I think framing the discourse about transracial adoption as a “well do you think you’d better off if you weren’t adopted?!”… or “at least you got a home rather than living in poverty/the slums/an orphanage/foster care!”… type discussion is really fucked up, as it places the onus for reconciling children needing homes with the inherent problems of white people adopting POC kids on the adoptees. It completely lets the white people who actually make the choice to adopt POC kids off the hook and absolves them of any responsibility to do so in a way that causes the least amount of harm to the child.
No discussion about transracial adoption should be centered on whether or not I’m sufficiently grateful for having been adopted. It’s completely irrelevant & parents who expect their adopted children to feel some sort of gratitude toward them shouldn’t be adopting in the first place.
The discussion that we should be having is why are white folks allowed to adopt POC children regardless of whether they’re sufficiently educated/prepared to rear the child in a way that won’t do lasting harm. Why is it that when actual transracial adoptees and other POC attempt to highlight the problems with white people raising children of color, the first response of most people is to essential tell us to “shut up & be grateful for what you got!”
I’m glad I was adopted because if I wasn’t I more than likely would have ended up in foster care going in and out of white peoples’ homes anyway. I would have been better off, though, if I’d had parents who didn’t ascribe to color-blind racist ideology (as do 90% of white people in the U.S.) but rather chose to educate themselves about the struggles inherent of brining up a child of color in a deeply white supremacist society.
So many emotions while making this video… revisiting a place in my heart that I have no memory of was truly a life-changing experience.
During these last few weeks, I have started on the process of searching for my biological family, but haven’t gotten any information. Creating this video was a first step of my understanding of the details surrounding my biological family and my adoption.
I decided to publish it for a few reasons. Many friends have asked about details pertaining to my adoption, so I wanted to fill them in. Also… it’s a small chance, maybe one in a billion, but on the internet, who knows who will see this video? The chance that someone who remembers the baby that left the Philippines as Marian Ruth Gabiazo… well that’s a chance I couldn’t pass up.
I hope you enjoy it.
**editing was very basic.
Please… take the moment to reblog this video!! I am hoping that many people view it… who knows who will. :)
The Importance of Strengthening Your Children's Ethnic Identities
May 2007 (published in the Chao Ban Newsletter’s summer issue 2007)
Since the tragic Virginia Tech shootings in April, many Asian adoptees had expressed anxiety and confusion regarding their ethnic identities and heritages. According to an article titled “Asian Children and Racial Identity” published on rainbowkids.com, some Asian adoptees, especially those from South Korea, felt ashamed of being Asian because the shooter happened to share the same or similar heritage background. As the author had suggested, proper parental guidance and support are critical during such times; make sure to listen to your children and ensure the fact that they have nothing to do with the tragedy, therefore, should stay proud of their ethnic identities.
“Individuals with high levels of ethnic identity have been found to exhibit a high quality of life, a common indicator of well-being; adolescents with a higher regard for their ethnic group were happier and generally less anxious when daily assessments were averaged over the 14-day study period, suggesting that individuals derived direct psychological benefits from holding positive perceptions about their ethnic group,” quoted from a research study conducted for the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.
Apparently, it is essential to help adoptees strengthen their ethnic identities to maintain their well-beings and quality of lives; parents play important roles during this process and can try the following methods when assisting their children.
1.Explore the birth country as a family
It is advisable to explore your children’s birth countries’ historical and cultural backgrounds. Since the adoptees have became part of your family, it is important to gain knowledge regarding their heritages together. This certainly will increase the children’s sense of belonging, and at the same time make them realize the importance of their ethnic identities to all family members and themselves.
2.Participate in cultural events
Explore the culture and customs of your children’s birth countries through cultural events. For instance, the Families With Children From Vietnam (FCV) chapters organize meaningful events frequently throughout the year; adoptees can obtain more information of Vietnam, its culture and traditional customs by joining such events.
3.Attend language school
A language best represents the mindsets, thoughts and customs of the people who share it. It is a human social construction and constantly changes. Learning the language of the birth country is a great way to have a closer glance to the culture and customs.
4.Sampling traditional food
Cooking and tasting traditional dishes can be a fun family activity. Furthermore, table manners vary between countries; take it as a game at home and have your children compare and contrast the differences.
