International

I feel like I oughta make some clarification about my last post and what I said about parents who adopt internationally. Today I was contacted by a family we work with who has two adopted kids from Africa. These are good parents, really good parents, and when I go off about “international parents,” I’m not thinking about them. They’re not even in that category. And I know there are other parents like them out there. But there are two things about international adoption that still make me unable to feel comfortable with it:

1) The majority of the international parents I come into contact are not like the family I spoke to today, and there is a much higher proportion of bad parents in the international pool than there is in the domestic pool — I’m speaking, of course, anecdotally about the people who contact us. I don’t have stats and figures about who is a rotten parent and who isn’t. It’s just something I’ve been unable to avoid noticing when I sift through the emails and phone calls that make me want to cry.

2) No matter how good an international adoptive parent is, the ability and desire for U.S. adoptive parents to adopt internationally has its origin in such fundamental exploitation and entitlement that I cannot consider the motivation to do so moral, ethical, or compassionate. Adoptive parents may or may not have exacerbated or contributed to the inequalities inherent in a global economic system that makes international adoption viable, but they are taking advantage of that system, and in so doing they become a part of the problem. They provide one little corner of support for a Western power structure that desires and pursues war, famine, and economic instability in foreign nations, because they want the natural resources that are necessarily left available for cheap by war, famine, and economic instability. Adoptive parents are, perhaps, a small part of that system, but they are still actively pursuing the dividends of such inequality. They are creating demand, which fuels supply.

International adoption is incredibly expensive. That by itself limits the eligible pool of adoptive parents to those with the equivalent of two or three college educations lying around or, more likely, those with a substantial amount of down payment and the personal collateral to create attractive bank loans. The main point being, we’re talking about the middle-to-upper-middle-class here, which means we are overwhelmingly talking about white people. And whenever you are talking about a demographic with strikingly similar qualities pursuing a certain action, it begs the question of why. Why do middle class white people want children from other countries? It’s certainly not cheaper; adopting from foster care, which is in no danger of running short of children, is an almost free process in the U.S. In total, it’s certainly not easier; the paperwork, money, and legal hoops required add up, over time, to be about as frustrating and dead-end as any the U.S. can put you through.

Again, I’m speaking anecdotally about my experiences fielding questions from families. I am not making a blanket statement about all internationally adoptive parents, but I am making a blanket statement about the ones I come into contact with on a daily basis. And from what I understand, there are two reasons middle-class white people want to adopt internationally.

First, they want babies. This is something they’ll admit forthright. I do have some problems with this. Don’t get me wrong. Babies are AWESOME. That developmental period in a child’s life is one of the most exciting and adorable, and a parent — adoptive or biological — would be outright lying to say they wouldn’t miss it if they didn’t get it. But when that incredibly small part of a child’s life becomes a deal-breaker, I think there’s something else going on. I think you’re dealing with somebody who is holding their entitlement closer to their heart than a child. Somebody who is so focused on having a baby isn’t somebody who is focused on having a family. The period of infancy lasts two years, tops. When a child grows out of the adorable baby stage, they will be the kind of child that parent would never have adopted, for no reason other than they can walk and talk. For no reason other than they’re now a real person, instead of your baby. There’s a real undercurrent of ownership going on with families who demand babies; these are people who don’t want to purchase anything used.

Along with the ownership and entitlement, there is a fantasy component of baby-adoption that, honestly, I don’t think is the parents’ fault. — the onus here is on adoption agencies to shatter adoptive parents’ imagination. Parents tend to think that if they adopt a baby, they’ll avoid all the “adoption issues” that adopted kids face. The kid won’t remember anybody other than their adoptive parents, and the adoptive parents believe they’re getting a blank slate. But all adopted children experience “adoption issues,” which are more appropriately deemed “identity issues,” and are not very different than the “identity issues” everybody copes with, except that they are more intense and complicated. Every kid reaches a point where they wonder who they are, who they should be, who they should identify with. To a child who knows they belonged to another place that is completely foreign to them, well, inevitably they’re going to wonder about that place. To a child who knows for a fact that their “similarities” to their parents are more likely to be learned than genetic, they’ve got a whole new layer of wondering what is them and what is their environment.

Potential adoptive parents don’t know this. Most people don’t. They don’t have to. But adoption agencies do. And it’s their job to make sure any parent they work with knows it as well. But will they? Well, a public domestic agency will be pretty likely to talk about it. They want adoptive parents to know because a disrupted adoption is more expensive to the state, and they want placements to work. But a private international agency? They’re getting paid thousands upon thousands of dollars to provide parents with a product. I wouldn’t trust them to tell their clients they’re not going to get what they want. It would be like a wedding planner telling a woman she’s about to get into an unhappy marriage that will probably end in divorce, and she should probably call the whole thing off. Probably the right thing to do, but they’re certainly not going to do it.

The second reason that middle-class white people adopt internationally is racism. This is generally an unstated reason, but it’s there, underpinning the whole system of international child-buying. It’s a very complicated and a very American racism, because it is about class and it’s about skin color and it’s about age and it’s about Americans. Parents that will mortgage their homes and move to Libya for three years to adopt an African child would never consider an African-American child from Chicago. It is a rather sophisticated hierarchy of desire, but as far as I can tell, it goes something like this:

White American baby
Eastern European (white enough) baby
Asian baby
South/Central American baby
African baby
African-American/Hispanic/Native American baby
White toddler
White child
White toddler with problems
White child with problems
White teenager
African-American/Hispanic/Native American toddler
African-American/Hispanic/Native American child
African-American/Hispanic/Native American teenager

