Save ICWA and Native children/families

If you want to weigh in on the Indian Child Welfare Act and the separation of Native American kids from their families, there is a serious campaign going on.

Below is the link where you can find out more. I just left a phone message with our Attorney General to support an amicus brief in an upcoming Supreme Court case about ICWA… More information on this case can be found at www.nicwa.org/BabyVeronica.

NICWA is working with the Tribal Supreme Court Project partners, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) and the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), to organize the legal response to this case.

Spread the word.

What audiences are saying

You might be interested to see what a recent audience had to say after hearing my presentation at a one-day conference for foster parents and adoptive parents in Nebraska. I showed the movie “Struggle For Identity” and talked about what we now understand about race and adoption, and what transracial parents need to understand in order to be effective parents. Here are the evaluation comments sent to me following my  presentation:

“Information was eye-opening and concerning, definitely made me think.”

“This topic deserves more time to cover.”

“We are mid-western/excepting real issues can’t be understood.”

“Not enough time was given to audience commentary or discussion.  He seems angry.  Some placements with foster children are immediate without looking at race; We need to balance that with offering experiences for all cultures and races.  This is Omaha, Nebraska – not all black placements can be with black families, we don’t have an unlimited number of foster homes.”

“Transracial parents-thought provoking to see his perspective.”

“Great speaker! I appreciate his honesty and his knowledge.”

“I liked this guy a lot.  We need more guys like this at these conferences.  Very exciting and easy for me to stay focused.  Only negative is that John seems a little angry about what happened in the past.”

“This is huge for us.  We are fostering Native American kids under the age of 2.  We haven’t even considered these issues.  Much to think about.”

“Very good and true information, something we all need to keep in mind when adopting.”

“Great thoughts. Really got me thinking.”

“Was good but seems he has a lot of resentment still for being raised in a transracial family.”

“I expected this to be the least relevant part of the day for me.  Instead, I got useful information for potential future placements, but also it opened my eyes to how many transracial families there are around me and how to better support and help them in their parenting.”

“Even thought I understand what Dr Raible was presenting, I really felt angry that I was stereotyped because a child of color was placed in my home and I came to love that child and chose to raise a child of color.  I would not be able to afford to move my family to a place where they might be with other people of color.  I do not do this because I want glory – or money.  I do this because I love these children.  I would like to see other people step up for these children.   And now there aren’t enough foster parents for all these children.  If I had seen this movie or heard this lecture I would never have become a foster parent.”

“Very useful information.”

What amazes me is how few parents who hear me speak choose to join me in my “anger.” Apparently, they’d rather attribute my passionate stance about race, adoption, and anti-racism to their diagnosis of “how I was raised” or to my supposed “resentment” towards my adoptive parents.

They choose not to see or hear what I am truly angry about. Why are other parents not as angry as I am about the persistence of racism?

Why are they not angry at the poor preparation of and support for families who take on the huge responsibility of raising vulnerable children?

Why are they not angry at the ongoing second-class treatment of adoptees and foster youth?

Why are they not angry at the racism that kids of color are exposed to on a daily basis?

Why are they not angry that 50 years into the transracial experiement, transracially placed children in 2011 STILL experience the same racial isolation that children were forced to endure in previous decades, especially when kids are expected to integrate all-white communities all by themselves?

Why are they not angry that the Indian Child Welfare Act is too often blatantly ignored so that Native kids end up being placed in hostile situations with non-Natives?

Why are they not outraged that so many kids of color end up “in need” of adoption and rescue in the first place?

The sense of urgency I feel propels me to keep going. I’ve never been about trying to win some popularity contest with adoptive parents. I’ve always been about trying to educate anyone who will listen about the complex intersections of race and adoption. Being the bearer of bad tidings, being assigned the task of sounding the much-needed wake-up call, is not exactly fun or rewarding. I continue to do this serious and dreary job because I care about children, particularly vulnerable children of color.

