Karen Winkler,
"The Distance Traveled: Reading Leinaweaver and Castañeda on Politics,
Privilege, and Race in Transnational Adoption"
(page 2 of 4)
As I was researching my own adoption options a decade ago, I met
prospective adopters who said things like: "I plan to adopt from China
because I feel a real affinity for Chinese art," or, "I love Chinese
food." In Guatemala City, at a big hotel where families waited days (or
weeks) with their adopted infants for necessary documents, I breakfasted
with many people who fit my idea of typical, white-bread, Christian,
Midwestern families. Greeting them each morning in the hotel's
restaurant, our brown babies attached to us in baby-slings, I often
thought: how in the world are they going to raise that Latina baby? But
their parental excitement worked the edges of my stereotypes and took
down my (unearned) sense of superiority, and I was struck by the
existence of an entire universe of adoptive families (including
"Manhattan moms," and dads, and single people, and LGBTQ couples), many
of whom had struggled to save the money for an adoption (as I had), and
committed to parenting all sorts of children in all sorts of places.
(Among the Manhattan moms I know who have adopted transnationally are
Iranian, Haitian, and Cuban-Chinese women.) This is not to say that most
of the white parents I encountered were conscious of the ideas and
feelings about race they may have carried with them into this parenting
project. A friend who also adopted a Guatemalan infant recalls numerous
admiring comments from other adopting parents about how "pretty and
light-skinned" her baby daughter was; they seemed envious that
her child would be able to "pass" with no racialized mark of her
Guatemalan origin. Examples abound of adoptive white parents, whether
well-meaning or not, professional, middle class, or working class, doing
and saying stupid, racist things (even if unconsciously)—in Manhattan,
in Minnesota, in Texas, everywhere. As Castañeda points out (see
later discussion), the traditional adoption narrative of race-blindness
ironically may serve to blind parents to racism. White adoptive parents
of children of color (whether through domestic or transnational
adoption) generally start out with the same relation to white privilege
as other white people, and the same ignorance about the rest of the
world that so many Americans share. Yet in creating "global families,"
they open up the possibility of a different relation to whiteness,
and to international solidarity.
It seems to me that a crucial part of our job as feminists is to
figure out how to move open-minded people to consider just the sort of
analysis Leinaweaver offers of the ethical imperative in transnational
adoption to value not only "the best interest of the child," but the
interests of other mothers, other peoples, other nations. In rejecting
the dominant discourse of adoption as all-good and always benevolent
(the rhetoric favored by the adoption establishment), we need to avoid
the self-righteousness that sometimes sneaks into our academic
discussions, and acknowledge the deeply felt, intimately protective love
between adoptive parents and their children. Only then will we be able
to figure out how to work with them as potential allies in the struggles
against racism and inequality on a global scale, and recognize them as
important forces to support demands for robust child welfare programs in
sending countries, in addition to the ethical regulation of
adoption.[8]
Many adoptive parent listservs and comment boards are filled with
discussions of searching for birth mothers and first families, sending
funds to support other children or paying for their educations,
contributing money to child welfare organizations, and arguing about
ethical responsibilities.[9]
To these parents, the suffering of other
mothers is a conflictual part of their everyday consciousness, and the
sense of loss often haunts their family experience. If this is "a mildly
radical idea," as Leinaweaver suggests it may
be,[10] then we must see
many of these parents as already radicalized in some way by their
adoption experiences. These online discussions, as well as conferences
and other forums, offer opportunities to learn from transnationally
adopting parents, and to share our scholarship with them to engage
broader political questions (of immigration reform, or fair trade, for
example).
One additional point must be made: Leinaweaver's work in Peru leads
her to point to the variety of formal and informal child welfare
practices around the world that sustain family structures and affective
ties, and she brings this to bear on her discussion of Madonna's foray
into Malawi, suggesting that local, temporary "solutions" to problems of
child rearing would often be preferable to transnational adoption in
terms of protecting the rights and desires of birth parents. Adult
adoptees have also questioned (sometimes angrily) adoption practices
that rupture families of origin. However, crucial recognition of
cultural alternatives to formal adoption (not to mention deep concern
over profiteering, corruption, manipulation, fraud, political terror,
and child theft in transnational adoption—outside the scope of both
Leinaweaver's essay and this response), should not obscure other limits
on women's reproductive integrity and choices in the Third World.
Limited access to birth control (underwritten by the U.S. global gag
rule), the illegality of abortion and/or religious sanctions against it,
domestic and political violence, male prerogatives to have multiple
children to prove masculinity in many cultures, legal and cultural
sanctions that make girl children undesirable, and occupational hazards
to reproductive health, for example, have all made adopting children out
an important option for many women struggling to survive and to make a
better life for their families, and themselves.[11]
Castañeda's essay offers a different take on transnational
adoption, urging us to deconstruct the ways transnationally adopting
families employ "technologies of race" to "re-racialize" their adopted
children. She suggests that "transracial adoption in the U.S. has become
almost coterminous with transnational adoption since the
1990s,"[12]
because white parents adopting domestically have tended to favor
adopting white babies. (This may change now that transnational adoption
has been shut down in several countries, due to changes in sending
nations' regulations and concerns over ethical practices.) In her
analysis of the approaches to race taken up in transracial,
transnational adoption in the U.S., she proposes the idea of
re-racialization to account for the family's interpretation of their
child's difference—the meanings "color" (or "phenotype") and "culture"
take on within the white adoptive family. Analyzing several different
models employed by adoptive families to structure their relationship,
and their child's relationship, to race, she comes to the powerful
conclusion that the problem of race in transracial adoption is
fundamentally a question of the parents' approach to racism.
