifts the dialogue away from obsessing on “the other.” […] In the end, and most importantly, national origin and ethnicity should not be held as determinants of “Americanness.” […] White families should be motivated to consider how much of their desire to instill Chinese culture is reactionary and how much is based in pride. 2
It’s clear that Falvey’s identification of the problems of trans-racial adoption is particular to the case of Chinese adoptions and rightly so. Her articulation of the problem of race as it dovetails with culture also identifies more generally the burden placed on trans-racially adopted children of performing racio-cultural “otherness” for a white audience that denies them the privilege of full belonging and unproblematized national identity offered to their white counterparts.
While Falvey’s approach certainly seems like an improvement, it’s not clear what would count as “real” exposure to a culture, and how such exposure might help to mitigate against trans-racially adopted children’s experience of racism. So long as race can be displaced by culture in the guise of a celebratory multiculturalism that disavows or erases racism, a strictly culturally based approach, whether it seeks to curb or instill culture. Louie notes that even though adoptive parents of Chinese girls “came to the realization that despite the generally positive image of Asian girls, their child could not easily merge into an ethnic American cultural identity because of her racial difference,” they were also tempted to “fall back on culture as a means of addressing the potential racism their children may face.” 3 Again, as Louie also points out, this aspect of adoption draws from broader U.S. politics that “celebrate culture at the expense of addressing the inequalities surrounding race.”
