Posts Tagged ‘transracial’
Pushing Culture
Response to an Amom about her daughter’s culture:
She has NO desire to learn about Korea at this point and takes offense when I suggest anything cultural
yeah, this IS pretty offensive, actually. I was the same way.
You know – there’s ACADEMICS and there is REALITY.
Transracials are acutely aware of inauthenticity. We question the motives behind everything having to do with suggestions related to race and culture. We get tired of having to put up with ignorance of racial issues, especially when they come from our own families.
CULTURE is something you have to LIVE. It’s commonwealth, born of common struggle and overcoming, which is handed down person to person. YOU can not provide any culture to your child that you do not know yourself, or in a vacuum removed from a cultural environment. It’s impossible/futile. Attempts to display cultural esoterica will come off as caricature. Over interest in culture will appear to be the cultural appropriation it probably is.
Pushing culture based on a person’s race is therefore even more offensive. Here’s this impossible thing you should strive for because you’re (insert nationality here) and because you’re not from here…you’re an alien.
Loss of culture is just one more sadness a transracial adoptee has to deal with. But because it seems so out of reach or so inadequate, a lot of us buried the desire to acquaint ourselves with it, resigned ourselves to that, had to reject it to defend ourselves.
If you aren’t near any people of your child’s birth culture, but are truly interested in your child being exposed to their culture so they don’t feel a loss later, then MOVE to some place where their culture is evident in their environment. It’s a horribly isolating feeling to be the only person of your race where you live, know nothing of that culture, yet bare the burden of representing your entire nation of origin, simply because of the color of your skin.
If you have the good fortune to know any people of your child’s birth culture, THEY can introduce your child to their culture. But it shouldn’t be formally. It has to be real. S/he has to see/experience how they live and develop their own thirst to learn more. S/he has to like hanging around them. Culture camp is another thing entirely. It’s not real, but it is at least a bubble. It can whet an appetite. But it’s just a bubble, and the child will know that too. They’ll no doubt develop an interest in their culture on their own when they are not feeling the tension over it that they do now.
Yes. That’s right. Tension. That you bring it up creates tension.
Repeatedly the worst disservice adoptive parents do as ignorant racists – that’s right, racists – is contribute to the retardation of the child’s exploration of culture by pushing it. I don’t say this to beat adoptive parents up. I say it in all sincerity that they just don’t know – they’re just being dumb. Most racism is just sheer ignorance on people’s part.
Odds are, you are an example. If, for instance, you are interested in knitting, your child might take an interest in your interest. Most adoptive parents aren’t TRULY interested in their child’s birth culture except to gather some exotic things and to try and elevate their children’s specialness. As if we need more reasons to justify how different we are.
Am I making myself clear here? Unless you’re going to fully embrace exploring their culture and making it part of daily life and immersing yourself in that culture and that community, then lay off – keep it pressure-free for your kid, and the kid will probably come to the table on their own. Your job is to provide them an environment with pressure-free access, and to support them when and if they show any interest.
Adoption, pros and cons?
Best Answer – Chosen by Voters
international adoption MAKES YOU FEEL LIKE AN ALIEN from another planet
– you’re almost always in the spotlight: either total strangers will be squealing in delight about how cute you are gushing about adoption or asking probing questions they would never ask if you were white.
– people will have ignorant expectations based on stereotypes about you, and you will always have to explain your background, your lack of history,and your lack of culture to people.
– you will be hounded by people with a fetish for the exotic.
– you will learn about your culture but it will be ACADEMIC and you will be torn between its added imposition and a yearning to fully know it, which is impossible unless you repatriate.
– you will be surrounded by a sea of white faces so your whole world is white faces. you will stop and pause when people approach you differently or respond to you differently. you will dismiss this. and then when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror you will be horrified to want to treat that image differently as well. you will be horrified that the image staring back at you is not the image you are used to seeing. you will despair. you will be always the odd man out. you will want to seek out more like yourself, but you will be embarrassed to be seen with them. because there are no images of your kind in popular culture. because you see how that kind gets treated and you think you are somehow not like them. this is called internalized racism.
international adoption MAKES YOU FEEL ISOLATED
– you will meet other adoptees as children and be thrown in together, but actually you’ve nothing in common.
– you will meet other people of your culture, but there’s no way to connect to them. they will speak to you in their tongue. you will awkwardly explain you can’t speak in their tongue/your should-be tongue. they will walk away, disappointed in you and sad for you.
– you can not entertain searching for your birth mother, because she is buried deep within another country, a country where you can’t communicate, a place teeming with those people.
– your parents will be proud of themselves and what they did by getting you. because you are different looking, you will have to suffer that pride by your very presence every time anyone sees you together.
– your parents will want to talk about adoption, but you know they can’t handle anything negative you might feel about it. and you’re too young to verbalize it. you suck it up because you have to. you have to deny the reality of your difference and thereby negate any of the problems associated with being different. you have to fabricate a false front that can handle everything with cheery optimism. you become the good will ambassador for adoption, but it’s a lie. that’s a lonely place to be.
international adoption eventually MAKES YOU ASK QUESTIONS
– why did my parents have to rip a child from its culture?
