I’ll keep this short. At this time last year I found out my story and visited my mother’s crypt where I keened for the one I cannot remember. At the same time, my cousin’s father contacted my eldest half-brother, hoping to establish a connection. My half-brother rejected this, we imagine due to worries about someone […]
One of my former students had a lengthy review of the movie Lion in her Twitter feed, and I was really taken with her analysis of the movie. I thought I’d open up a discussion on the film here. Did you see it? Will you see it? What did you think of it?
Colin Kaepernick was a mixed-race newborn when he was adopted transracially in Wisconsin close to three decades ago. He has been candid concerning his experiences growing up different, as a perceived-as black young man. Recently he was in the news for refusing to stand up for the national anthem during a football game [link]. There’s […]
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?
My daughter has asked me for assistance, and I thought it would be good to ask the community here: It seems that in every era since International Adoption became a thing, that it’s become a consideration for family planning, especially among the socially conscientious. Today it’s become the defacto solution for those who are interested […]
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 […]
I don’t remember the first time someone told me I was White. But I definitely remember the last. It was the summer of my junior year in college and I was a new student orientation leader. My university was diverse but mostly segregated, and this staff was about half White and half Black – plus […]
I want to ask your thinking about the claim that childhood in North America (at least) has been making children into consumers for decades and that essential to that project has been the “constant stimulation of desire and longing.” Do you see practices underlying adoption and donor conception that reflect that kind of stimulation of […]
All the buzz in social media right now is about an NAACP official who turns out to not be black as claimed. She was born to a white couple and raised with black adoptees. There have been other articles wondering whether or not being transracial is analogous to being transgendered. And other articles about syndromes of delusion. Rachel […]
Most intercountry adoptees reading on the internet are gen x’ers or millennials. Very few are baby boomers, because we were the first to have been subjected to this social experiment en masse, and we are aging. And, if the rest of older adoptees are like me, we are exceptionally (acquaintances might even say irrationally) afraid of […]
We’ve spoken about ghosts here and there. Lately, with reunion looming, I feel like I am haunting my own life, finding might-have-been footsteps; meeting could-have-been friends and, inch’allah, even family. But the metaphor is bothering me. A ghost is the immaterial which haunts the physical plane of the past, of what was. What is it […]
Like many people here in America, currently in racial turmoil over grand jury decisions not to indict police officers who have killed unarmed black men, I shared this image on facebook. A few days later, articles appeared berating the photo’s manipulation and message. Clearly, other people think harder than I do before sharing. The first […]
The metaphor of “coming out” has been used elsewhere as a way to describe the experience of disclosing one’s status as adopted. What do you think about how this metaphor illuminates and distorts being open about one’s adoption experience?
I wrote an article (published) that I’ve posted on Academia dot edu called “Human Nature and Truthfulness in Adoption and Donor Conception Practice”. The article has received 49 hits in the last 30 days from Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, Kumar, Gurgaon, Suri, Mumbai, Vijayawada, etc. The search terms when identified are something like “to be truthful is […]
Transracialeyes 