Author : Pamela Anne Quiroz
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 158 pages
File Size : 22,36 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 9780742559424
Adoption in a Color-blind Society illustrates how the political economy of private domestic adoption intersects with the political economy of racism to generate quite different demands for infants and children of different races and how the private adoption arena responds to these demands. This book argues that rather than moving towards a color-blind democracy, we instead live in a context where race continues to matter substantially, particularly in arenas 'closest to home.'
Author : Rebecca Carroll
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 21,74 MB
Release : 2021-02-02
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1982174552
A stirring and powerful memoir from black cultural critic Rebecca Carroll recounting her painful struggle to overcome a completely white childhood in order to forge her identity as a black woman in America. Rebecca Carroll grew up the only black person in her rural New Hampshire town. Adopted at birth by artistic parents who believed in peace, love, and zero population growth, her early childhood was loving and idyllic—and yet she couldn’t articulate the deep sense of isolation she increasingly felt as she grew older. Everything changed when she met her birth mother, a young white woman, who consistently undermined Carroll’s sense of her blackness and self-esteem. Carroll’s childhood became harrowing, and her memoir explores the tension between the aching desire for her birth mother’s acceptance, the loyalty she feels toward her adoptive parents, and the search for her racial identity. As an adult, Carroll forged a path from city to city, struggling along the way with difficult boyfriends, depression, eating disorders, and excessive drinking. Ultimately, through the support of her chosen black family, she was able to heal. Intimate and illuminating, Surviving the White Gaze is a timely examination of racism and racial identity in America today, and an extraordinarily moving portrait of resilience.
Author : Helen A. Neville
Publisher : American Psychological Association (APA)
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 11,76 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781433820731
"Is the United States today a "postracial" society? In this volume, top scholars in psychology, education, sociology, and related fields dissect the concept of color-blind racial ideology (CBRI), the widely held belief that skin color does not affect interpersonal interactions and that interpersonal and institutional racism therefore no longer exist in American society. The chapter authors survey the theoretical and empirical literature on racial color blindness; discuss novel ways of assessing and measuring color-blind racial beliefs; examine related characteristics such as lack of empathy (among Whites) and internalized racism (among people of color); and assess the impact of CBRI in education, the workplace, and health care--as well as the racial disparities that such beliefs help foster"--Provided by publisher.
Author : Michele Bratcher Goodwin
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : pages
File Size : 50,25 MB
Release : 2010-02-22
Category : Law
ISBN : 1139788655
Creating families can no longer be described by heterosexual reproduction in the intimacy of a couple's home and the privacy of their bedroom. To the contrary, babies can be brought into families through complex matrixes involving lawyers, coordinators, surrogates, 'brokers', donors, sellers, endocrinologists, and without any traditional forms of intimacy. In direct response to the need and desire to parent, men, women, and couples - gay and straight - have turned to viable, alternative means: baby markets. This book examines the ways in which Westerners create families through private, market processes. From homosexual couples skirting Mother Nature by going to the assisted reproductive realm and buying the sperm or ova that will complete the reproductive process, to Americans travelling abroad to acquire children in China, Korea, or Ethiopia, market dynamics influence how babies and toddlers come into Western families. Michele Goodwin and a group of contributing experts explore how financial interests, aesthetic preferences, pop culture, children's needs, race, class, sex, religion, and social customs influences the law and economics of baby markets.
Author : Mary Ann Davis
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 37,57 MB
Release : 2011-08-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9048189721
Do adoptions provide children for families or families for children? This book analyzes the complex interactions between adopters and adoptees using historical and current data. Who are the preferred parents and children, both domestically and internationally? How do the types of adoptions-domestic adoptions, private and public through the foster care system, and intercountry adoptions-differ? Domestic trends include a shift to open adoptions and a notable increase in "hard to place", foster care adoptions-typically older, siblings, minorities, with physical, educational, or emotional challenges. Adoptive parents are increasingly all ages (including grandparents); all types of marriages (single, married and same-sex couples); all income levels, with subsidized adoptions for children who would otherwise remain in foster or institutional care. Intercountry adoptions have followed waves, pushed by wars and political or economic crises in the sending country, and pulled by the increasing demand from the U. S. Currently there is a decrease in intercountry adoptions from Asia and Eastern Europe with a possible fifth wave from Africa with the greatest number from Ethiopia. This is a resource for family sociologists, demographers, social workers, advocates for children and adoptive parents, as well as those who are interested in the continuing research in adoptions.
Author : Rhonda M. Roorda
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 349 pages
File Size : 23,18 MB
Release : 2015-11-03
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0231540485
While many proponents of transracial adoption claim that American society is increasingly becoming "color-blind," a growing body of research reveals that for transracial adoptees of all backgrounds, racial identity does matter. Rhonda M. Roorda elaborates significantly on that finding, specifically studying the effects of the adoption of black and biracial children by white parents. She incorporates diverse perspectives on transracial adoption by concerned black Americans of various ages, including those who lived through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era. All her interviewees have been involved either personally or professionally in the lives of transracial adoptees, and they offer strategies for navigating systemic racial inequalities while affirming the importance of black communities in the lives of transracial adoptive families. In Their Voices is for parents, child-welfare providers, social workers, psychologists, educators, therapists, and adoptees from all backgrounds who seek clarity about this phenomenon. The author examines how social attitudes and federal policies concerning transracial adoption have changed over the last several decades. She also includes suggestions on how to revise transracial adoption policy to better reflect the needs of transracial adoptive families. Perhaps most important, In Their Voices is packed with advice for parents who are invested in nurturing a positive self-image in their adopted children of color and the crucial perspectives those parents should consider when raising their children. It offers adoptees of color encouragement in overcoming discrimination and explains why a "race-neutral" environment, maintained by so many white parents, is not ideal for adoptees or their families.
