Category Archives: Adoptee Roundtable
I came across this essay by Prof. Asma Barlas [ link ], entitled Racism’s Labyrinth. It’s a quick read, but quite interesting on a number of levels. An excerpt: Whether white people want to claim their whiteness or not, whiteness claims them by positioning them as potential saviors of people of color. Liberals speak on […]
“Through me you pass into the city of woe.” —Dante As adoptees who live on the razor’s edge between places, we are often asked to broker for or engage on behalf of those who are looking for roots as well, either as adoptees, or more often for me I must say, adoptive parents wanting to […]
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 […]
I was struck by a post at Adoption Coach Blog [link]. The post discusses children who were not adopted, “shadow children”. I find the idea of adoptive parents mourning a child they do not adopt repulsive, quite frankly. But it made me think of the children that were passed over for me. There was a […]
I keep thinking about this Adoption Horrow Show [ link ] and how it sets back humanity on all levels a couple of thousand years. And I keep re-reading what I initially wrote when I saw this: Adoptees have no will. Adoptees do what they need to do to survive, even if at the expense […]
I have argued long and hard that there is little difference between domestic and international adoption, if we consider that often the class differential of domestic adoption is from an internal “Third World” of poverty and the exploitation of those from this realm. I have argued long and hard that if we shift to notions […]
I came across this today in a Twitter bio: “Adoptive vanilla mama to handsome chocolate son.” Comments?
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: […]
This comment came in on the RAD discussion, and I thought it expanded nicely into a topic of discussion on its own: Got to your Twitter feed somehow and have been reading some of your articles and wanted to share something that I guess is not necessarily on topic, some points resonated with me. I […]
Over at Sumeia Williams’ great blog Ethnically Incorrect Daughter [ link ], there is an item discussing the case of Heidi Bubb, and the documentary that was made about her return as on adoptee to Viet Nam, Daughter From Da Nang. In response to something I posted there ages ago came this response: You are […]
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 […]
I’d like to touch back on to two discussions we’ve had so far, one on nature vs. nurture as posited by Snow Leopard, and the other one having to do with Russian adoptions, and the idea of a second-best race-based adoption, i.e., one that does not (seemingly) require those adopting from having to mythologize their […]
Many adoptees who have returned to their places of birth can identify I think with the reality of countries such as Lebanon, which boasts 7,000+ “non-governmental organizations”, which is one NGO for every 500 people who find themselves within this country’s current borders. We often joke here that the millions of dollars that these NGOs […]
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 […]
