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Claudia Castañeda,
"Adopting Technologies: Producing Race in Trans-racial Adoption"
(page 3 of 5)
Technologies of racialization are powerful in trans-racial adoption
in particular, because:
- the person in question is a child, who has relatively
little power over the conditions of its existence and;
- 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.[6]
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."[7]
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."[8]
So too, Ann Anagnost has argued that the
focus on culture can take the form of a "domestication of differences
emptied of history."[9]
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.
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