What makes it so challenging, in part, is the predictable wall of denial I encounter everywhere I go. The wall of denial is usually coupled with the smug certainty that the “white way” is the right way. The smugness of unexamined white superiority leads to a kind of sanctimonious arrogance that tends to deny the reality of racism and white privilege. It makes the message of critical transracial adoptees like me nearly impossible to be heard.

This same arrogance allowed an adoptive father in the audience to dismiss my message about the importance of joining a community where people look like adopted children of color. After telling us how he felt called to adopt a little girl from Africa, he stated proudly that “Jesus will be my child’s role model.” It was fascinating to watch as nobody challenged him or offered a different perspective. I guess they were waiting to see me poke holes in his blissful ignorance all by myself. But that would have looked and sounded too angry, and I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. So I thanked the dad for his comment and moved on. I’ve learned through experience that some people you just can’t argue with.

Yet if we fail to connect the dots between race issues and adoption issues, too many transracial parents will be left in the dark clinging to sentimental color-blind fantasies that leave children at risk and unsupported. I refuse to stand idly by knowing that many children will suffer due to the inadequate preparation of their ignorant though well-meaning parents. And so I continue to speak out, when invited, and to share what I’ve learned as a scholar and as an adoptive parent, former foster child, and adoptee.

Clearly, Orphans, we have a lot of work to do. The struggle continues, and I am always looking for another ally.

Adoptee Liberation posters

Perhaps it’s time for less talk and more action… here are some posters I would LOVE to see plastered at adoption agencies, conferences, and support groups!

Decolonizing transracial adoption

For me, the time we are living through right now is a decolonizing moment. I realize that I need to do more to decolonize my mind from the grip of the global adoption industry. I think we all could use some decolonizing. Our minds have been colonized. In saying this, I mean that the way we think about adoption–even the way we picture kids and childhood–has been shaped and molded. Basically, so that somebody can make money. Transracial adoption will never get better until we decolonize it. This is what I believe: We have to decolonize our minds before we can empower ourselves as transracial adoptees.

It reminds me of watching women become empowered during the feminist movement of the 1970s, when I was a teenager and going off to college. It was a little unsettling, as a male, but I got why women felt they had to talk to each other without men interrupting all the time. Women met together to talk about their lives and their problems, including their relationships with men. By doing this, women were able to get some distance and some space that was free from the male energy that tended to dominate. They weren’t necessarily saying that they hated men—mostly, the women I knew still loved their husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers. But without men butting in and making women take care of them all the time, women were able to reclaim their power. Ultimately, I think our society benefited and moved forward because of the self-empowerment that women went through.

What’s happening in our transracial adoptee community also feels like a parallel movement to various ethnic studies and identity politics movements, where African Americans, Natives, Latinos, and Asians organized for self-determination. I experienced these exciting movements as a youth. People of color in different communities woke up and said, “You know what? The white people have been in power long enough. Now it’s our turn.” Again, they weren’t necessarily saying that they hated white people, just because they expressed their righteous anger about the way some white people had been treating them over the years. But people of color needed to tell the story of our nation’s history from their OWN perspective. No longer was the story told just going to get told by the winners and the descendants of conquerors and slave-owners. Now it could be told by the victims and the oppressed themselves, the survivors of genocide and slavery and cultural destruction. Incidentally, this is where multicultural education came from, from the need to expand the narrative voices and tell the story from multiple perspectives. While using schooling to advance anti-racism and social justice.

Are we oppressed as Orphans and transracial Adoptees? Absolutely. Does this mean that we hate our adoptive parents? Not necessarily. It depends on whether adoptive parents act like our allies or our oppressors. I don’t blame parents for adopting. After all, I am an adoptive parent myself. But I do hold APs accountable to do right once their eyes have been opened to how unethical and corrupt the adoption industry really is. But regardless of what parents do, transracial adoptees need to acknowledge our oppression for ourselves in order to overcome it. Just as women and people of color did in their respective consciousness-raising movements before us.

