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: culture
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 […]
****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 […]
“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 […]
Last night I made the unfortunate decision to watch the last 15 minutes of the movie Orphan which was showing on one of the Gulf satellite stations. By coincidence, this was in the search phrases this morning. My punishment perhaps—moreso than the movie in and of itself? In any case, the question is open for […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Some 30 years ago when I was a jerky Jersey Boy listening to new-wave and post-punk music in an effort to be “alternative” and “rebellious” (within the safe limits of suburbia of course) the English band The Beat came out with a sub-song to their “Whine and Grind” entitled: “Stand Down Margaret” [ link ]: […]
In the post discussing the devolution of adoption [ link ], at the heart of what was either seen as horrifying or else a cause for viral reposting was the mediation of an adopted child for public consumption. I am intrigued here because I have often been threatened by adoptive parents either directly or via […]
I finished reading Adam Hine’s (2010) Duncan the Wonder Dog (Show One) today, and one of the things it does is not only to have animals to talk but actually to center the “values” of the story from the animal point of view. (I have a longer review of the book here; there are some […]
For some reason one of the Saudi channels on my pirate-satellite-cable service keeps showing the horrid movie Australia with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. I find that their presence in the movie (as adoptive parents) makes it doubly offensive, especially as concerns the destruction of the Aboriginal population via cultural re-education and adoption. I realized […]
This was in today’s search phrases: …wearing items that identify an individual with a culture outside his or her adoptive country slows down the assimilation process…” God forbid we wish to slow down assimilation. Question open to interpretation, but as a starting point, do you “wear items” that identity with your original culture?
This comment came in on the RAD discussion, and I thought it expanded nicely into a topic of discussion on its own: Got to your Twitter feed somehow and have been reading some of your articles and wanted to share something that I guess is not necessarily on topic, some points resonated with me. I […]
Over the years I’ve been cataloguing blogs of adoptive parents who in any way mention dolls. For example, here is a site [link] where the adoptive mother is looking to purchase an “Asian” doll (whatever that even means) for the VietNamese girl currently in her care. Another [link] allows a “mother” (scare quotation marks theirs) […]
Transracialeyes 