So how can it be that in 2010, this is where we find ourselves:Of course, the post is about more than children's books; that context, however, makes the concept of white privilege very accessible, I think.
*The percentage of published children’s books featuring characters of color is far smaller than - perhaps less than half - the percentage of people of color in the U.S. population, and the majority of these books are still created by white writers and illustrators.
*Many of the most popular book series, particularly in fantasy, have no significant characters of color at all.
*Cases of “whitewashing” book jackets, of editors requesting that an author erase a character’s ethnicity so that a book “can reach a larger audience,” of booksellers or librarians passing on certain titles because “our community doesn’t respond to those kinds of books,” suggest an assumption that white readers won’t respond to characters of color.
And so on.
I want to suggest a cause for the gap between our intention and the reality we’ve created: the patterns formed by white American socialization, which I’ll call White Mind.
Humans are hardwired to feel another person's pain. But they may feel less innate empathy if the other person's skin color doesn't match their own, a new study suggests.
* * *
In the study, which appears in the journal Current Biology, people of Italian and African descent watched short film clips that showed needles pricking black- and white-skinned hands. As they watched, researchers measured the participants' empathy (i.e., their nervous-system activity) by monitoring sensors attached to the same spot on their hands. They also tracked the participants' heart rates and sweat-gland activity, a common measure of emotional response.
"White observers reacted more to the pain of white than black models, and black observers reacted more to the pain of black than white models," says the lead researcher, Alessio Avenanti, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Bologna.
The researchers also showed clips of a needle pricking a hand painted bright purple. Both the Italian and African participants were more likely to empathize with this intentionally strange-looking hand than with the hand of another race, which implies that the earlier lack of empathy was due to skin color, not just difference. "This is quite important, because it suggests that humans tend to empathize by default unless prejudice is at play," says Avenanti.
The researchers gauged prejudice by testing the participants on how readily they associated good and bad concepts with Italians and Africans. The people who showed a strong preference for their own group in this test also tended to show the least empathy when the hand belonging to the other group was needled, the researchers found.
Adopting a child especially through international adoption process is not an easy decision to take. Both the needy parents and the adoption agency have to look after various factors . . . .I don't think the author intended sarcastic social commentary about the fact that adoption these days isn't so much about finding families for needy children, but is instead about finding children for needy parents. . . .
The need for adoption-competent mental health services is critical to the ongoing wellbeing of adoptive families. Feedback from adoptive families reflects a struggle to meet the mental health needs of their children due to a failure of some mental health providers to understand the unique issues of adoption that are related to mental health. Health and behavioral health care providers need to have expertise related to adoption in the same way that a provider might specialize in substance abuse treatment or in a specific diagnosis such as autism.The most important trait, I think, is the one listed first: "Knowing that adoption is a lifelong process that includes universal experiences as well as unique individual feelings and perceptions." Dr. Gregory Keck's book, Parenting Adopted Adolescents
, devotes chapter 9 to the therapist's role, and notes the need to keep adoption issues in perspective in therapy:Some therapists dismiss or minimize adoption, convinced it is not a contributing factor to the presenting problem. Others blame all of the child's difficulties on the fact that he was adopted. As with most things, the truth of the matter lies somewhere between these two polarities.I think that's another important trait -- that the therapist doesn't attribute all behavior to adoption, but who knows that adoption may affect a host of behaviors.
Here, free of charge, is a Crash Course for transracial adoptive parents. Think of it as your guide to getting the education that you will absolutely need in order to effectively and ethically raise an adopted child of color in the United States (and possibly in comparable white settler nations, such as Canada and Australia).Really important stuff here, with a humorous approach.
The unabashed assumption and unapologetic bias behind this Crash Course is that the best teachers of adoptive parents are adult transracial adoptees who have lived through the experiment, especially those adoptees who are also adoptive parents. The second best teachers are experienced transracial adoptive parents who, even though they may not be adoptees or people of color, nevertheless have figured out how to become conscious anti-racist advocates and allies.
Allies, you ask, in what struggles? In the joint struggles against racism and on behalf of adoption reform.
US-based Desiree and David Smolin were elated when they adopted two girls from Hyderabad. But their happiness was shortlived. Within weeks, the couple discovered that their two lovely daughters were not orphans, but victims of child trafficking.I met the Smolins in 2004, when they presented at a conference on international adoption that my law school hosted. He has written quite a bit about adoption corruption since that time. I've always remembered Desiree's presentation about language loss and acquisition -- she explained how children the age of her adopted children lost their original language at a rate greater than the acquisition of the new language such that they were incapable of even thinking, much less expressing, complex thoughts. How frustrating is that?!
That was 12 years ago. The Smolins now operate a website, in which they have catalogued international adoption injustices and offer advice to adopting parents, based on their own experience [the only website I know that the Smolins are involved in is Fleas Biting, which hasn't had a post since 2008 -- does anyone know of a more current website?].
The Smolins, who have five sons, adopted nine-year-old Bhagya and 11-year-old Manjula from Action for Social Development (ASD), a Hyderabad-based adoption agency, Nov 18, 1998.
"The girls were terribly depressed and one of them had suicidal tendencies," Desiree told IANS in an e-mail interview. The Smolins were saddened by the emotional state of the girls. Luckily, they got some information. The girls had told a friend at ASD about their past, which prompted the Smolins to probe further.