5.Birth country visit
Nothing can be more effective than returning to your children’s motherlands when it comes to strengthening their ethnic regards. If budget allows, more than one visit would be ideal. According to Clinical Child Psychologist Dr. Rebecca Nelson, the first trip can be conducted when the child is four or five years old. The main purpose of the trip is to gain a basic idea of the birth country and its culture.
If your family only can plan for one visit, consider returning to the birth country while your child is between eight to ten years of age. “By this age, children have greater ability to think about themselves and others in a more dynamic and complex way, and tend to have a keen interest in understanding how they came to be adopted.” as mentioned on Dr. Nelson’s research article titled “Timing Birth Country Visits”. At this stage, your child still needs much of your guidance and support when dealing with the mixed emotions while the exploration is in progress.
Preferably do not wait until your children reached their teens to visit their birth countries, as they may feel more reluctant to explore new things and absorb knowledge of cultures that are foreign to them, because of their “immersion in their existing social world and an increased sense of self-consciousness,” based on Dr. Nelson’s research.
Last year, one of my clients told me that her three-year-old daughter Lily (hypothetical name) was so ready to return to her motherland-China. Despite being so young, Lily has been exploring China’s cultural and historical backgrounds with her parents at home, attending cultural events organized by her local Families with Children From China (FCC) chapter frequently, sampling traditional Chinese food both at home and in restaurants and attending Chinese lessons at a language school. According to her mother, she is very proud to tell others she is from China and looking very much forward to spending her upcoming vacation in “her China”. Lily is a great example of those who have a very high ethnic regard. With the appropriate guidance and support of her parents, she has successfully established a positive ethnic identity, in which may lead to her personal well-being and a high quality of life in the future.
Pathos of Asian Adoptees is one year old!
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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
By Peggy McIntosh
This article is now considered a ‘classic’ by anti-racist educators. It has been used in workshops and classes throughout the United States and Canada for many years. While people of color have described for years how whites benefit from unearned privileges, this is one of the first articles written by a white person on the topics. It is suggested that participants read the article and discuss it. Participants can then write a list of additional ways in which whites are privileged in their own school and community setting. Or participants can be asked to keep a diary for the following week of white privilege that they notice (and in some cases challenge) in their daily lives. These can be shared and discussed the following week. Through work to bring materials from Women’s Studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are over privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women’s status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s. Denials, which amount to taboos, surround the subject of advantages, which men gain from women’s disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened or ended. Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege, which was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege which puts me at an advantage. I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks. Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in Women’s Studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about having white privilege must ask, “ Having described it what will I do to lessen or end it?” After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive. I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don’t see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence. My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow “them“ to be more like “us.” I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege on my life. I have chosen those conditions which I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographical location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can see, my African American co-workers, friends and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions. 1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.2. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area, which I can afford and in which I would want to live. 3. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me. 4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed. 5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented. 6. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is. 7. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race. 8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege. 9. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my hair. 10. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of my financial reliability. 11. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them. 12. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race. 13. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial. 14. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race. 15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group. 16. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion. 17. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider. 18. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to “the person in charge,” I will be facing a person of my race. 19. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race. 20. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race. 21. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared. 22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having coworkers on the job suspect that I got it because of race. 23. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the place I have chosen. 24. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help my race will not work against me. 25. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones. 26. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin. I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own. In unpacking this invisible backpack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of daily experience which I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant and destructive. I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a pattern of assumptions which were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and Iwas among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways, and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely. In proportion as my racial group was being confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit in turn upon people of color. For this reason, the word ”privilege” now seems to be misleading. We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work to systematically over empower certain groups. Such privilege simply conf e r s dominance because of one’s race or sex. I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred systematically. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups. We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantages which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as a privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power which I originally saw as attendant on being a human being in the U.S. consisted in unearned advantage and conferred dominance. I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance and if so, what will we do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most of our white students in the U.S. think that racism doesn’t affect them because they are not people of color, they do not see “whiteness” as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion or sexual orientation. Difficulties and dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism and heterosexism are not the same, the advantaging associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage which rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex and ethnic identity than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977 continues to remind us eloquently. One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms which we can see and embedded forms which as a member of the dominant group one is not taught to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in the invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth. Disapproving of the systems won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. (But) a “white” skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end, these problems. To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making thesetaboo subjects. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist. It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power, and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already. Though systemic change takes many decades there are pressing questions for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily-awarded power to reconstruct power systems on a broader base. Peggy McIntosh is Associate Director of the Wellesley College Center for Research for Women. Reprinted by permission of the author. This essay is excerpted from her working paper. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies.” Copyright 1988 by Peggy McIntosh. Available for $6.00 from the address below.