Just like these parents consider babies to be somehow immune to “adoption issues,” they consider non-American children to be immune to American racial politics. I can’t tell you how many white parents of African children we deal with who refuse to teach their kids about racism, put them in diverse schools or neighborhoods, or grapple with their racial identity at all, because their kids are “African,” not “black.” This is more than ignorance, it’s consciously maintained ignorance. These are parents who want the existence of their non-white child to vouch for their exclusion from the work every American needs to do to exterminate racism within themselves. They want to sidestep their own personal responsibility — to investigate why they want an African child over an African-American one — and they want to ignore the additional hardship they have just placed on their child to do their own work as well as their parents. It will be the child’s job to cope with racism, to cope with the fact that their parents wanted them because white children were not available, to cope with the fact that their parents still exhibit racism to those who look exactly like the child (we have plenty of parents who have Central American children but will talk long and hard about goddamn Mexicans taking all the jobs), and to cope with the fact that they were only adopted because their home country and people are in ruins, and their white parents took advantage of it. And because they are not and never will be white, they will never have that same privilege of exploitation. Not in this country, and not in this world.

This is not to say all internationally adoptive parents are this way or, more importantly, stay this way. Some of the very best parents we work with, like the ones I spoke to this morning, are the families who learned early on that this shit wouldn’t fly. And, again, this is a fault of adoption agencies as much as the parents lack of internal self-knowledge and admission. Adoption agencies need to explain to families what they’re getting into when they adopt a child of a different race and ethnicity than them. But they don’t. In America, they don’t because we have a law that specifically does not allow adoption agencies to mention race to families (because we’re colorblind, right?). Internationally, they don’t (though they’re supposed to) because the same privilege that allows middle-class white families to have the disposable income to adopt internationally is the same privilege that allows them to ignore the racism that got them where they are. We would not have a overwhelmingly white middle class without centuries of American racism, just like we would not have a global baby-selling industry without centuries of global racism. Any individual may not have contributed to creating this system, but they benefit from it, and they are taking the path of least resistance to continue benefiting without examination of whether they deserve what they have got and, most importantly, whether others deserve what little they have got.

And it is a baby-selling industry. Again, there are white parents with a demand, and the world is providing the supply. Countries who have been unable to recover from their centuries-long rape-fest by the Western world rely upon adoption pipelines as a modified child welfare system. Why create foster care? Just sell the babies to gringos instead. White people get to feel noble for “saving” a poor little child from savagery and heartache, countries get to modify their orphan stats, and middlemen get to make absurd amounts of money procuring and selling the babies. The money a family spends adopting a child internationally from third-world countries is more than enough to have kept that family together for generations. This is not to say this is what adoptive parents should be doing. They want a child; they do not want to support a country. But the moment a family wants to make a commitment to a child from another country, they must make a commitment to that country. And that means a commitment to understanding that adopting a child from a third-world nation means you have contributed to maintaining that country’s woe. You paid money to keep funneling babies away from their parents. Again, it’s not necessarily any given person’s job to assist a third world country. But paying money into a broken system keeps a broken system running, and buys you a baby and culpability for that baby’s origin.

A lot of families slough off this responsibility by saying that happens to other adoptions, but not theirs (sure, some people are racist, but not me or anybody I know). They’re working with a reputable adoption agency, so they feel certain there’s nothing shady about their adoption. This is the biggest bunch of white bullshit. Middle class white people who can afford international adoption can afford all the assurances they want about how compassionate and wonderful and moral they’re being; that doesn’t mean their adoption agency is legit. It’s like paying extra for the organic sticker, instead of looking at the package, ingredients, or manufacturing company. All you’ve done is pay extra for a sticker that makes you feel good. There have been enough stories over the years of reportedly legit adoption agencies being exposed for knowingly or unknowingly buying babies that anybody who maintains their adoption agency is reputable is being willfully ignorant. Maybe it is reputable. But you don’t know. You don’t know for sure. You just don’t want to think about it, is all, and because you’ve got enough money, you don’t have to. You paid extra for the sticker, so you are not a part of that nasty business.

Some truly amazing things can happen to the families who are forced to wake up after an international adoption. They can become some of the most incredible allies to the non-white population, and advocates in every area of their life for stamping out racism. I have seen some families realize what they have done to help maintain an oppressive system, and actively seek out their children’s birth families to ensure they did not buy a coerced baby. But this is a pretty small minority. Most international adoptive parents go on with their privilege and their entitlement, their no-used-goods, no-blacks, no-social-services, no-toddlers, no-culpability criteria. And you know what? That doesn’t just make them shitty people. It makes them shitty parents, in the end, because they refuse to acknowledge one of the biggest and most blatant parts of their child’s existence. They refuse to acknowledge their origin.

Parents everywhere make mistakes. Bio parents, adoptive parents. Kids forgive. Families work it out. An admission that a family has taken advantage of another country’s misery to buy a dream baby for whom they did not prepare themselves is really no different to me than a bio parent admitting to a kid that they didn’t know what they were doing when they started a family, they were young, they fucked up, but they have always loved their child like anything. Kids understand flaws. They have tons of them.

In the end, my biggest problem with internationally adoptive families is that they are the most likely to call us wanting to find a way to get rid of the kid. Because the kid grew up to not be grateful for being bought away from a poor mother, to not be a blank slate molded by the adoptive parents hands, to not be African-instead-of-black. They paid all this money, and got a defective product, and fuck this kid, I don’t care what happens to him anymore. Admittedly, we get crisis calls. We do not have spontaneous phone calls from families who are doing just fucking great, thank you. But I do not get the “I don’t want him anymore” crisis call from domestic adoptions, because they tended to have more realistic expectations of what they were getting into. The parents I speak to who get into international adoptions do so out of entitlement, privilege, racism, and ignorance, and the money to maintain all four. They don’t have to stay that way, but it’s where they start, and it’s a long hard haul uphill to get better.