Excerpt: In the case of the children, she gives one away to friends — as one might pass on an extra pup from a litter.
This has been a “Dear White People” kind of week. Over fewer than forty-eight hours, prominent white people have spoken or tweeted words that will either haunt them forever or prove to be mere blips that, perhaps, occasionally return as faint, blurry shadows and then disappear into the ether.
Of all the people who appear to not have understood how words can circulate out of context, Liam Neeson is unfortunately perhaps the most sincere and least racist of the lot but was viciously dunked in hot water when he revealed and then tried to explain his racism thirty years ago. In a rather different world and on Twitter, three white academic and lefty women—Barbara Ehrenreich, Katha Pollitt, and Elaine Showalter—mocked the very petite Marie Kondo for speaking in Japanese and for her delicate, pixie-like ways—proving that no matter how left you are, you can always make space for good old-fashioned orientalism.
I’ll have more on the Neeson and Clueless Women of the Left episodes in forthcoming pieces but for now I want to focus on the woman who joined this group before the week was even over (whatever will the weekend bring?): Cindy McCain, the millionaire widow of John McCain. McCain was on an Arizona radio station on Monday, February 4, to relate that she had witnessed a woman trafficking a toddler at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix and successfully thwarted the ghastly deed by calling security. What a Superhero! A Saviour of Children! But news reporters who actually dug into the facts quickly revealed that her story was made up. By Thursday, the Phoenix police stated that while officers had in fact checked on a child, “there was no evidence of criminal conduct or child endangerment.”
McCain had lied, and the interview (archived online for now until it gets yanked) reveals that she lied hard and spectacularly. Her story was as follows:
I came in from a trip I’d been on and I spotted—it looked odd—it was a woman of a different ethnicity than the child, this little toddler she had, and something didn’t click with me. I tell people trust your gut. I went over to the police and told them what I saw and they went over and questioned her and, by God, she was trafficking that kid…she was waiting for this guy who bought the child to get off the airplane.
Insert a “By God” anywhere in a sentence and you’ve successfully amalgamated a jab at truth with showy sincerity and consequently proven that you’re actually lying. By God, I swear I never hurt that woman! By God, I swear I did not touch the money in the till! And so on.
McCain’s lie came wrapped in blatant racism. What triggered all of her spidey-senses was that the woman and the child did not share the same ethnicity. Despite an absence of details from her or the police, we can very easily assume that what McCain meant by this is that, oh, horrors, the woman was a person of colour and the sweet, doomed child was white. We can all be comfortable with asserting the facts related to ethnicity because Cindy McCain is the adoptive mother of a brown woman, Bridget, whom she brought over from Bangladesh. Cindy McCain is a millionaire White Lady Who Lunches and Supports Good Causes and Adopts Brown Babies to Save Them so, of course, if she’d seen a white woman with a child of colour, her instant reaction would have been to smile warmly and perhaps even go over to the mother and show affection as a kindred spirit: Oh, yes, how cute, I have one of those at home too! Aren’t they fun? Aren’t we good people to do this work of saving such children?
But this woman was something else altogether, we can safely assume: a threatening figure, a not-white woman who had the temerity to be seen outside with a white child without behaving like a subservient nanny, making her a figure of suspicion. We can extrapolate this much because we have a long, long history of white women who see it as their God-given right to adopt or care for “little brown babies”—recall, please, Ingrid Bergman’s missionary in Murder on the Orient Express—and if we are wrong, we will eat our thick winter boots, that is how sure we can be, that is how long this kind of rank racism has been implanted in the DNA of cross-racial adoptions.
But not all adoptions, you might cry, and you would be right. Plenty of white people have adopted children of colour, caring and nurturing them with an acute consciousness of their racial dynamics and creating loving, intentional families. Many adoptions are carried out under legal circumstances which ensure that babies and children are placed in families in the most ethical ways possible. Often, the stringent rules can be tiring and even heartbreaking for anxious parents in waiting. But it’s also true that international and domestic cross-racial adoptions have long, horrible histories implanted in legacies of colonialism and racism. The scholar Dorothy Roberts has written at length and often about the US foster care system and its funneling of poor black children away from their families into the waiting arms of white adoptive parents. And international adoptions have long been implicated in histories of outright kidnapping and abductions, as in Guatemala.
Given all that, Cindy McCain’s adoption of Bridget bears scrutiny.
The story of how she came to adopt the woman now known as Bridget McCain has been repeated often, as in this Vogue magazine profile. Told in a brief paragraph, it goes like this: Cindy McCain “encountered” Bridget as a baby with a serious cleft palate that made it hard to feed her, in a Bangladeshi orphanage where she also saw another baby with a “potentially fatal heart defect.” She worried that they would never receive proper medical care, and “fought the authorities to bring them both back with her.” At some point, the child with the heart defect was placed with friends, and she alighted from the plane in the US with Bridget in her arms, surprising her husband, John McCain:
When she stepped off the plane with Bridget in her arms, her husband asked her where the child might be spending the night. ‘I told him I thought maybe she ought to come home with us… and he didn’t miss a beat. McCain himself tells me, “I was not as astonished as one might think, because that’s the kind of person she is.” Besides, he adds, “she handed me this touching little baby. It’s hard to resist something like that.”
In the very next paragraph, John McCain laughs about her passion for animals and the two Yorkshire Terriers she felt compelled to buy when she saw them in a Manhattan pet store window. It’s hard not to wonder if the Vogue writer Julia Reed might not have deliberately sneaked in this juxtaposition in what is otherwise a standard-issue adulatory profile, because the parallels between the two kinds of adoption are hard to miss. In each case, Cindy McCain comes across hapless little creatures and, convinced that only she can care for them, brings them home. In the case of the children, she gives one away to friends–as one might pass on an extra pup from a litter.