Author : Mark Montgomery
Publisher : Vanderbilt University Press
Page : 363 pages
File Size : 17,22 MB
Release : 2018-01-30
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 0826504035
Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2018 International adoption is in a state of virtual collapse, rates having fallen by more than half since 2004 and continuing to fall. Yet around the world millions of orphaned and vulnerable children need permanent homes, and thousands of American and European families are eager to take them in. Many government officials, international bureaucrats, and social commentators claim these adoptions are not "in the best interests" of the child. They claim that adoption deprives children of their "birth culture," threatens their racial identities, and even encourages widespread child trafficking. Celebrity adopters are publicly excoriated for stealing children from their birth families. This book argues that opposition to adoption ostensibly based on the well-being of the child is often a smokescreen for protecting national pride. Concerns about the harm done by transracial adoption are largely inconsistent with empirical evidence. As for trafficking, opponents of international adoption want to shut it down because it is too much like a market for children. But this book offers a radical challenge to this view—that is, what if instead of trying to suppress market forces in international adoption, we embraced them so they could be properly regulated? What if the international system functioned more like open adoption in the United States, where birth and adoptive parents can meet and privately negotiate the exchange of parental rights? This arrangement, the authors argue, could eliminate the abuses that currently haunt international adoption. The authors challenge the prevailing wisdom with their economic analyses and provocative analogies from other policy realms. Based on their own family's experience with the adoption process, they also write frankly about how that process feels for parents and children.
Author : Sherrow O. Pinder
Publisher : SAGE
Page : 545 pages
File Size : 18,21 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Education
ISBN : 1412998026
American Multicultural Studies: Diversity of Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality provides an interdisciplinary view of multicultural studies in the United States, addressing a wide range of topics that continue to define and shape this area of study. Through this collection of essays Sherrow Pinder responds to the need to open up a rich avenue for addressing current and continuing issues of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, cultural diversity, and education in their varied forms. Substantial thematic overlaps are found between sections and essays, all of which are oriented toward a single broad objective: to develop new and different ways of addressing how multicultural issues, in their discursive sociocultural contexts, are inextricably linked to the operations of power. Power, as a site of resistance to which it invariably gives rise, is tacked from a perspective that attends to the complexities of America's history and politics.
Author : Mia Tuan
Publisher : Russell Sage Foundation
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 30,20 MB
Release : 2011-01-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1610447069
Transnational adoption was once a rarity in the United States, but Americans have been choosing to adopt children from abroad with increasing frequency since the mid-twentieth century. Korean adoptees make up the largest share of international adoptions—25 percent of all children adopted from outside the United States—but they remain understudied among Asian American groups. What kind of identities do adoptees develop as members of American families and in a cultural climate that often views them as foreigners? Choosing Ethnicity, Negotiating Race is the only study of this unique population to collect in-depth interviews with a multigenerational, random sample of adult Korean adoptees. The book examines how Korean adoptees form their social identities and compares them to native-born Asian Americans who are not adopted. How do American stereotypes influence the ways Korean adoptees identify themselves? Does the need to explore a Korean cultural identity—or the absence of this need—shift according to life stage or circumstance? In Choosing Ethnicity, Negotiating Race, sixty-one adult Korean adoptees—representing different genders, social classes, and communities—reflect on early childhood, young adulthood, their current lives, and how they experience others' perceptions of them. The authors find that most adoptees do not identify themselves strongly in ethnic terms, although they will at times identify as Korean or Asian American in order to deflect questions from outsiders about their cultural backgrounds. Indeed, Korean adoptees are far less likely than their non-adopted Asian American peers to explore their ethnic backgrounds by joining ethnic organizations or social networks. Adoptees who do not explore their ethnic identity early in life are less likely ever to do so—citing such causes as general aversion, lack of opportunity, or the personal insignificance of race, ethnicity, and adoption in their lives. Nonetheless, the choice of many adoptees not to identify as Korean or Asian American does not diminish the salience of racial stereotypes in their lives. Korean adoptees must continually navigate society's assumptions about Asian Americans regardless of whether they chose to identify ethnically. Choosing Ethnicity, Negotiating Race is a crucial examination of this little-studied American population and will make informative reading for adoptive families, adoption agencies, and policymakers. The authors demonstrate that while race is a social construct, its influence on daily life is real. This book provides an insightful analysis of how potent this influence can be—for transnational adoptees and all Americans.
Author : Soojin Chung
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 29,65 MB
Release : 2021-12-14
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1479808881
Explores the role played by missionaries in the twentieth-century transnational adoption movement Between 1953 and 2018, approximately 170,000 Korean children were adopted by families in dozens of different countries, with Americans providing homes to more than two-thirds of them. In an iconic photo taken in 1955, Harry and Bertha Holt can be seen descending from a Pan American World Airways airplane with twelve Asian babies—eight for their family and four for other families. As adoptive parents and evangelical Christians who identified themselves as missionaries, the Holts unwittingly became both the metaphorical and literal parental figures in the growing movement to adopt transnationally. Missionaries pioneered the transnational adoption movement in America. Though their role is known, there has not yet been a full historical look at their theological motivations—which varied depending on whether they were evangelically or ecumenically focused—and what the effects were for American society, relations with Asia, and thinking about race more broadly. Adopting for God shows that, somewhat surprisingly, both evangelical and ecumenical Christians challenged Americans to redefine traditional familial values and rethink race matters. By questioning the perspective that equates missionary humanitarianism with unmitigated cultural imperialism, this book offers a more nuanced picture of the rise of an important twentieth-century movement: the evangelization of adoption and the awakening of a new type of Christian mission.
