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 […]
Tag Archives: backlash
In our postmodern Occidental milieu, the articulation of new “meta” levels (of market) becomes necessary. Thus, it seems inevitable that extended organizational networks[1] to facilitate the facilitation of adoption[2] would come to exist,[3] along with the usual sorts of fees, such as $395 to attend a mandatory orientation workshop before even being allowed access to […]
****This is my first post with TRE and I would like to share my gratitude to Daniel and the other contributors for this space. And for you, readers. I have this memory from 3rd grade. On the surface, it’s a fairly mundane image; I am staring at a piece of paper with a large circle […]
NOTE: to address this issue, I start with an analogy to white privilege, which in any case represents an integrally related aspect of the whole. Does this seem like a fruitful analogy? What don’t you like about it? And does the alternative–the demonic, as opposed to the insane or the immoral–seem like a helpful alternative […]
In a previous post, I asked what strategies we have discovered for addressing those sorts of occasions when we find ourselves face-to-face with with people expressing “opinions” (they almost always call them opinions) that dehumanize, wound, or reprise in the present patterns of abuse associated with our experience of adoption that occurred in the past. […]
In reading some of the posts on birthdays, in experiencing as a result some of my own vast, unexpected sadness behind that topic as well as reading it in others, I saw how the trauma expressed, though it references and refers to the past, seems pointedly to occur in the present. This makes me suspect […]
The controversy over Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird remains, but for me the central image of the novel still holds: A birdcatcher paints one of his flock in bright colors; seen as foreign by the other birds, it is attacked and killed. This is the image that occurred to me after reading a news […]
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 […]
A researcher, or perhaps a journalist, Kathryn Boyce has recently written an expose, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (published 23 April 2013), on how evangelical Christians are preaching the new gospel of adoption. I haven’t read the book; I’m flagging it down here in case someone wants to. My […]
“Through me you pass into the city of woe.” —Dante As adoptees who live on the razor’s edge between places, we are often asked to broker for or engage on behalf of those who are looking for roots as well, either as adoptees, or more often for me I must say, adoptive parents wanting to […]
Elsewhere on the site we have explored the “cost” of adoptee activism [ link ], and we have heard some stories of closed-down blogs and the like. Certain adoptee sites have erased past posts, or willingly avoid or openly mock the so-called “radical” in acts of self-censorship. Much of this is in the realm of […]
Over at Sumeia Williams’ great blog Ethnically Incorrect Daughter [ link ], there is an item discussing the case of Heidi Bubb, and the documentary that was made about her return as on adoptee to Viet Nam, Daughter From Da Nang. In response to something I posted there ages ago came this response: You are […]
A few years after I arrived in Beirut, a French-language daily published an overview of us as adoptees looking for our roots in Lebanon. It was very “poor orphans” in tone, and it didn’t really communicate what I was feeling at the time. Later, when the Arche de Zoë scandal broke in Chad/France, I wrote […]
We, adoptees, cannot force P/APs to listen to what we have to say. We can remark, on the other hand, how much what we have to say disturbs the house of cards that represents the mythologies built up around adoption. How many of us have been erased from discussions at such web sites as Canada […]
The transracial adoptee who made this comment must have misunderstood the subject matter, as the title was, “Adoptee repatriation: Would you go back?” Because it is typical of attacks adoptees who question and/or don’t 100% agree with the status quo encounter, we thought it would be appropriate to open it up to thorough examination… Submitted […]
Transracialeyes 