But more than the puppy parallels, we might wonder and be shocked about the process by which McCain came away with two human babies, and perhaps ask hard questions about the adoption, the sort that journalists never have. She was at the time a wife of a Congressman, but whatever influence she used to get them out had to do with her own personal resources and influence (she is independently very wealthy), which is clear from the fact that she never told him what she was up to. In general, we can assume that the adoption of a child, an actual, living breathing human being and one who will require years of expensive medical care, is a decision made by both partners in a marriage. There are some countries that won’t even allow unmarried parents to adopt (an issue that the former Jolie-Pitts ran into). The website of the US embassy in Bangladesh states that both parents have to be present for the adoption process to even begin.
Let’s now return to the interview that has rightly earned Cindy McCain so much scorn (at least for half a news cycle). While the focus has, justifiably, been on her hole-riddled tale of child trafficking, we might note that it actually begins with a great deal of scaremongering about sex trafficking and children on the part of the hosts and McCain, tales of which are hysterically inflated. All three reinforce the widely disputed myth that the Superbowl and the World Cup are prime events for sex trafficking (such claims have been proven to be untrue). McCain also claims that her interest in child trafficking began in India, when she spotted several pairs of eyes staring up at her from beneath the floorboards of a sari shop, where she was buying gifts for Bridget (because, as she emphasises, she was from Bangladesh). Despite being assured by the shop owner that the eyes belonged to his family that lived beneath the floor, she left convinced that he was a sex trafficker dealing in girls “selling them on the open market for sure” (why and how a man selling saris would have the time and resources to also sell children is left to our imagination because, darkies, who knows what they do?).
All of this is worth considering in light of her fixating upon the dark-skinned woman traveling with a white-looking child. Cindy McCain somehow wrested two brown babies from Bangladesh, despite regulations that would have prevented her from doing so (unless the laws have changed dramatically) with no notice to her husband or family, and flew across the world with them, casually disbursing one to another family, with no discernible consequences or questioning from authorities. She also has no qualms about casting suspicion on dark-skinned people whose association with children must, in her eyes, be read as sinister. In the case at the airport, the suspicion proved potentially dangerous because she acted upon it and brought police scrutiny upon an innocent woman who was simply there with her child. And she fabricated all the subsequent details: there is no evidence that she had anything on which she could base her very affirmative story that the woman was waiting for a man who had bought the child.
The McCains’ adoption of Bridget became a flashpoint during his 2000 presidential bid, when the Bush team implied that she was actually McCain’s illegitimate child, which is possibly one reason journalists have never questioned the circumstances of her adoption, perhaps fearing that they might add fuel to a racist fire. It’s likely that Bridget McCain had been left at the orphanage by parents too poor or desperate to keep her, and that her severe congenital condition would have eventually resulted in an early death. She’s now twenty-seven years old, and there is no returning her to Bangladesh or erasing the fact of her existence as a McCain.
But that shouldn’t prevent us from considering that the conditions in which she was brought here demonstrated what we can and ought to call extreme white privilege as well as an extraordinarily strange set of family dynamics: an “adoption” carried out without the explicit consent and knowledge of the entire family as if a baby were simply a new rescue puppy that everyone would eventually come to love. These are not simply private family dynamics unique to the McCains that we should be disallowed from discussing, because Cindy McCain was able to whisk two babies out of Bangladesh only because of her enormous wealth and her marriage to a powerful politician—the privileges she accrued as a public figure. Her response to an accompanied child of a different ethnicity than the adult it was with was a complete and utter lie, and the lie didn’t simply state something that did not happen: it very clearly, in a racist state like Arizona, cemented the assumption that a white child could not possibly belong to a woman of colour, that it was not just okay but necessary that the state be called on to investigate and separate the two. Even if the child was of colour and the mother white (a highly unlikely scenario because of the reasons discussed above and because, Arizona), nothing warranted the cops being called on a family to potentially tear it apart. Again, we have few details but we can safely assume that the situation has been deeply traumatic for the mother and child, and that having McCain then go on the radio and lie about the situation has furthered that trauma.
In her interview, McCain says that she always acts upon the directive of the Department of Homeland Security: “If you see something, say something.” Those words, repeated everywhere in a hyper-surveillant world, emblazoned everywhere as we go about our daily lives in subway stations and on buses and in public spaces, admonish us all to turn upon people of colour, immigrants, anyone deemed un-natural, out of the order of things. The shifty-eyed white guy nervously pacing with a duffel bag gets by with nary a glance, while the anxious scarf-wearing Muslim woman desperately hunting for a phone in her cavernous handbag (the sort so elegantly tossed over white women’s arms) is immediately scrutinised, followed, and even questioned. Cindy McCain saw nothing but an object of contempt, a person of a different ethnicity than a child, and she immediately distorted the tableau in front of her to include a sinister third figure, a buyer of the child, entirely out of her imagination. If every white person traveling with a child of colour were constantly asked about their relationship, inter-racial adoptions would not be as common as they are. Cindy McCain left Bangladesh with no fewer than two brown babies. If even one airline attendant or Bangladeshi policeman had decided to “say something,” McCain would, in all likelihood, never have been allowed to enter the US and surprise her husband with an actual human baby, brought in as if it were a souvenir from a quaint bazaar.
For Cindy McCain, someone else’s motherhood looked like the sex trafficking of a child. But her own adoption looks a lot like human trafficking, even if wrapped in diplomatic immunity and the power that comes naturally to the very wealthy.
For more on adoption, see also “Adopting Difference: Race, Sex, and the Archaeology of Power in the Farrow-Allen Case.“
Image: Frida Kahlo, My Birth, 1952.
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