"When the girls finally began to open up after about six weeks, they told us that they were not orphans, but were stolen and sold to us. They were even threatened and forced to lie to the embassy official, who interviewed them," said Desiree, who still can't believe it after 12 years.
, and a white adoptive parent of a son who is African-American and Latino, on how their attempts to incorporate culture failed to protect their son from racism :When we adopted our son in 1991 — he is African American and Latino; we are white — there weren’t many images floating around (either in my mind or in the media) of transracial families. Neither were there many books on the subject of parenting a child of another race nor many agencies educating adoptive parents on the right way to go about it. (Little did we know, there isn’t a right way.)For an eye-opening look at the teen-age years, check out her article, the Trouble With Troubled Teens.
In not knowing quite what to do, we did a lot: sought out friends of color; talked openly about race and racism; went with our son to culture camp; got books and artwork depicting different ethnicities; wrote letters to accomplished men of color for advice; read about racial identity and history; celebrated Kwanzaa; visited a Baptist church; even traded homes one summer with a family from a Black and Hispanic neighborhood in Oakland, CA.
There’s plenty we didn’t do, too: We didn’t move to a community that was racially mixed in the way our son is; our closest family friends were still white; our gung-ho efforts to pursue ethnic friends and experiences petered off as our son got older; and we chose to send him to a better school than the one that had more kids of color.
Our second-hand attempts to boost our son’s racial pride over the years have been outweighed and outnumbered by his first-hand experiences with prejudice. Big-impact opportunities he’s had — like meeting a group of Tuskegee Airmen and spending a day with Quincy Jones — are no armor for the small, daily daggers he’s encountered — like being stopped in ninth grade by a security guard at his own high school or being watched like a hawk at 7-Eleven.
The story as I originally heard it from Zhou Lei, my Chinese teacher every Sunday afternoon at Temple B'nai Chaim, goes like this: a girl named Yan Yu is adopted into a white family and taken to a small town in Maine. Shortly after she leaves China, her birth mother, along with her brother, are killed in a factory fire. Yan Yu's birth father -- a man named Chao -- grieves, but he is not to be reconciled. He decides to search for his daughter.To read the rest, click here.
In his village, Chao finds the right people, says the correct words, presents the appropriate gifts. He's told by an official at the orphanage where Yan Yu had once lived, that his daughter is in a place called "Crooked Bay," and gives her Western name: Molly Kutner. It takes years, and practically every yuan he can gather, but Chao is finally able to immigrate to the U.S. and gets a job as a waiter in a place called The Golden Panda, Crooked Bay's only Chinese-style restaurant.
And here's where he gets lucky. . . .
The market is not politically correct. It often assigns lower values to humans (their wages) based on their race or sex, even after controlling for education and experience. It's just as cruel to children. A few years ago I was disturbed to learn that it's cheaper to adopt black American children than white. I recently had lunch with NYU Stern School economist Allan Collard-Wexler, who has estimated adoption price sensitivity. He found just how much adoption fees are sensitive to the race and gender of a baby. It’s about $8,000 cheaper to adopt a black baby than a white or Hispanic child and girls tend to cost about $2,000 more than boys.They're talking about that same study that came out last month about adoptive parents preferring non-black, girls. But it is interesting to hear the Economist's market take on it.
Inter-country adoption has undergone radical decline and it is no longer the opportunity it once was for building families. In the US, the practice peaked in 2004 with 22,990 children sent to the nation as adoptees as compared to only 12,753 in 2009.
As adoption has become more difficult, the global surrogacy industry has begun to surge to meet the fertility demands of individuals and couples seeking to secure healthy infants.
A handful of adoption agencies and service providers with prior significant interests in Guatemala have been shifting to meet this need. For example, attorney Mark Reder of MLJ Adoptions based in Indianapolis boasts international surrogacy as a practice area of expertise, calling the activity “surrogacy arrangements.” Because Guatemala is recognized by the UN to have the greatest gender inequality in the Western hemisphere and the nation has no regulatory laws on surrogacy, “expertise” on such matters is more about the how to, where to, and with which vulnerable woman to contract the service. In the current environment, the information and service that will be offered will undoubtedly be tailored to meet the needs of those who have the privilege to pay for surrogacy. One has to wonder how information will be imparted to Guatemalan women who may well be illiterate and lack the legal savvy to truly understand the contracts they will be required to sign.
What is the state of international adoption today? In light of recent controversies involving Russia and Haiti, we'll spend this hour with UTA Sociologist and adoption expert, Dr. Heather Jacobson. Her recent book on the subject is "Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference" (Vanderbilt University Press, 2008).
Aggrieved parents whose children were adopted by American-based Main Adoption Placement Services, MAPS, have demanded the immediate return of their children.The story says there's been a year-long investigation by the Sierra Leone government, but no results yet.
In a meeting with the minister of social welfare, gender and children's affairs at his New England office yesterday, spokesperson for the aggrieved parents, Kassim Kargbo said: "We want our children back immediately. We were not informed about any adoption."
He said they were told by Help A Needy Child International, HANCI, that their children would be well taken care off and provided with the basic amenities up to university level, adding, "It is rather unfortunate that it has turned out to be an adoption."
HANCI, an organization responsible to look after the welfare of children in the country, facilitated the adoption of the children to MAPS in America.
The organization had earlier claimed that the adoption was done legally and that the parents of the children were fully informed throughout the process.
