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: social injustice
In Jung’s Symbols of Transformation, at one point he remarks on the irregular origins of birth for heroes in many sacred traditions: The hero is not born like an ordinary mortal because his birth is rebirth from the mother-wife. That is why the hero so often has two mothers. As Rank has shown with a […]
I hope, if proposing this question re-treads material already exhausted previously, that revisiting it has also a quality of refreshing it. But also, to avoid taking up a lot of space with any sort of startled “discovery” of the issue on my part, I intend only to submit it to the collective intelligence of the […]
A friend recently asked me: I was wondering how you would suggest I respond when people trot out the, ‘don’t be selfish just wait 9 months and give your child up for adoption’ BS. Besides the other things I thought to respond with, I also came up with: “Whoa, really? Your solution to the ‘problem’ […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
My question to you relates to your comment[s] above about foster care [in the previous question]. Would you please elaborate on what you mean by a shift in focus regarding foster care? I should also add that my husband was raised in a foster home for 8 years (ages 6 through 14). He says he […]
I am currently working with a group locally that does research for returning adoptees to Lebanon, similar to such organizations in other source countries. We are going through my collected bogus paperwork, bogus passport, and bogus references and one by one crossing out the information contained in them as being useful or not (mostly not). […]
[Originally asked at Yahoo! Answers]
Transracialeyes 