Adoptee oppression started when, as children, we did not have any say in what would happen to us right when we  were born. We didn’t vote for relinquishment or to be separated from our birth mothers. None of us chose to be abandoned. We had no say in whether we would get to stay with our birth fathers or extended family. We didn’t decide whether we should be left in a dumpster or go to an orphanage or into foster care or be placed for adoption. All these life-changing decisions were made by adults without our participation and without our consent. These decisions about our fate as little powerless kids set in motion a series of events that we now have to deal with for the rest of our lives.

Remember, Orphans, adoption is a crisis response. Plain and simple. It kills me to see people running around trying to pretty up adoption by making it sound cute and sentimental. “Happy Adoption Day!” Bring home your little angel! “Happy Gotcha Day!” It’s actually quite sickening. Adoption is a crisis intervention. The fact that some mother felt so desperate that she believed that her only move was to give up her baby –her flesh and blood—should give us pause. The fact that this world accepts the widespread separation of mothers and children almost without blinking an eye should tell us something. When we talk honestly about adoption, there is no avoiding this tragedy, this awful moment of relinquishment or abandonment. The separation of a mother and child is painful and heart-breaking. It should be remembered and honored in a deeply serious way. People need to recognize that what we know as adoption is built on this painful, heart-breaking scene, multiplied a million times, over and over and over, all around the world.

One amazing thing to consider is that many people actually benefit from our loss and our sorrow. That’s why I don’t like to celebrate “Gotcha Day” or “Adoption Day.” The winners in the adoption game experience adoption as a joyous event. (I get it. I mean, why wouldn’t they? After all, they got us!) But at whose expense? And why should their happiness at adopting a child outweigh our sorrow at losing our mothers?

Other beneficiaries are the adults who literally profit off our sorrow. Adoption agencies that charge fees (not all of them do, remember), and adoption facilitators and lawyers and others who “arrange” private adoptions make tons of money. It’s criminal, when you think about it, that people can make money off the buying and selling of children. But they don’t call it that. It’s as if the adoptive parents and agencies and social workers all wink at each other as they exchange cash, telling each other that this is for the good of the children. Children are being rescued. Lives are being saved. And adopters get to feel like saints for doing a “good deed.” Like they just bought a rescue dog down at the animal shelter.

Decolonizing transracial adoption means exposing it for what it really is. When the survivors of adoption trauma tell the tale, our perspective as Orphans will never sound like the perspective of the winners in the adoption game. We are survivors, Orphans. I am an adoption survivor. I am a former foster child and an adoption survivor. It is a trauma that I experienced as a small child. Adoption happened to me, happened to all of us.  But somehow we survived, and are still surviving. Thank goodness we found each other.

In stating it so bluntly, I am not saying that I don’t love my adoptive family, because I do. But I lived through something they will never understand as non-adoptees. I live with the aftermath of my relinquishment and my stay in foster care and my adoption every day of my life. It’s all part of one long experience. The joyous moment of adoption—when I got to join a new family—cannot be separated from the whole trauma. Adoption is part of what we have suffered. I don’t celebrate it and I am not happy I had to be adopted. I’m glad I have an adoptive family that loves me, don’t get me wrong. But I am still grieving the loss of my birth family, while missing the connection to my foster family, and suffering the effects from the whole traumatic experience.

Decolonizing transracial adoption also means we have to tell the truth about race. We must use the R word—and talk about racism. Even if it makes the white people in our lives—our families, friends, and teachers—uncomfortable. I will get to that in my next post. Until then, stay strong, Orphans. Stay up. Get on top.

Los Angeles Times story

Here’s a story from a few years back about the ongoing controversy over transracial adoption. It’s interesting to see that even though some people are still arguing about this topic, other parents are making major changes to support their multiracial families.

Click on the link to download a pdf version fo the story: adopt-then-adapt-los-angeles-times1