The Distance Traveled: Reading Leinaweaver and Castañeda on Politics, Privilege, and Race in Transnational Adoption

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.¹ 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.² 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,³ 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.⁴

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,”⁵ 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.”⁵)) 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.⁵ 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,”⁵ 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.”⁶

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.”⁵ 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.⁷ 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.”⁵

1. See Laura Briggs, “Adoption, Immigration, and Privatization: Transnational Transformations in Family,” S&F Online 7.3 (2009). Briggs asserts that “[A]doption to the U.S. is serving as a privatized welfare system for the ferociously neoliberal Guatemalan state. This is bitterly fitting, given the U.S. role in defeating other visions of the state in Guatemala.” [↩]
2. See for example: Guatemala Birthfamilies. [↩]
3. See Leinaweaver.  [↩]
4. See, for example, Pat Goudvis’ documentary video on Guatemalan adoption, Goodbye Baby (New Day Films, 2005) for discussion by Guatemalan interviewees of some of the conflicts pregnant and childrearing women confront, and intra-country arguments about adoption. See also Henry Frundt, Fair Bananas (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2009) for a discussion of toxic environmental exposures, unfair labor practices, and sexual harassment faced by women banana workers, and union responses to these. [↩]
5. See Castañeda. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
6. Eng and Han, “Desegregating Love: Transnational Adoption, Racial Reparation, and Racial Transitional Objects,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 7.2: (2006): 147-172, 156. [↩]
7. See Castañeda’s endnotes for full references. [↩]