This past Saturday, the Boston Globe ran a beautiful, provoking, complicated photo above the fold on the front page. A dark-skinned girl with a purple headband and huge grin hugs a white woman with strawberry-blonde hair.
They're sitting on an oriental rug that's covering a hard-wood floor. The caption: "Wislandie, an 8-year-old orphan from Haiti, is right at home with adoptive mother Beth Wescott of North Andover."
I love this picture. As an adoptive mom myself, it's a relief after all the mug shots of misguided missionaries trying to smuggle children out of Haiti. In the video that accompanies the online version of the story, "A New Home for Wislandie," adoptive mom Beth gently rocks a little girl who is lively and mischievous but also clearly in need of comfort.
Yet the Globe's recent photo spread, video, and story by Maria Sacchetti—"Joy, Frustration Brought Home"—raise big questions for me, too, because of all that isn't said or shown. This front-page feature, more than all the press about those criminally ignorant Baptists, exemplifies the cognitive dissonance that's part of transracial adoption.
Why is the white-savior storyline so entrenched? And why is it so hard for the "objective" journalistic voice to talk about race?
The racial difference of Haitian adoptees and their adoptive parents isn't mentioned once in this story. Perhaps the photo and video are supposed to lay that issue on the table—and they do—but the story frame is the usual one of dedicated church members (Wislandie's adoptive father is a pastor) visiting Haitian children in a Christian orphanage in Port-au-Prince.
To be fair to Wislandie's new parents and the orphanage (the Marion Austin Christian School) and this story, "about 10 Boston-area churches regularly send mission groups to help at the school," Sacchetti writes—and the connection prospective adoptive parents have formed with children apparently often goes back to when they were toddlers. Many of the prospective adoptees are in their teens.
Before the earthquake, some adoptions were already in-process; according to the article, a few like Wislandie's have been successfully completed. But other potential adoptive parents and adoptees wait, mired in even more bureaucratic red tape, as conditions for the orphanage children worsen. (In this same issue of the Globe, the story above Sacchetti's, after the jump inside, is headlined "Haiti Wants Refugees Back in Ravaged Areas.")
As Massachusetts state rep Barry Finegold asks: "These children are never going to have families in Haiti, so why not try to bring them into loving families in Massachusetts?"
Yes, why not? The rhetorical question rings true in the most immediate way for long-time orphans. Seventeen-year-old Auguste Joseph wants to join his frustrated adoptive parents in Ashby, Masschusetts. Like other kids in the orphanage wearing Red Sox T-shirts, Auguste is quoted as saying, "I'm dying to go.... I've been waiting for a long time."
Why not?
For many of us in the international adoption community—adoptees, adoptive parents, birth parents, and adoption workers—this question is far from simple, though. After "why not?", I also wonder "what next?"
There are hints of the dissonance to come in an evocative description at the end of the Globe feature: Wislandie is now wearing pink Crocs and has a bedroom of her own. "It is not an easy transition," Sacchetti writes; the girl's adoptive parents "look alternately joyful and exhausted."
Most haunting: "Even though she has so much now, Wislandie insists on dividing every snack or sandwich, to give away half to her mother, father, or sister."
The story then closes with her adoptive mom insisting—rightly—that her daughter isn't the only one who's lucked out.
Yet this is really just the prologue. The rest of the real story, which varies with every transracial adoptee and his or her particular family circumstances, is full of complications of race and culture and loss that apparently can't be accommodated in a mainstream news feature.
Here's where have I to ask: Why not? Why can't a daily paper like the Boston Globe, in a metropolitan area that includes a large Haitian immigrant population, tell this story as more than one white family's joy and the frustration of other waiting white families?
At least one caller to a January 20 NPR show, "Where Will All the Haitian Orphans Go?", raised issues of cultural and homeland loss. These were treated seriously by Tom DiFilipo, CEO of the Joint Council on International Children's Services, the guest on this edition of Talk of the Nation.
Other sources, such as the ColorLines' blog RaceWire, have grappled with the racial question of whites adopting Haitian orphans. And as one topic on the Haitian Internet Newsletter, "Haiti's Orphans, what are we going to do about it?", puts it:
"Let me ask you a question: Do you really think that the rest of the world will just fly to Haiti and take all these Haitian kids into new homes somewhere outside of Haiti so they can live happily ever after?
The orphan children of Haiti are Haiti's problem and now is the time to start talking about how we're going to deal with it.
This is our country, these are our kids..."
Discussions about race and culture and international adoption are all over the Internet and in various blog and editorial forms, even in mainstream-press outlets. But you wouldn't know it from this Globe feature about Wislandie.
Interestingly, a number of the online comments to the story have been negative, pointing out snidely that there are American black kids waiting for adoption, too. That kind of knee-jerk response flips too far in the other direction, but it's obvious that readers and video-watchers are reacting immediately to the racial difference.
