another perspective on recent articles by adult adoptees

Here's something else that I posted on the agency message board, but thought it deserved space here as well. I wrote this in response to several recent articles by adult adoptees which, at first glance, appear to make valid arguments as to why transcultural adoptions may not be in the best interests of the children. First, I'll post the links to the aforementioned articles, and then I'll follow up with my response:

Lemn Sissay

Hannah Pool

I have been closely following the recent discussions of articles written by adult adoptees, but have declined to comment until now. I want to start off by saying that I really enjoy hearing everyone’s diverse perspectives on these tough issues. However, discussions about race are never easy, and I think it’s especially challenging to talk about these seemingly angry articles because, as adoptive parents, we have a lot personally at stake.

That said, I feel that sometimes our first reaction is defensiveness, and those self-protective measures sometimes impact our abilities to hear what’s really being said about issues that are critical to our own children’s development of self-identity and self-esteem.

I can only speculate as to what Hannah Pool and Lemn Sissay truly feel about international adoption as a whole. However, I’ve chosen to take their statements (as well as the statements of several “angry” Korean adoptees) in a bit of a different way.

From my perspective, the common theme that I have seen among ALL of these individuals is that their adoptive families removed them from their birth countries and promptly cut all ties to their birth culture. Herein lies the problem.

My personal belief is that, as adoptive families, we cannot expect a child of colour to enter into a white (or any other ethnic group that is not their own) family and then “assimilate”. They can never fully assimilate because no matter how hard they try, they cannot “look the part”, and unfortunately we live in a society that continues to ascribe value to things like skin tone. Our children are made to walk the line between cultures and may never be fully accepted into either. It is our job as parents to minimize this effect as much as possible by maintaining birth culture as well as exposing our children to the beauty of all cultures.

I believe that when we adopt transculturally (and I won’t even say transracially because Ethiopian children adopted by Black American families will face different challenges than even their parents have) we have a responsibility to redefine our own identities just as much as we’re expecting our children to redefine theirs. The difference is that we have a choice in the matter, whereas our children do not. In my opinion, having that choice should be considered a privilege, and those with privilege should act with conscience.

Those of us from European-American descent can no longer define ourselves as white families with a black child. By accepting these children into our families, we are implicitly accepting the fact that we are now multicultural families, and should take pride in that. We need to model that pride for our children, who look up to us as teachers, because a large part of their self-esteem later in life will rest on the foundations that we have prepared them with.

That said, I think the call by these authors who have chosen to share intimate details about their own personal stories is not to completely avoid adoption. I do agree that the ideal solution is to keep children within their birth culture whenever possible. Foreign aid may help somewhat, but there will always be children without homes. And there will always be homes without children. We adopt for a myriad of reasons, but at the core, we each want children. Adoption is a solution to each of these problems that can benefit all parties. But again, I think it is up to us as adoptive parents to seek out local resources and role models from our children’s culture so that they maintain important connections to their culture. In a sense, we all become ambassadors of culture, and it is up to us to create a cross-cultural dialogue.

I also want to make the point that in American culture, the idea of “different” often comes along with a judgement call of “better” or “worse”. It simply needn’t be that way. The whole idea that Hannah Pool and Lemn Sissay put forth that “money is not everything” brings a critical eye to the idea that transculturally adopted children will be better off in any home with money than they would have been in their birth country. They will certainly live different lives, and perhaps their lifestyles will be enhanced by access to better healthcare, nutritious food, and many more material possessions, but they will also have suffered unspeakable loss in order to get here. We need to keep this in perspective when talking about “better” and “worse”.

In closing, I just wanted to state that I have been so impressed and inspired by discussions about how people have been able to keep the Ethiopian culture alive within their families and communities. I would welcome further sharing of any ideas we could incorporate into our own home to ease our children’s transition and further develop their connection to their Ethiopian roots.