Excerpt: The problems facing adoptees of colour and white adoptees are different in many ways but no matter their colour, adoptees inevitably face the burdens of race.
It was, as always, my immense pleasure to do a podcast with Plan A magazine, with Adam Goodman. This one was on “Celebrity, Adoption, and Power.” I’ve written on adoptions a few times (a list is at the end), and Adam has been podcasting and thinking about the subject for a while (he’s also a Korean adoptee, as he has discussed in public).
Our conversation was both wide-ranging and deep, and we touched upon several points, from different angles. While we talked, we both came to moment of discovery, together and individually. For me, one such moment was about whiteness and adoption.
Most of my work on adoption has had to do with cross-racial and international adoptions; the latter are almost always across racial boundaries. The exceptions are from countries which have recently entered the adoption market (there really is no particularly polite term for the messy, complicated, largely unregulated and mostly insidious system that treats children like fungible tokens to be exchanged across borders). As Adam and I talked, we discussed the issues concerning children adopted from places like Romania and Russia, both of which have involved what are practically prison houses for orphans. Children are brought to these orphanages as infants and raised with little human contact and socialisation, creating massive adjustment problems for them as older children and adults.
But these children are white, and there is a premium on white babies and children among American adopters; would-be parents (who are mostly white) will pay tens of thousands of dollars for a Russian child. They fondly imagine that, at last, their families will be complete (the stigma of being married and without children endures even in the United States of the 21st century) and that they’ll get a child who looks like them. What they don’t anticipate is that a child raised in emotionally and socially cold conditions might have an enormously hard time adjusting to any “normal” family (quotation marks because, really, what is “normal”?); many of the adoptees come with behavioural issues that include rage and withdrawal from others.
In one infamous case, Torry Hansen adopted a seven-year-old Russian child, Artyem Saveliev, in 2010. Five months later, she put him on an eleven-hour flight back to Moscow, unaccompanied, with a note that claimed he was violent (Hansen has since been ordered to pay child support for the child who is still her legally adopted son). The story inflamed many and caused a temporary suspension of Russian adoptions to the U.S, but it did little to highlight the real traumas suffered by so many adopted children.
In the world of adoption, most adoptees are Black and brown and the issues they face, while not universal, have to do with racism and bigotry seeping into their childhoods and lasting long into adulthood as they cope with adoptive families that treat them as little more than tokens of their own munificence. To be clear, this is not the case with every single trans-racial adoption but enough that adoptees everywhere have formed networks of solidarity. In fact, there’s such a large number of Korean adoptees that they meet at international conventions and effectively form a diaspora, as Adam and others point out.
But it’s not as if the white adoptees of white families have it much easier, as we saw with Saveliev. If the burden of adoptees of colour is that they are made to feel that they will never fit into their adoptive families, the burden of white adoptees is to constantly demonstrate that they can live up to millennia of white supremacist logic that whiteness is inherently supple and able to survive all and any conditions, even the complete dissociation from necessary human contact in their formative years. What Savaliev suffered is what I suspect is the burden of many thousands of other white adoptees, including those born and raised in the U.S: the always impending sense that one might not succeed at Whiteness itself. There were several reasons for Hansen’s enormous callousness and cruelty towards a child she imported the way one might order Beluga caviar off the internet, not the least of which is that she is a horrible and cruel person. But we have to wonder if part of her great disappointment with Savaliev was also that he was not, somehow, whole and perfect from the first minute: he was, after all, white. Why didn’t he work? Hansen is a nurse and unless she got her credential in the mail, like her child, she had to have had some training in the psychology of humans and understood that, surely, a seven-year-old raised in an orphanage would have had some adjustment issues, including anger (though we have no proof that he demonstrated any rage towards her). Whiteness operates like masculinity: those born into it by what is purely an accident without meaning, mere happenstance, are expected to live up to ideals supposedly somehow encased in their DNA. Culture tells those born into what we consider male bodies: You must, surely, just know what it is to be a man and in case you forget, here are several different ways we will humiliate and coerce you into all its expected rituals and patterns. Similarly, whiteness is supposed to automatically mean that you will simply be everything non-white people are not. And so the white child, burdened with centuries of representation as beautiful and angelic and civilised is expected to be all that from birth; it’s assumed that even the worst social conditions cannot dim all that.
If and when a child of colour “acts out” (which could mean anything from not demonstrating proper gratitude to just…being), its failure as an adoptee (in the eyes of its adoptive family) is understood to be natural to its condition of being of colour, to whatever race or ethnicity it belongs. When a white child does the same, its supposed failure is read as a betrayal of Whiteness itself. This is something we haven’t paid much attention to but is worth considering as we rethink what adoption should look like (the current system is broken beyond repair). The problems facing adoptees of colour and white adoptees are different in many ways but no matter their colour, adoptees inevitably face the burdens of race.
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Listen to the podcast for more: “Celebrity, Adoption, and Power.”
See also my “Adopting Difference: Race, Sex, and the Archaeology of Power in the Farrow-Allen Case” and my “Cindy McCain: When Adoption Looks Like Trafficking.”
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Image: Elisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun: Self-portrait with Her Daughter, Julie