You could argue that daily news features are really people stories. Americans adopting orphans from countries like Haiti or Vietnam (as in my own family) can surely be heart-warming. I would argue, however, that journalists make decisions all the time about who to focus on and what main idea to follow.
Simplifying the emotional storyline by focusing on getting home to America has political and social implications. It seems to deny that differences of race and culture matter. And I don't think daily news is off the hook for promulgating musty stereotypes—letting anonymous online commenters criticize a story subject or go out on a limb rather than reporting on what this white mother, for example, thinks about parenting a black child.
Of course Wislandie is happy to be free of the current devastation in Port-au-Prince, where many families huddle under nothing but bedsheet tents as the rainy season approaches.
Yet what will she think of her homeland as she gets older? Will she make connections with the local Haitian community in Boston and Cambridge? Will she keep speaking French and Creole? Will she realize that Haiti has a rich history and literature, a complicated history, that it is not just defined by poverty and disaster?
That is the international adoptive parenting journey. It is very possible that Wislandie's adoptive mom and dad will help her along the way. In the video, Beth holds the girl close and talks realistically about adjustment challenges and the scene in Haiti.
But not until I read more mainstream stories that dig into white adoptive parents talking about race—and not until I hear more about the links that can be forged between adoptees and the Haitian American community—will I believe that the discussion about international adoption has moved beyond saving those poor lucky kids from a place better left behind in the rubble.
This piece originally appeared in Adopt-a-tude.
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STATHI STATHI
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Comments
These reports aren't quickies and they aren't easy, and today's staffs, I'm afraid, have neither the experience nor the resources to do them justice. (r)
I know from transracial adoptees who have written about the topic in newspapers that they are often savaged in online reader comments (or international adoptive is savaged, or some combo of the two). It's hard to stand up and talk about race. You put yourself on the line when you do. But I think that's exactly what white adoptive parents--and journalists--need to do.
There have been international adoptions for years and years. Maybe someone should study the attitudes of the adoptees. I suspect it depends on the situation.
How easy is it for white parents to deal with the racial and cultural issues of their kids who are a different race/culture (which happens in bicultural families)? It's interesting to look at the choices of Obama, who identified as a black man despite being largely raised by a white mother. Was it easy for her to see him seemingly reject her community?
And, of course, we all, to an extent, choose our community. And in doing so, we align our values. For our kids to choose a different community is, to a certain extent, a rejection of those values. So how does it feel for a parent if their other-race child chooses to identify more strongly with that race?
As for the wislandies, if people want to help desperate children with no other optiona, I don't think race is that relevant. Someone has to look after them.
I'm not an adoptive parent nor an adoptee, but I enjoy your writing Martha. I agree that race is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about, in a variety of settings.
And becasue I am sure we all knew that this would be brought up, what of gay parents wishing to adopt who are prohibited from doing so in THIS country, let alone a foreign one, regardless of race?
Like I said, devil's advocate- just trying to posit some other points.
What are the stats of black american being able (0r willing in the first place) adopting white childeren?
Part of this all is ofcource to show off other races how mutch more superior the white race wants to be percieved (dare i to say ubermensch?)
Also when black become succesfull how to they start to behave?
Look at Oprah and lesser Obama; they start to act like the whites have done for hundereds of years , not like there ancesters have done.
Same succesfull black man (tiger woods , seal, severoal other rappers ect) date and marry .. you guessed it WHITE woman.
How manny other succesful man date black woman ?
SO again the blacks with there choices show wich race they prefer.
I love this story so much. Thank you for writing it. I want to adopt lots of babies from other countries some day. Thank you for raising awareness of the racial issues here. One of my friends, a single mom, has a beautiful girl from Ethiopia. I just can't afford to do it by myself but I sure admire her. I am reposting this story to FB to give people something to think aboout. Blessings -- Patty
Yet as adoptive parents we know that this is NOT true. Adoption involves some degree of trauma, and for many adoptees, connections to their first families, cultures and heritages are critical to easing this trauma. But how do we tell this to the white (savior) parents looking to rescue these children? How do we tell them to prepare themselves for racial issues that they themselves never had to face and are in a bit of denial about their existence?
Sadly I read something in Adoptive Families yesterday. A mother described taking her Mexican toddler daughter to a garden center. There the owner asked disparagingly whether the child was Mexican. After affirming that she was, he then begins to lay out all the things he thinks are wrong with Mexicans. And what does this mother of the innocent brown toddler do during this verbal assault? Nothing. After he finished she slunk away crying. Yeah, that's really helpful for your child! So this is going to be her response when faced with similar attacks? To me that is just pathetic and shows how ill-prepared she was to adopt transracially.
