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 […]
Tag Archives: racism
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 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 […]
Jae Ran Kim has referred to Asian adoptees as “the model minority of the model minority”; this came up in an item discussing the arrival of a French Korean adoptee to the government ministerial level in that country [link]. We’ve also discussed the “glass ceiling” which might be described as racism suffered out of the […]
Comments on this, the movie, the musical, the comic strip, the mediation of orphans, popular culture and adoption? [link]
Can you share any “glass-ceiling” moments you might have had in your life when you realized the limits of “meritocracy”, “working hard to succeed”, and other assimilationisms?
****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 […]
This tweet recently appeared on Twitter: I WILL constantly #judge you if you #adopt a child and constantly refer to them as: “my #black #adopted child”. It was followed up by the above question. I’ll leave it open to your interpretation and response.
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 […]
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 […]
I hope not to retread overly well-worn material (about the problems or issues of identity), but I feel some threads currently adrift in the ether might usefully get woven together in (something that at least might seem for a moment) a new configuration. I apologize if this gets longer than desirable (the long post-title makes […]
I feel it almost gratuitous or senseless to post this update on the legal fandango, all done openly and above board, in the public theft of Veronia from the Cherokee Nation, but nonetheless, the discourse of the article still seems so rich and impenetrable (see here): In the context of that “victory,” however, what I […]
I found this sitting in the “pending” pile; Girl4708 has given me permission to update and post. She originally wrote: As I approved another comment today on a blog post I wrote about Woody Allen, I wondered about tan fever, brown fever, and black fever as Asian adoptions decline and other countries become sources for […]
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 […]
We’ve already discussed food analogies that are used as metaphors for interracial adoption; we’ve discussed how pet adoption is similar to human adoption. Now it’s time to talk about metaphorical comparisons to animals used to “help” the transracially adopted child [link]: Despite the grumblings and protests of the other animals, Baby Brown Bear learns family […]
Transracialeyes 