Why is it acceptable for one set of adoptees...?

Question

Why does it seem that trans-racial, international adoptees are often encouraged to seek out their roots, heritage, and even their birth family? I have even seen news stories about this being such a great thing.

Yet when us white, American born adoptees express interest in our birth families, we are told "get over it, be glad you weren't aborted, be grateful someone took you in and gave you a place to live". There is a huge, negative social stigma against it.

Why is it acceptable for one set of adoptees to search, but not another?

Is the loss greater for one set but not the other?

Thoughts as to why this cultural opinion exists?

Answer 1

I think it's simply because the transracial/-national adoptees are so obviously adopted.  Caucasian American babies adopted by CA parents tend to not "look adopted," and are therefore more likely to be adopted by people more interested in maintaining the "as if born to" fiction.  Such people may well not encourage their children to search.

There's also the fact that as humans we find the different interesting.  This puts transnational adptees at risk for becoming sort of exotic tokens of their culture--not that their parents love them any less, but "Ooh!  Another culture!  How interesting!  Let's explore it!" is an understandable urge.  And the fact that the culture is geographically far away, and the birth mother unlikely to physically enter the child's life, surely makes certain a'parents feel more secure about exploring the child's heritage than they might if it meant having a strange woman show up on the doorstep to meet her offspring 18 years later.

I have a perfect right to know my heritage and my identity.  But I have lost less than they have.  Nobody took my language, country of origin, and racial heritage from me.  I would have been a white American female whether I'd been adopted or not.

Answer 2

If a child wants to find his birth family heritage, don't hide him from it. Help him.

If the other doesn't want to find their birth family, don't make him find it. He may be content with his adoptive family, or he doesn't care about his birth family.

He may also be afraid about what he might find out about his birth family, or afraid he might not find anything at all.

Answer 3

This question and Laurel's post really got me thinking. So I'd like to put my lowly AP 2 cents in. :-)  I'm a transracial adopter and in the homestudy process I was given VERY little information regarding this process. Therefore being the compulsive person I am, I made it my goal to study transracial adoption. It was reccommended to do all the things you stated (celebrate the culture, heritage, birthfamilies, and so on) so I have tried to do so.  What I am wondering is, since my homestudy process was so lacking in preparation/information in this aspect of adoption, is it the same for those who adopt Caucasian, healthy, infants? Is it in great part a lack of knowledge? Even the research I've seen on this type of adoption doesn't emphasize these aspects very much. Not to make excuses, but what an AP isn't aware of, they can't take care of.  Since doing my research, I really question how the entire process is conducted and what aspects are emphasized and why. Perhaps we could all get together and devise a new system?

Answer 4

Laurel, Justice, Sunny and others have all answered this question very well.

I just want to add that I have perceived adoptive parents of transcultural children often feel less threatened in "supporting" their children's exploration of their roots because the children are far less likely to actually *find* their natural parents.  It's safe, and it makes them look good.

As others have suggested, it seems to be the natural parents themselves that some adopters find threatening - not the different cultures.  With "homegrown" adoptees, the "threat" of connecting with natural parents is very real.

Answer 5

Laurel & Justice have hit all the relevent points.

It's easier for people to believe what they can 'see', i.e. different race.

As a 'homegrown' adoptee, I actually envy their freedom a bit, it seems like they would have had less pretending to do growing up.  And as adults,  more understanding and  less justifying to do to other's as to WHY they want to search.

Answer 6

Maybe acknowledging the loss of another culture is easier than acknowledging a newborn's trauma of losing it's mother.  It seems like it's easier to accept the tragedy of families in 'other countries' losing their infants than to recognize we're making a business of that same tragedy in our own country.

TRAs are 'building cultural bridges' that we can exploit and feel expansive and sophisticated about.  But breaking up our own mother child bonds still has a nasty stigma that doesn't feel good after the fact.  It requires us to make the other options sound worse, like being killed or left in a dumpster; as if those are the only available outcomes.

Healthy children separated from healthy mothers because their births were inconvenient raise up the underbelly & hypocrisy of the adoption business.   I think the huge negative social stigma is reflective of the shame that our society bears for fostering adoption instead of nurturing our natural families.

Answer 7

Thats a very interesting question.  I honestly don't know why.  I guess because its like if you are a white kid adopted then OBVIOUSLY you were taken from a crack w***e of a mom.  Why should you go to find her?  Where as the babies from china for instance could be from an orphanage (so there isn't as much risk for the AP's to encourage it) and every one feels sorry for them.

Thats just my thoughts on it.

Answer 8

I think when people tell interracially adopted children to find their roots, it's more their heritage and culture as a race rather than their birthparents.

I was adopted from China and my (white) parents have always made it a point to encourage me to learn about Chinese customs (Chinese New Year, tea ceremony, myths...). My little sister is a mix of black and Native and we are already showing her about the rich heritage of both races but we would not under any circumstances encourage her to go back to the woman who broke a four-year-old's arm and nearly drowned her.

Answer 9

I think it's a new opportunity for international adoptees that hasn't much existed until recent trends towards openness, so it is really being talked about a lot now.  I think it's great.  I'm sorry that you feel unsupported in your desire for openness.  I wish no adoptee had to feel that way.  Best wishes.

Answer 10

For non-"trans-racial" adoptions, it was fairly easy to pass the child off as one's own biological child.  The amended birth certificate backs up the "as if born to" statement.  In a "trans-racial" adoption, there is no doubt by looking at the child that he/she is not the biological child.  There was no way around it.

For some reason this translates as Caucasian adults don't need to know that they are Irish or German or French-Canadian.  But if the background is Korean or African the adoptive parents can't hide the difference.  If they can completely avoid the subject (i.e. pass the child off as coming from the same background) they can make the argument that there's no need for the child of, say, an Irish family to know they are German.

The search for roots is a relatively recent phenomenon (past 30 years or so), not just for adoptees but for anyone interested in pursuing it.  For adoptees, another layer is that they first have to find out the background of their own parents.

In the 1950's I don't recall that Korean adoptees were actually encouraged to find out more about the culture from which they came - I would invite Korean or other "trans-racial" adoptees to comment on this.

I was raised by a Russian-Jewish family.  My birthmother was Russian-Jewish BUT my birthfather was Irish.  I didn't find this out until I was 46.  And - my adoptive parents were told that BOTH my birthparents were Jewish.