It's not enough. Racial difference is what many international adoptees end up coping with--often without the help of their clueless white parents. So, yes, foxanhound, one's birth culture (or country of origin) may come to have many different for individual adoptees, depending on when they arrived in America and how they create their own identities.
But regardless, "culture" can't be a stand in for "race" when you're growing up black or brown in America--especially the fun, more superficial, and essentialized aspects of culture often celebrated in adoptive families. Froggy, I've read some of Alexie's writing about this, and he is dead-on about what often happens with teen adoptees of color, especially in mostly white towns.
Phillyart, I do believe that at a basic level children without families need homes. I am an adoptive mom myself; my eight-year-old Vietnamese American son seems very American--and he is an American--but he also sees himself as tied to Vietnam. This is a good thing, I believe.
I have written about this issue in print in a number of places. If any of you would like article links, please send me a PM.
"Yet what will she think of her homeland as she gets older? Will she make connections with the local Haitian community in Boston and Cambridge? Will she keep speaking French and Creole? Will she realize that Haiti has a rich history and literature, a complicated history, that it is not just defined by poverty and disaster?"
very, very, very valid points and questions that go unspoken and whenever uttered, are ignored.
"But not until I read more mainstream stories that dig into white adoptive parents talking about race—and not until I hear more about the links that can be forged between adoptees and the Haitian American community—will I believe that the discussion about international adoption has moved beyond saving those poor lucky kids from a place better left behind in the rubble."
absolutely and whole heartedly cosigned.
Interesting observations and considerations, both in the post and the comments.
Whenever possible, people should adopt children who are the same race as themselves. As has been pointed out, some whites who adopt black kids, despite any feelings the parents may have to the contrary, end up treating the black kids as pets--particularly if they already have white children. It's only natural for parents to want kids who look "normal" like they do. Whether it's a disease or an appearance issues that is the result of a racial difference, children who have physical or mental characterists that differ from the parents are treated differently. Not necessairly loves any less, just treated differently. Children should not be adopted to act as mere fashion accessories or to show how apparently loving and non racist the parents are----and if you go to that much trouble to show the world you aren't a racist because you adopt kids from a different race than you, then you probably are, deep down, extremely racist.
I know from my own experience as an adoptive mom that I can't imagine loving my son any more or differently than I do. We are a family. But you are right that race can't and shouldn't be avoided, because children notice differences very early on.
Her childhood was not a happy one, in fact she was always aware how different she was and even mentioned that she felt as if she were a "pet" and not a full member of the family though she assured me that her parents provided well for her and loved her very much. She was grateful to have grown up in America but feels it would have been better if she had grown up in an Asian (and preferably a Korean) home.
I was sad but fascinated by her revelations. Like many I assumed that babies and young children would somehow assimilate into homes, even if they were homes composed of people who looked so different from themselves. I was wrong. My friend always had a deep seated feeling that she did not belong.
I thought it was interesting when, I think it Angelina Jolie but it might have been Brad Pitt, was asked why they were adopting one of the new children to their brood and Angelina responded that they wanted each of their children to have at least one other family member that looks "like them." I suppose have a whole collection of racial types in the family might even help to nullify the racial differences in an adoptive family. If no one looks like anyone else it must be better than if one kid is the different one.
Lots of food for thought here.
The segment is in the sidebar in the "Video" section. It's called "Haiti's Future: Pt. 3." The website is thegreenespace dot org
factor. There is a reason that certain countries (such as Haiti, for
example) are so stricken with poverty (stricken in the sense of being hit) whereas other countries are rich enough for their citizens to look outside the borders of their own country for children. There is also an unspoken reason why these citizens choose to adopt outside their own country.
I mean, I rarely hear about children being adopted from France or
London or any western European country. It is almost always a country that is war-torn, stricken (hit) with poverty or some kind of severe problem that leads to the children basically being taken out of their native cultural environment and planted in foreign cultural environment.
I believe it has to do with unspoken notions of "the white man's
burden". But I could be wrong. Maybe the desire is truly altrusic but I think if that was the case, taking away a country's greatest natural
resource would just be a temporary solution meant to alleviate
temporary conditions, not a permanent adoption.
Regarding culture, with such a thought experiment, I would suggest that the 4th of July is not really meaningful (those of us with Asian adoptees don't celebrate political holidays from the country of origin). What does seem more meaningful is language, history, and common customs and beliefs--all the ways that people connect with one another within a culture.
Regarding the economic forces that drive adoptions by Americans (and other westerners), it's complicated, and has to do with the distinction between the public and private domestic adoption systems here. International adoptions aren't necessarily more costly than private domestic adoptions. By the same token, public domestic adoptions aren't necessarily the red-tape hassle that prospective adoptive parents think they will be.
Interesting questions!
Rated.