Before turning to Castañeda's review of the "technologies of
race," I want to take a moment to puzzle over the concept of
"re-racializing" adopted children. It seems to rest on the
slippery foundation that the child is already racialized through some
logic of biological inheritance ("a notion of race as a natural
substance that is passed from the birth mother and father to the child")
that is disrupted in adoption; the child's race is then re-produced by
her adoptive family, according to different "technologies." She states
compellingly that, "To think of adoption as a technology of race is to
identify the process of racialization that takes place through
adoption, understood as a specific—and often material or
materializing—set of practices. It is to understand adoption not simply as
'reflecting' existing forms of racial categorization and attribution,
but as one among many other sites in the U.S. nation that 'makes' race
in particular ways. This approach does not address the biological truth
of race—it has none—but the ways in which race and its categories
are given semiotic and material existence in adoption
discourse."[13]
It is not clear, then, what is at stake for Castañeda in
insisting on the "re" of re-racialization in the models she
describes; she seems ambivalent about just what sort of "racialization"
happens prior to the child's adoption and positioning in the social (and
psychic) space of race in America, and slips back and forth between the
terms "racialization" and "re-racialization" throughout the paper.
According to Castañeda, in the old-fashioned assimilation
model dominant in the 1960s and 1970s, the adoptee's "race" was
denaturalized, and the child thus made available to be absorbed into the
whiteness of the adoptive family. She proposes that an adopted Korean
student who exclaimed, "I'm white ... I'm white!" in her Women's Studies
class quite "naturally" sees herself as white, given the material and
affective practices employed by her
parents.[14] Castañeda
suggests that "feeling white" follows from the parental practice of
ignoring the child's racial origins (her embodied difference from them),
and raising her to "be" white (through social learning)—like them. In
her view, this is a problem for her student mainly insofar as she must
"invoke her whiteness,"[15]
unlike her white peers who assume it
automatically. But what does it mean to "feel white"? How can we
understand this identification with whiteness, or with the white
adoptive parents? What psychic processes does re-racialization entail?
What becomes of the adoptee's material and psychic loss of their first
parents in the process? Eng and Han (2006) describe a psychotherapy
patient who similarly "feels" white, but they posit the concept of
"racial melancholia" to account for the transnational, transracial
child's unconscious identification with her first mother, and
motherland, and the devalued, disavowed racial identifications that may
haunt her idealization of whiteness. Castañeda's analysis of
racialization would benefit from reference to Eng's and Han's elegant
psychoanalytic work on the intrapsychic dimensions of racialization in
transnational adoption—especially the unconscious experience of the
adoptee whose adoptive parents do not reciprocally identify with their
child's losses, but instead maintain a version of "color-blindness" that
fails to recognize her experience and "threatens to redouble racial
melancholia's effects."[16]
In considering other modes of (re)racialization, including what she
terms "immersion" and various culturally-based models (that she
describes in the context of Korean, Chinese, and Latin American
adoption), Castañeda makes the important argument that adoptive
parents see their adoptive children as "being" of a different
racio-cultural heritage, and at the same time "make" or "sustain" their
racio-cultural difference through particular practices. Such practices
range from enactments of selective elements of birth-culture, to
exoticizing their child's difference, to making trips to the country of
origin to enable the child to develop an authentic relationship to her
"conditions of birth."[17]
Castañeda is suspicious of the
"racio-cultural" technological processes that imbue the adopted child
with a cultural identity presumed to be derived from her "homeland"
while displacing racial identifications: the over-riding question she
poses is whether racism will be explicitly articulated and addressed by
adoptive parents in the midst of the celebration of multi-culturalism.
In citing Falvey (2008), Louie (2009), Anagnost (2000) and Yngversson
(2003), Castañeda searches for models of re-racialization through
which adoptive parents can self-consciously resist hegemonic whiteness,
re-racializing themselves by de-centering whiteness in the
family, and helping their children negotiate the problem of racism by
recognizing white supremacy's reach.[18]
My description of my family as
"biracial" in the opening paragraphs of this paper follows, I believe,
Castañeda's idea of ways whiteness may be de-centered.
Castañeda argues that Falvey's model of "integration" offers an
improvement over the immersion model, but this move overlooks the
freighted history of integration in the U.S., and the critique of
integrationist approaches from nationalist perspectives. Her
suggestion, following Yngversson, that families make visible the
"conditions of birth" and the inequalities at work in transnational
adoption, and struggle against racism both locally and globally,
resonates with Leinaweaver's argument. Yet the figure of the birth
mother (first mother) is absent from Castañeda's thinking about
the meanings of the child's racial difference from her adoptive family,
and the process of re-racialization. Castañeda concludes that
trans-racial, transnational adoption does not guarantee that white
parents will re-racialize themselves in what she calls a "resistant
mode," nor does she believe they are any more responsible than other
white people for resisting racism; but she is optimistic that these
families hold possibilities of transformation that will help their
children and "the worlds they all inhabit."[19]
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