Claudia Castañeda,
"Adopting Technologies: Producing Race in Trans-racial Adoption"
(page 4 of 5)
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."[10]
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.[11]
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."[12]
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."
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