The continual disavowal of race through recourse to culture that works as a technology of race in adoption prompts me to ask: what is the problem of race in trans-racial adoption? In the end, it seems to me that it is precisely the problem of racism. Non-white children must face and negotiate this problem whether they are adopted or not, and white families who adopt children of color, like all white people, can either take on this problem or ignore it. How they take on the problem is, of course, significant—as I hope my discussion shows. The options are neither limitless nor pre-ordained by some biological truth of race. White adoptive adults, families, and communities may employ existing technologies of re-racialization that tend to obscure racism, or they may adopt new ones that undermine white privilege and afford children more open and positive ways of inhabiting the world by recognizing the workings of racism and other inequalities.
I have used the term “adopt” in the prior sentence deliberately, to emphasize the potential that is generated by the process of adoption as compared to biological reproduction as a way of making families. On one hand, trans-racial adoption by white families potentially condenses racism for the adoptee, by situating the child as a child and the only “other” in the heart of whiteness, the domestic space of the nuclear family. In U.S. multicultural forms of difference, whiteness can be re-racialized in a new way, “no longer solely created in opposition to nonwhites, but rather through incorporating … parts of a nonwhite culture into family identities. 1 The child, as I have argued elsewhere, is among the least threatening of such incorporable entities. 2
On the other hand, trans-racial adoption at least potentially offers the possibility of different kinds of re-racialization that open up that very same nuclear family to different kinds of affiliation. Barbara Yngversson further suggests that “[r]oots trips” back the child’s country of origin can enable alternative forms of engagement with otherness for adoptees and their families. To do so effectively requires that adoptees and their families enter into the “eye of the storm” that makes visible all of the inequalities at work—between the birth and adoptive mother/parents, between poor and rich nations. 3 Travel to the birth country does not by itself guarantee such entry. While “benevolent feelings” about the birth mother, country, or culture “evoke the sense that the eye of a storm is a site of calm,” entering the eye of storm entails experiencing the “chaos, [the] shaking up (and opening up [of]) families, persons and nations” that result from taking risks “that we will lose our boundaries, the edges that make our families complete.” 4 What Yngversson calls the “refiguring” of relatedness in this process both takes up and reworks aspects of relatedness “in ways that have the potential to create new forms of consciousness as well as to transform everyday practices of relatedness.” 5
The case of Chinese adoptees who return with their families to spend time playing with children at the orphanages where they were once housed suggests some possibilities for such transformation. As Yngversson suggests, the forging of the adoptees’ relationship to China explicitly and frankly makes visible the very particular and material conditions of their existence, before and after adoption: they were children relinquished for adoption under the one-child policy in China, who are now relatively privileged U.S. children in white families. They and their families create a relationship with the child’s conditions of birth not through a reified notion of Chinese culture, but through engagement with their counterparts in the Chinese orphanage in real time and space. (Perhaps this is part of what Falvey means by “authenticity.”) In the scheme of things, where the inequalities on many levels that enable and produce trans-racial and trans-national adoption are at work, this approach seems at the very least a step in the right direction. Confronting issues of racism on a global and local scale could certainly form part of the engagement that these families undertake.
Such an engagement might include constituting trans-racial adoption as a technology that re-racializes not only the adoptee, but also the white family. Anagnost suggests that even in China-U.S. adoptions, which benefit from the “flexible racialization” of Asianness, “the haunting of difference” can “pull parents into initial and uncomfortable encounters with white privilege and racial inequalities at home” that can, little by little, work toward a “dismantling of the racial assumptions that gird the ‘baggage-free’ child and celebrated multicultural family.” 6 In this case, the shift is from hegemonic whiteness to an “other” kind of whiteness, one that is potentially resistant to the hegemonic form, one that is no longer assumed as the given against which the trans-racial adoptee’s must be “colored in,” so to speak. Instead, this whiteness is self-consciously white, and resistant to the hegemonic mode.
Trans-racial adoption in no way guarantees nor requires such transformation, but white adoptive parents and families may arguably re-racialize themselves in a resistant mode before, during, and/or after the adoption process begins, in ways that can only benefit their newly adoptive child and the worlds they all inhabit. Remembering that trans-racially adoptive parents do not by themselves create the conditions under which they must negotiate race, this is not a task simply for these parents. It is a task for everyone who occupies a position of privilege in a society where the ugly fact of racism remains, and where technological innovations in the making of racial hierarchies continue to proliferate.
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Global Dimensions of ART – Podcast Description
Iris Lopez introduces and moderates this panel discussion on “Global Dimensions” of ART practices which features speakers Dana-Ain Davis, Laura Briggs and Claudia Castañeda. Increased demand for assisted reproductive technology (ART) and transnational adoption has been propelled by a number of factors, including the development of new technologies and changes in familial form – such as childrearing in second or third marriages; lesbian, gay, and transgendered families; and delays in childbearing and subsequent difficulties in conception – that make ART helpful. Other relevant factors include environmental changes that have negatively affected fertility levels, new levels of transnational migration and interaction that have fueled awareness of babies available for and in need of adoption, and concerns about genetic diseases and disabilities. Effectively, the various imperatives and the desires, both cultural and personal, that the use of ART fosters and responds to, have created a “baby business” that is largely unregulated and that raises a number of important social and ethical questions. Do these new technologies place women and children at risk? How should we respond ethically to the ability of these technologies to test for genetic illnesses? And how can we ensure that marginalized individuals, for example, people with disabilities, women of color, and low-income women, have equal access to these new technologies and adoption practices? And, similarly, how do we ensure that transnational surrogacy and adoption practices are not exploitative? These questions and many others on the global social, economic and political repercussions of these new forms of reproduction were the focus of this year’s Scholar and Feminist Conference, “The Politics of Reproduction: New Technologies of Life,” which took place on February 28, 2009 at Barnard College.
- Louie, 294.[↑]
- Claudia Castañeda, Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).[↑]
- Barbara Yngvesson, “Going ‘Home:’ Adoption, Loss of Bearings, and the Mythology of Roots,” Social Text 74 (2003): 24.[↑]
- Yngversson, 24.[↑]
- Barbara Yngvesson, “Placing the ‘Gift Child’ in Transnational Adoption,” Law & Society Review 36.2 (2002): 227-256.[↑]
- Anagnost, 375.[↑]