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1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
7. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
9. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.
10. I can be pretty sure of having my voice heard in a group in which I am the only member of my race.
11. I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another person’s voice in a group in which s/he is the only member of his/her race.
12. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my hair.
13. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.
16. I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others’ attitudes toward their race.
17. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.
18. I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.
19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
20. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
21. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
22. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.
23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
24. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the “person in charge”, I will be facing a person of my race.
25. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.
26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.
27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or feared.
28. I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another race is more likely to jeopardize her/his chances for advancement than to jeopardize mine.
29. I can be pretty sure that if I argue for the promotion of a person of another race, or a program centering on race, this is not likely to cost me heavily within my present setting, even if my colleagues disagree with me.
30. If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn’t a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.
31. I can choose to ignore developments in minority writing and minority activist programs, or disparage them, or learn from them, but in any case, I can find ways to be more or less protected from negative consequences of any of these choices.
32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.
33. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor will be taken as a reflection on my race.
34. I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.
35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
36. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.
37. I can be pretty sure of finding people who would be willing to talk with me and advise me about my next steps, professionally.
38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.
39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.
40. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.
41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
42. I can arrange my activities so that I will never have to experience feelings of rejection owing to my race.
43. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.
44. I can easily find academic courses and institutions which give attention only to people of my race.
45. I can expect figurative language and imagery in all of the arts to testify to experiences of my race.
46. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin.
47. I can travel alone or with my spouse without expecting embarrassment or hostility in those who deal with us.
48. I have no difficulty finding neighborhoods where people approve of our household.
49. My children are given texts and classes which implicitly support our kind of family unit and do not turn them against my choice of domestic partnership.
50. I will feel welcomed and “normal” in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social.
Elusive and fugitive
I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.
In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of daily experience that I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant, and destructive.
I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a patter of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turn, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.
In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people of color.
For this reason, the word “privilege” now seems to me misleading. We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to over empower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one’s race or sex.
_
Earned strength, unearned power
I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.
We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages, which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantage, which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power that I originally say as attendant on being a human being in the United States consisted in unearned advantage and conferred dominance.
I have met very few men who truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance, and, if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States think that racism doesn’t affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see “whiteness” as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.
Difficulties and angers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantages associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage that rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex, and ethnic identity that on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the members of the Combahee River Collective pointed out in their “Black Feminist Statement” of 1977.
One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms, which we can see, and embedded forms, which as a member of the dominant groups one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.
Disapproving of the system won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. But a “white” skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems.
To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these subject taboo. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.
It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.
Although systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and, I imagine, for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.
Peggy McIntosh is associate director of the Wellesley Collage Center for Research on Women. This essay is excerpted from Working Paper 189. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies” (1988), by Peggy McIntosh; available for $10.00 from the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley MA 02181 The working paper contains a longer list of privileges.
This excerpted essay is reprinted from the Winter 1990 issue of Independent School.
Multiculturalism. Pluralism. Syncretism.
Adoptees and adoptive families, how do you feel about each subject? Send your submissions please!
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China Fires 12 After Inquiry on Adoptions
Investigators concluded that workers did not engage in “baby trading,” but they found “severe violations,” a newspaper reported.
Adoptees Unite
Hello everyone,
This is a new networking site for all adoptees created by a fellow friend and adoptee, Jessica. I am a member as well and I would like to share this with you all. Please share this among each other
Thank you,
James (Pathos of Asian Adoptees)
Some Not So ‘Lucky’ Adoptees Talk Back
Dear Dr. John Raible, You’ve got to be freaking kidding! We are 21st century transracial adoptees. But none of us feel “lucky” in the way you talked about in your letter.
