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: First Worldism
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 […]
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 […]
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’d like to touch back on to two discussions we’ve had so far, one on nature vs. nurture as posited by Snow Leopard, and the other one having to do with Russian adoptions, and the idea of a second-best race-based adoption, i.e., one that does not (seemingly) require those adopting from having to mythologize their […]
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 […]
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 was visiting with my brother and his family and we went out to a “Chinese” restaurant chain for lunch. As we were dealing with the quasi-Asian menu (Pad Thai in a Chinese restaurant?) a woman walked by with the child now in her care. The girl was from China, and the mother was wearing […]
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 […]
A father regains custody of his child through the Indian Child Welfare Act: http://www.facebook.com/KeepRonnieHome http://www.facebook.com/KeepingVeronica Alaska’s Supreme Court’s ruling on one such case: http://www.courts.alaska.gov/ops/sp-6680.pdf And then there are the adoptive parents: http://www.facebook.com/SaveVeronicaRose Who echo the sentiments of organizations such as this: http://caicw.org/ In the above case race, nation, and culture won. What do transracial adoptees […]
I stumbled across this article in Asia One, which was discussing the appointment of Fleur Pellerin as a minister in the new French government. The article states concerning the Korean-born Frenchwoman: Newspapers in Seoul on Friday splashed frontpages with her picture and carried stories about her life while the ruling New Frontier Party expressed hope […]
We currently live in Portugal (we are US citizens) and have been researching adopting in Portugal. There are orphanages here and the children receive placement with Nationals first if there is availability. I came across your website and found it very different from the majority of the blogs/websites and the view point very interesting. We […]
I was talking to “someone” from a chat 3-4 years ago, and he somehow stumbled across one of my blogs and decided to e-mail me about my adoption privilege and all the benefits associated with it (from an economic standpoint). I told him that “happiness” is merely subjective to the perspective of the person. He […]
How do you feel about white Europeans and Americans living in countries abroad (like in Southeast Asia/China/Africa/Haiti) and adopting children there “domestically”?
Transracialeyes 