I recently received an email from an old mailing list that I guess I’m still on because I presented at their conference a while back. It was promoting an online discussion of a train wreck of a book written by E. Kay Trimberger, entitled Creole Son [sic]. Everything about the event outlined in the email […]
Category Archives: Adoptee Roundtable
We are, I believe, currently witnessing the adoption equivalent of the resurgent and unapologetic racism and classism found elsewhere in society as white supremacy and fascism “unstructure” themselves and present fully within dominant discourses. By this I mean to say that there are adopters who present themselves as “perfected caregivers”, despite issues of race or class. There are adopters who no longer hide their loathing of the children temporarily in their care. They no longer feign guarding their privacy, or pretend that they are acting beneficently or charitably. They no longer are attempting to uphold their expected performance.
Adoption is complex. All of it. And sometimes we, as adoptees, don’t fully understand how complex it is until we lose our adoptive parents. Because many times, our adoptive parents, good or bad, are the only people who moored us to existence.
I live in Canada now, and the recent news has been talking about the country’s senate’s hearings and report on the Baby Scoop targeted destruction of Indigenous communities here via adoption: [link] and [link]. Much talk about “healing”, and “moving forward”, etc. Australia did something similar 10 years ago [link]. I’ll hold off on adding […]
It’s been two months since I’ve returned Stateside, and once again I am acutely aware of my sense of belonging in this country. In the corners of New Jersey that I grew up in, I am luckily not made aware of my “painted bird” [link] status. But trips to Eastern Pennsylvania (where my brothers live) […]
I came across this article I haven’t been able to unpack yet. It seems to tap into one of the arguments promoting transracial adoption, and I thought it would be a great topic for discussion here. transracial adoptees, your thoughts? If babies were randomly allocated to families would racism end?
Prior to 2013, I was considered, by some, to be an adoption activist as I wrote and presented about historic trauma, and the role of legislation in determining legitimacy as a family, a person, a representative of an ethnic group. Adoptions were bad, staying within family/community was good. But then a funny thing happened on […]
A question from a fellow adoptee: My question for other adoptees is, what have your experiences been as far as “coming out” as adopted is concerned? For instance, I am an adoptee completely estranged from my parents for six years, but a lot of my friends and coworkers did not know anything about my family […]
Over the years I’ve received much in the way of hateful missives, personal attacks, threats, libelous statements, etc. Some I reply to, some I ignore, some I seek legal counsel concerning. After a recent uptick in such communication, I realized something about the nature and sublimated message of them, which perhaps serves as a “message” […]
In a previous post [link], Lucy explores the idea of abuse that can be stated is functional to adoptive parents withholding information from a child temporarily in their care. I didn’t want to hijack that post, so I’m hoping to expand on that here a bit. If we define the systemic displacement, dispossession, and disinheritance […]
Amy’s comment on knowing more about Korean cooking than her compatriots got me thinking about food and culture/identity, especially because we’ve already discussed this in terms of the negative of racist food analogies [link]. I mentioned to my sister (a pastry chef/wedding cake baker) the other day that I really missed our “first Sunday” monthly […]
Have you ever used or contemplated using one of the DNA services that promises to find ancestors/relatives, such as 23AndMe? Why or why not? What changes in terms of your own understanding of adoption when you think about yourself on this, the genetic level? Expand at will….
I came across a list of books targeting children as the audience with the subject being transracial adoption [link]. Two questions. Can you now imagine or consider that these might have been helpful/hurtful reading as a child? What books did you turn to (consciously or not-so) to help you deal with your adoption and/or these […]
“There’s a world waiting for you,” sang Nina Simone in “Young, Gifted, and Black.” We know that Simone longed to be part of the musical academy, but was rejected by the Curtis Institute of Music for the fact of her race. This narrative of “fitting in”, or attempting to fit in to the dominant mode […]
Whether cliché or heartfelt, we often speak or hear of the adoptee search as being a “journey”, implying a destination. I’ve often said that the journey replaces the destination, but recently for reasons having simply to do with sheer mortality, I find myself a bit more desperate to know family, to know origins. Perhaps this […]
Transracialeyes 