We just read “Lucky Adoptee.” It’s hard to tell if you were just trying to be funny or maybe sarcastic. Either way, some of us felt very offended at the way you trivialized our lives with your tongue-in-cheek attitude. For us, transracial adoption is NOT a laughing matter. Real kids are being hurt. Some kids are hurting so bad that they end up feeling suicidal. Other kids get locked up in jail or put in mental hospitals by their parents who gave up on them.
We talked about your letter at our Teen Empowerment Group. Somebody tweeted it to us on Twitter. We decided to write to you for a couple of reasons. We mean no disrespect, Dr. Raible. But we strongly take issue with a lot of what you said. Basically, you made it sound like “racism is over.” It could be very misleading if parents who don’t know any better read your letter. We DON’T think things are all that different from your childhood in what you call Whitesville. (Yes, we do follow your blog and we usually agree with what you write about.)
As teens of color, we get followed around in stores all the time. We get pulled over by the cops, too, just because we have brown skin. This happens in our “nice” neighborhoods that are mostly white. Telling the cops that our parents are white doesn’t help us stay out of trouble. It doesn’t keep us from being watched and followed around, either.
Some of us have had other really painful experiences, like with the families of our boyfriends and girlfriends. Some parents are flat out prejudiced. They tell our friends not to go out with us, even though we have white parents. Even though we can act white and sound white, even though we go home to white families, it seems like we are not allowed to date white kids. But who are we supposed to date if that’s all we have been exposed to our whole lives?
When you said that our parents encourage us to hang out with our birth families, at first we were like, “He must be trippin.” Does that really happen anywhere? Mostly, our parents get sad or act uncomfortable if we even mention our birth families. BTW, a lot of us found our birth relatives on Facebook. Even if we have to go behind our parents’ backs. But it’s only fair that we can use technology to reconnect with our peeps online. Those are OUR RELATIVES. No more social workers blocking us from getting our information!!
Speaking of social workers: Do they really refuse to put kids in families if they live in an all-white neighborhood? Legally can they do that? We thought the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act says that parents get to adopt whoever they want and race doesn’t matter. We have been studying this in our transracial adoptee teen empowerment group. We believe that MEPA is one of the biggest problems with transracial adoption. The way we see it, MEPA protects the rights of adopters as “consumers.” At OUR expense as transracial adoptees, pure and simple.
Dr. Raible, you are right that some things are different nowadays. We grew up talking to camp counselors that are adoptees. And we follow blogs by adult adoptees. It seems like a lot of adult adoptees became social workers to try to help other adoptees. And a lot of you guys work with adoptive parents groups and adoption agencies. Meaning no disrespect, but we see that as part of the reason of why things have not gotten better. When transracial adoptees keep working with the system, it only makes it stronger. And then transracial adoptees are kept down. We want power and we refuse to support a broken system that harms youth like us. We plan to help transracial adoptees in different ways that haven’t been tried before.
Mainly, we don’t want to grow up feeling frustrated and angry. Instead of joining a broken and corrupt system, some of us are planning to go to law school. We are already making plans for a class action lawsuit. It’s time for transracial adoptees to take matters into our own hands. Instead of begging parents and adoption agencies to protect us better, we think we should just force them to do what’s in our group’s best interests. We know we have rights as children and youth. We are tired of grown-ups deciding for us what should happen. We demand to have a voice!! We are also looking into the Hague Convention, to see what it says about the rights of adopted children and youth like us. Our generation is going to make sure real change happens. Not another transracial adoptee should go to jail, be hospitalized, or commit suicide because they feel isolated, alone, and unsupported.
No offense to you after trying to convince parents and social workers for so many years. We really appreciate the way you and other adult adoptees have spent so much time teaching SOME of our parents about race and adoption. We think you did make a small difference. (For some of us.) And we love hanging out with you guys (older adoptees) at camp, even though we think “culture camp” is a wack concept. When we grow up and take over as camp counselors and directors, we have other ideas for the kind of camps transracial adoptees REALLY need.
