There are three randomly connected ideas/facts that have come together for me in a rather disturbing way.
First is a footnote from the conference paper I’m working on:
As is often the single most common comment made when international adoption is discussed in online forums, the question arises: “Why not take care of American children first?” The fact that child poverty reaches levels of sixty percent in certain regions of the United States only highlights the readily apparent hypocritical gloss to such international efforts.
Second is a posting from Twitter today, basically stating that there are more black American males in prison now than were slaves in 1850.
Third is another footnote from the paper focusing on an article in the Toronto Star entitled “Unequal justice: Aboriginal and black inmates disproportionately fill Ontario jails” [link]:
This idea deserves further research and analysis. Populations whose children first served as adoptees are often over-represented among the incarcerated. Beyond the obvious class markers at play here, might we further say that the attempt to integrate the marginalized via adoption, once it is seen as failed, results in a fallback position which has a historical precedent in the poorhouse?
I’m thinking of adoption in terms of social experiment. I’m thinking of adoptees who are being deported as punishment for perceived infractions of the law. I’m thinking of the punishment that Calvinist capitalism would have the poor suffer as their lot in life.
I’m intrigued by this from the article:
But consider the cost of crime, the justice system and incarceration on Canadian families, communities and Canadian taxpayers. Study after study has shown that investing in families, education and mentally and physically healthy communities is less costly than the tab we are paying for sick, poor communities in terms of health costs, opportunities lost, policing, courts and jails.
Could we say that adoption is, economically and politically speaking, akin to “house arrest” of marginal populations? Is this why we get “time off” for “good behavior”? Is this why reunion and/or return are imagined as “freeing”?
Yes why not! Poverty too is ‘house arrest’ and those who are marginalised in this way don’t or rarely get time off for good behaviour particularly in countries torn apart by war, famine and the intervention of ‘super powers’.Children from those countries are prime targets for commodification as adoptees and exiled to countries with which they have no connection whatever.The ultimate ‘house arrest’.
Again, I write as a white American adoptee, so the exile is not so distant. Exile from an unknown family in the same city was overwhelmingly lonesome.
Wow. Poorhouses. A digression… I was adopted by two people who were old enough to be my grandparents; they were in their early 40s when they adopted me. My father often talked about Poorhouses. He was born in 1914. My mother, at the age of two, was sent to live in an orphanage after the death of her mother in 1918. My mother had happy memories of “The Home”. When I was growing up, I saw old movies on TV and cringed at the portrayal of the poor and orphans. Mom always liked “Little Orphan Annie” which I hated, both the comic strip and the play/movie.
As for house arrest, yes, I can feel that, too. Though we weren’t rich, my cousins were jealous of me, saying that I had a bedroom all to myself and that my mother sewed dresses for me. Why was that my fault? I felt like a doll. I didn’t know any better, and I only had my cousins as play mates whenever our families visited each other. They had their siblings, but I went home alone with my parents. House arrest. They kept me secluded in the suburbs away from “harm” – away from the truth they knew existed in the city.
Then I heard about the “poor little rich girl” and that upset me.
Your remark about your mother’s experience in “The Home” made me wonder if it were not possible that orphanages were in some measure “better” then than later, and if so how. … That is, how did that come to happen.
Hospitals back and the day and now: no one wants to go to them–in the former, you went to die; in the current, you go to lose your ability to live because you have no money left–but at least hospitals were free back then.
Prisons back in the day and now: no one wants to go to them–in the former, you were thrown and forgotten about and had generally uncomfortable conditions at best; these days, basic humanness insists on being better off, though after you get out you can hardly live a life because you’re branded as a felon–at least back then when you got out, you could move somewhere and start over.
So orphanages back in the day and now: no one wants to go to them–in the former it was sort of a combination dungeon/hospital where your worthlessness (as a sick/dying person, as a criminal) was treated with at best grudging contempt, but if you managed to get out of there alive you had the possibility of living a life; these days, you are asked to pay with your life for the privilege of being treated (as a sick person or criminal) badly, and have little to no opportunity after your institutional stay to have life.
A difference between then and now then: in the old days, there was always the chance that some hare-brained idealist might decide to substitute humanitarian charity for the grudging contempt usually lavished on the sick/dying, criminal, or orphaned person. but good luck, you might wind up in a decent place. These days, it’s the very inhabitant of the institution who is “taxed“ for being there, whether sick, criminal, or orphaned–so the possibility of a “charitable” organization is virtually impossible; at best, it would be a foundation that would ultimately have to look at its financial bottom line first and foremost, to the detriment of its sick, criminal, and orphaned–as we currently see everywhere and in abundance.