Claudia Castañeda,
"Adopting Technologies: Producing Race in Trans-racial Adoption"
(page 2 of 5)
How does racialization take shape in this scenario? Let me begin
with two brief personal stories. Here is the first:
In an Introduction to Women's Studies course, the
students and I were discussing race. I told the students that I made no
assumptions about how they identified themselves racially or culturally,
and that I certainly did not assume that I could know this by looking at
them. In the course of the ensuing discussion, a student said something
like: "I'm white. I was adopted from Korea. But I'm white. I'm
white!"
The second story goes like this:
At a meeting for a queer Latino/a organization, I
introduced myself to one of the co-chairs. In the course of our
discussion, she told me that her parents were white and U.S.-born, and
that they adopted her and her brother as babies from Colombia. She went
on to say that her parents frequently took her to Colombia throughout
her childhood, and that she now went "back home" to Colombia frequently
on her own.
These two stories involve young women of roughly the same age,
adopted as infants by U.S. families at approximately the same time (the
early 1990s). They speak to two ends of the spectrum of the available
approaches to race in the recent U.S history of trans-racial adoption
practice, namely assimilation (in the first story) and immersion (in the
second). In between these two poles lie two other options, "celebrating
plurality," and "balancing act" (of two cultures).[2]
All of these approaches involve processes of re-racialization.
The child is initially racialized according to a notion of race as a
natural substance that is passed from birth mother and father to child,
but this substance is seen as largely incidental. In the first
story—in the assimilation model—the adoptee's race does not carry any
significance beyond the "fact" itself. Consequently, it becomes possible
for the adoptee to simply blend into white culture, to be assimilated
into whiteness. It is not so much that the adoptee is not seen as being
"of" a different race, but rather that in the assimilation model there
is no substantial discourse of race in the process of adoption and
parenting. The "unmarked" category of whiteness therefore has free rein
to do its work. Like my student adopted from Korea, the adoptee is
raised in a white family, more often than not in a predominantly white
neighborhood, and becomes white through the everyday technologies
of childhood that are also technologies of race, or in this case,
of whiteness: books, toys, games, media, school curriculum, and everyday
interactions in which the entire conceptual and visual field
assumes whiteness without ever having to name it as such.
It's hardly surprising, given this process, that my student sees
herself—and legitimately so—as white, and insists upon this
while also knowing that she is likely to be challenged in this claim.
In fact, perhaps the only way in which my student is different
from her neighborhood peers is that she actually identifies explicitly
as white. She does not have the luxury of simply being
white in the same way; she must claim, and in that sense
negotiate her whiteness, and race in general. In other words,
she identifies as white, but she does not enjoy all of the privileges of
whiteness: she must invoke her whiteness.
It is important to note that this might be a far more difficult
process for a black or Latino child than for my student adopted from
Korea, given the hierarchies of race and racism at work in the
U.S.[3]
In her incisive work on trans-national adoption, Sarah Dorow has argued
that within the black-white U.S. economy of race, Asianness becomes a
kind of flexible category of race, edging toward or even classifying as
whiteness when juxtaposed against blackness.[4]
This flexibility makes
it possible to racialize Asian adoptees as white-enough, or as palatably
non-white Asian. Addressing the intersectionality of race and gender in
the case of Chinese adoptees, who are primarily female, David Eng has
further suggested that "the racial management of gender and the gendered
management of race" that "assimilate the Asian adoptee into the intimate
public sphere of the white nuclear family" are bound up with the model
minority myth[5],
making Asian children more desirable than their
non-white counterparts. Clearly, both the adoptees' and the families'
choice of racialization is highly circumscribed by these broader
economies of race.
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