We think there’s enough of us coming of age nowadays to change the power dynamics. If we stick together and strategize, we feel like we can fix transracial adoption because obviously it ISN’T working. Either that, or we will shut it down entirely. Like Native Americans did with the Indian Child Welfare Act. That’s something else we’ve been studying in our group. We are learning from their success in protecting Native children and youth.
We hope that you keep writing stuff directly to us, as transracial adoptees. Maybe you should stop wasting your time trying to get parents to see things differently. We can tell it just stresses you out anyway. Talk straight to US. We love you and respect you, Dr. Raible, and we are listening. Because you are talking about our lives in a way that no one else does. Respectfully yours, The Transracial Adoptee Teen Empowerment Group P.S. We DARE any adoptive parent to give their kid “Letter to a Lucky Adoptee!!” Hopefully, kids will find it on their own, just like we did. We are tweeting it to all our adoptee friends. It’s a great piece, even though it’s kind of offensive, cuz it makes you think.
Respectfully yours, The Transracial Adoptee Teen Empowerment Group P.S. We DARE any adoptive parent to give their kid “Letter to a Lucky Adoptee!!” Hopefully, kids will find it on their own, just like we did. We are tweeting it to all our adoptee friends. It’s a great piece, even though it’s kind of offensive, cuz it makes you think.
What the Hello Kitty: Transracial Adoption
What is sad that there is also a barrier between adoptees and adoptive parents. A barrier in which that the adoptive parents don’t fully understand how it is and what it means to look different from the rest of the family. Some people view adoption as second rate since there is for some reason an importance on biological connections from parent to child.
Attended a workshop on multicultural education by Dr. John Palmer, a Korean adoptee. He facilitated the evening showing of “In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee” too.
What I learned from Dr. Palmer:
*There is pushback from foreign transracial adoptees. This workshop discussed Korean adoptees. What many are saying:
“What about us, where is our voice? We didn’t have the right to choose or say because we were children. Where are our rights?”
They are hurt being still seen as the “poor foreign babies”. Many are adults now, but still viewed as “the children”. And they are strong not weak.
Because they came to America where the “streets were paved with gold” (quote from the documentary) they were and still are being reminded “how lucky you are”. Therefore any questions they have are silenced. Shh! There is tension among the adoptees and their adopted parents.
They must remain eternally grateful. But grateful for what? From what were they spared? “What if that $20,000 (adoption money) had been given to the unwed Korean mother?”
The vast majority of adopting American families are White middle class. Very, very few are Asian or Asian Americans. Yes that reinforces the notion of the White savior rescuing the poor colored children.
This trend isn’t going to disappear anytime soon. And what about the Chinese babies?
Dr. Palmer is pro adoption all the way. But he—and many others—wants people to think and consider all the issues and angles.
ADK Photography
Anh Dao Kolbe
Born outside Saigon, Anh Ðào Kolbe came to the United States via New York City in 1972. She left two years later and grew up with her Greek and German parents in the Middle Eastern countries of Qatar and Oman. In 2003, she returned to Vietnam, the first time in over thirty years, backpacking around the country for two months.
INTERVIEW FOR NGUOI-VIET.COM BY MATTHEW CHIN NGUOI-VIET.com
ALSO CHECK OUT MISPLACED BAGGAGE, THE BLOG MISPLACEDBAGGAGE.WORDPRESS.COM
Born Identity: Adopted Asians Returning Home to Adopt Their Own
ST. PAUL, Minn.—When Rebecca Eun Hee Viot speaks of her daughter Ruby, her tone expresses a love that clearly transcends words.
“She has basically done what no husband or therapist or boyfriend or girlfriend has ever been able to do,” Viot said. “She’s basically quieted my heart.”
Viot, a Korean adoptee, grew up in the Midwest feeling a disconnect between her US life and her culture of origin. But, through Ruby (in photo above), her adopted Korean daughter, Viot has filled a void within herself.
Over a half-million children in the United States are adopted, and 60 percent of Americans have either been through the adoption process or know someone who has, according to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a New York-based nonprofit devoted to improving adoption policy and practice.
