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: class warfare
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 […]
The following arrives at the point of asking: In the face of too much irresolvable complexity, must we simply say “fuck it” and accept and live by the (untenable) premise that we can go on living “without culture” by taking whatever we pick up (individually) to have the sustaining and grounding quality that actual culture […]
“It takes a village to raise a child” is probably the single-most profound or useful proverb as far as recognizing the needs of children growing up. Capitalism presupposes that villages need not exist, should not exist, must be destroyed. So, there you see the very heart of the critique–around the world where the State interrupted […]
From here, we have just a brief excerpt from an article about suicide (and other health risks) amongst indigenous people around the world: Some of the reports alarming statistics include, “In the United States, a Native American is 600 times more likely to contract tuberculosis and 62 per cent more likely to commit suicide than […]
In a previous question [link] I asked whether you as an adoptee would repatriate yourself if your place of birth afforded you some kind of re-entry to the country, language, culture, etc. Girl4708 replied at the time: The power differential on a smaller scale doesn’t change: the haves will always overpower the have-nots. As an […]
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 […]
I’d like to pick up on the discussion in the item “Adoption as House Arrest” [ link ] where we were discussing whether formerly children might have been “better off” in an orphanage. My adoptive father’s parents and uncles were brought up in orphanages in New York City, and I think this was a core […]
I have argued long and hard that there is little difference between domestic and international adoption, if we consider that often the class differential of domestic adoption is from an internal “Third World” of poverty and the exploitation of those from this realm. I have argued long and hard that if we shift to notions […]
This question comes from the title of an article at Counter Punch [ link ], and I feel it is addressed to adoptive parents in one sense, coming as they do from the class with the will and the privilege to change things domestically if they so desired. Here is a quote from the article: […]
I recently stumbled across a real-estate listing for my old apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with an asking price of $4,000 a month, which is double the rent my sister and I were paying when it was still rent-stabilized many years ago, and we were paying 50% of our income toward the […]
Many adoptees who have returned to their places of birth can identify I think with the reality of countries such as Lebanon, which boasts 7,000+ “non-governmental organizations”, which is one NGO for every 500 people who find themselves within this country’s current borders. We often joke here that the millions of dollars that these NGOs […]
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 […]
I was talking to a former student of mine who has taken to traveling through South Asia. This time around, she was heading to Nepal, and she met a man there who was formerly working in Iraq. She asked why he had to return, and he replied that after the U.S. invasion, much of the […]
I’d like to ask a question here that reflects a concept that has come up from time to time, but as is often the case, it is overshadowed by our focus on race and ethnicity in terms of transracial/transcultural/transnational adoption. That concept is one of the division of class. I’ve been thinking about it more […]
Transracialeyes 