Seven Oaks Magazine.

A review of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption
February 18, 2007
Cara Ng

Book Review: Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (South End Press)

In these times – when sound bytes on adoption currently clogging our airwaves are thoughtlessly pandering to the standpoints of celebrities who have taken a fondness to parenting brown- and yellow-skinned babies from the Third World – Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (South End Press) should cause elation among audiences critical of this fashionable spectacle. The collection is a valuable resource for those who believe that transracial, often international, adoption cannot be a curative measure – in the slightest – for the inequalities which stain the human experience.

Outsiders Within brings together an assortment of first person narrative, poetry, and political essays, dividing the book into six thematic sections. Fortunately, given the ways in which we’ve generally been deprived of this viewpoint, almost all contributors are adoptees themselves – raised by white parents in privileged Western/Northern regions of the world, with domestic adoptions in this part of the world included. The result: an unapologetic response, a diverse array of thematically overarching expressions of critique regarding wide-spanning issues – of identity, belonging, exclusion, loss, guilt, discrimination, malaise, trauma, journey, and discovery – that are inextricably interwoven into the practice of transracial adoption itself.

Laura Briggs presents a formidable critique of adoption practices in US domestic politics in “Orphaning Children of Welfare”, with an especial emphasis on the popular discourse of 1980s America which constructed the image of an African-American, crack-addicted, pregnant woman who gives birth to a ‘crack baby’. In contravention of national statistics at the time – which defined the highest users of cocaine and crack as young white males – news stories featuring black women addicted to crack flourished, giving racist politicians and policy-makers the impetus to push for domestic adoption and to continue its attack against Americans, particularly black mothers, falling below the poverty line. Brigg’s essay is a factual and extremely well-argued chapter of this collection, not only due to the statistical evidence that supports her claims, but to her ability to place the manufacturing of the mythical black crack baby and her crack-addicted mother properly within the egregious context of American racial politics.

Jae Ran Rim’s exploration delivers an unrelenting appraisal of zealous Christian intervention into the South Korean region in the destructive aftermath of the Korean War. Illuminating the arrogant, misguided, and avaricious pursuits of the late Harry Holt, founder of the Holt Adoption Agency, she offers a persuasive argument regarding his self-serving ulterior motives: an indefatigable Christian, racist ethic to ‘save’ Korean children from their ‘deficient’, ‘savage’ cultural order, coupled with an inexorable drive for material wealth (certain streams of Christianity have often “[viewed] that fruitful rewards result from heeding God’s will [justifies] the pursuit of wealth” [156]). Rim’s nuanced analysis – which highlights the integration of Christian, colonialist, and capitalist attitudes that drove a great deal of missionary work in post-war Korea – offers a comprehensive historical approach to that country’s current-day reliance on sending children overseas.

Narratives of trauma and/or abuse are also shared in this collection. Shandra Spears’ poem, “If I Pull Away”, demonstrates the demolishing impacts of colonization in Canada from the perspective of an Ojibway woman. Her poem returns repeatedly to a phrase that expresses the violent uprooted-ness, disconnect, and volatility that is a part of the experiences of many Native children who have been adopted:

While not lyrically captivating or poetically innovative, it manages to convey the author’s tragic experience. The systematic removal of Native children from their homes asphyxiated Indigenous cultures, not only brutally interrupting the flow of cultural identity transmission, but axing away at the cultures and humanities of the peoples themselves.

Ron M’s story chronicles the painful circumstances of his conception: his white Scottish mother, raped by a Pakistani man, gave birth to him and brought him to live in an orphanage immediately thereafter. While he is adopted by well-intentioned Scottish parents, an increasing awareness of his history – combined with the schoolyard taunting he must endure throughout his childhood due to his racialized identity – drives him into a life of self-destructive behavior. After years of adulthood spent on this disintegrating path, he makes a decision to recover: a support network for adoptees provides an opportunity for him to finally feel part of a meaningful community, and it facilitates his healing process and road to sobriety. The prose in this story sometimes resembles a manual for self-help (“I recall that my second wife often spoke to me about love being about commitment, but I just could not understand that at the time… I now practice love in my life” [page 196]), but overall, it’s an elevating story of recovery and hope.

The work’s concluding chapters, situated within the book’s final “Speaking for Ourselves” section, offers hopeful, heartening stories that reverse, once and for all, the standard social tendency to view adoptees as having no agency; a tendency conventionalized through a process of infantilizing that is hinged upon our imagery of overseas, blameless, clear-eyed children who have been lovingly enveloped by selfless, charitable parents: they are a silent, docile, and suffering population. Perlita Harris examines the ways in which adoptees are creating communities for themselves through organizations like the Association for Transracially Adopted and Fostered People (ATRAP). A service-user-led organization stationed in the United Kingdom, ATRAP is modeled upon the revaluation of adoptee voices and needs, administered and used by adoptees themselves.

The strength of this book lies in its political analysis – many of its contributors are skilled in illustrating the macro and micro dimensions of adoption, qualitatively and quantitatively speaking – although many of the stories told from first-person narrative will fall short, in literary terms, of capturing the political sympathies of those who approach the book from an stance of mere curiosity. While the aim of the book, as a “corrective” action, was to act as a catalyst to broadcast the voices of transracial adoptees, readers may feel shortchanged by the imbalance between political and literary talent. I could not help but feel that the force behind the various messages of criticism and calls-for-change could prospectively be diffused in some of the unimpressive writing styles. Further, the vast spectrum of narrative between each chapter – transitioning from political analysis to poetry and back again – can make for a less-than-smooth reading experience for those who are used to collections that are authored in one particular form.

But the book’s release could not come at better time, raising crucial questions regarding the current Hollywood fixation on adopting children from Africa. If Angelina Jolie’s adoptive impulses – identified by dominant media discourse as a gesture of ‘humanitarianism’ – of the world’s underprivileged children were not enough to spawn a discussion of the global economic asymmetries which facilitate the transfer of babies from the poor to the rich, from the racialized to the white, from the non-Western to the Western, Madonna’s recent adoption of a Malawian baby boy should have. The pop culture icon raised a furor among Malawian human rights groups when she adopted a baby boy from that country and immediately flew him off to live in her lavish household in the United Kingdom.

While the legalities around adoption in that African country are ill-defined and she did not technically breech any national rules in adopting with such distasteful abruptness, this is surely not the point. What needs to be called into question, if we are to learn anything at all from this incident, is not only the uncritical response the star launched at her critics (she told a sympathetic Oprah that all she wanted to do was “go into a Third World country and…give a life to a child who might not otherwise have had one”) or her general behavior of haughty entitlement, but also the historical and contemporary global system that so cruelly delineates who has a right to parent whose children. And what will become of Maddox and David – and the ever-extending line of children that Jolie and Madonna will adopt – whose experiences will be further complicated by the unrelenting, insatiable industry of media surveillance?

If we are to be productive in our questioning of adoption, we can no longer employ a language that is purely framed within the discursive confines of ‘practicality’ and ‘humanitarianism’ – a trite, obsolete mode of expression that our dominant media outlets are so grossly guilty of perpetuating. The limits imposed by invoking ‘practicality’ and ‘humanitarianism’ can only take us so far in examining the complexities of adoption before we find ourselves unable to confront the limbo, one involving solely issues of morality. Writing against the currents of this binary dead end, Outsiders Within transgresses the dichotomy of ‘Adoption: Good or Bad’ and, instead, chooses a much more intellectually rigorous, multifaceted approach to dismantling the assumptions and systems which make this practice an increasingly thriving, normalized occurrence. This is a book that bravely and forcefully demands alternatives.