– what kind of rescue fantasies did they have, and are they valid?
– what does charity mean? how charitable is adoption, anyway?
– what is my birthmother’s story? was my adoption ethical? did my parents check into this?
– what were they trying to gain/proove by choosing this radical route?
– who did they think they were?
– was i just a toy for purchase?
adoption hurts – we walk around with no beginning to our stories, no connection to anything, devoid of roots, dropped here as if we truly were aliens.
international adoption hurts even more
– there’s so much more lost, and it’s irretrievable.
– we’d rather our countries had helped our mothers
– we’d rather our extended families had had access to take care of us
– we’re outraged to learn very few children are real orphans
– we’re outraged that so many relinquishments are based on temporary economic hard times.
– we’re outraged that the people who run non-profit adoption agencies board members make six figure incomes
– we’re outraged at the hidden costs of adoption and that people are profiteering by our sale
– we don’t appreciate how adoption siphons off the problem of out of wedlock childbirth, when the countries could address these problems with adequate birth control and social programs but adoption allows them to shirk their responsibility to their own people.
– we’re outraged that there is a market to exploit all these
– we’re outraged that the so-called potential adoptive parents who claim charity as their purpose would not bother to sponsor families to avoid relinquishment.
– we’re outraged that the cost of one adoption could save multiple entire families in the country the child comes from.
– we’re outraged that the civil rights of adoptees get violated daily, that their histories are fabricated, that their names are changed, that their birth records are tampered with, and that they are denied access to their records.
– we’re outraged adoptive parents do not do their home-work, or choose to ignore unethical practices.
please adopt ethically.
please adopt domestically.
please adopt one of the children passed over here because they are no longer babies.
Are view of interracial adoption different in various parts of the US?
my husband and i are white, we are looking to adopt. the race factor isn’t that big of an issue to us.
we live in central california, and we see bi-racial couples and childeren all the time, and no one seems to be bothered by it.
is it different in other parts of the US? and why
because it doesn’t seem to make a diffence in our area, what is you opinion on us adopting a child of another race?
and does the race matter?
Best Answer – Chosen by Asker
sadly, i think the fact that it’s even up for discussion indicates what an uneasy relationship we all have with the topic of race, much less when we are forced to deal with it’s ism in our lives…
i do not believe racism can be narrowed down by region anymore. we live in a mobile culture, and people with bias have been broadcast from sea to shining sea. and the nature of racism has changed, because it is aware of it’s public face, so its manifestation is more subtle and nuanced. you never can know when you will meet it or what form it will take. but it lingers. it is everywhere. in practice, we have not caught up with the ideal of “we are the world” yet.
even in a cosmopolitan city your children will encounter racism. but in a cosmopolitan city, there too will your children encounter more people to identify with. even in a city, there are regional differences. i live in a major city, but its cosmopolitan has moved to the edges of the urban center, so the center is now predominantly an economically advantaged racial mono-culture, while various races are forced by economics or by choosing community to hug the city’s margins. the racial divide is now a fifteen minute drive by car. it is the inverse of the white flight found during the genesis of surburban developments.
and if you travel to the rural areas, an hour drive by car, race and economic class become even more distinct and separated. i don’t believe there is more racism there, just that it is more obvious.
odds are that, even with your best efforts, you will never be able to offer an experience that can give your child adequate access to their race’s experience, as your race might be the limiting factor for entry into a racial community. no matter how open and supportive you are with your children, you will not be able to shield them from society recognizing and remarking on how different they are from you. this will come in the form of celebrity, curiosity, criticism, hostility, or second class status. and no matter where you live, your child will encounter subtle and sometimes overt racism. nor will your experiences dealing with race differences in any way match or effect you in the same way it effects your child. this will take its toll, but it will be their own private burden to deal with. so yes, race matters. it hurts a lot. it hurts in ways that deeply alter your self esteem, and the subtle variety takes years to recognize and dissect in order to understand why you feel bad.
i will not speak about my own experience at this time, but i will share the story of an african-american male adopted friend. his well meaning caucasian parents adopted him believing their love and understanding would cancel out the race factor. he was considered too white by the black minority where he grew up. he was considered too black by the white majority where he grew up. (this was a liberal, open-minded community) and though his parents tried to be color blind and provide a color blind world view for him, the truth was his world was color focused. because even if there is no hatred and the society is accepting, the fact is that people still address and relate to people of color differently. it wasn’t until he was in high school where some african american sisters took pity on him and helped TEACH him how to fit in better as an african american male that he began to stop feeling like an alien. all of which was to the detriment of his place in white society and to his relationship with his adoptive family, both of which he rejected to be more fully black. he spent his adult life very angry over having been put in this avoidable situation, and it wasn’t until a nervous breakdown that he finally came to terms with his adoption and forgave his parents.
this is a stark example. however, most of us transracial adoptees have parallel paths. i believe, if given a choice, most of us would have preferred to be placed in a home that matched racially.
here’s some interesting commentary on YouTube:
struggles for identity
struggles for identity 10 years later
Adoption Survivor 