There’s a @DavidAFrench piece @TheAtlantic that cites my adoption work alongside some stomach-turning racist attacks, made on his family by the Alt Right since 2015, and particularly after French’s criticism of Donald Trump in the election 1/a bunch theatlantic.com/family/archive…
1. I don’t do Twitter fights as a general rule. 2. I’m disgusted (but sadly not surprised) by the racism directed at French’s daughter and family, which included photoshopping his daughter, born in Ethiopia, into gas chamber or slave plantation pictures. That’s vile and atrocious
However, French’s attempt to draw equivalence between that sort of hate attack and what he presents as corresponding attacks on his multiracial family from the left—with me as the prime example—leaves me wondering whether he read any of the work of mine he cites.
My book, The Child Catchers, does certainly discuss the evangelical movement that arose in the mid-‘00s and crafted an adoption theology to, in their words, “Get as many people in the church to adopt, and adopt as many kids as you can.”
amazon.com/The-Child-Catc…
amazon.com/The-Child-Catc…
There *were* leaders in this movement who argued that “the ultimate purpose of human adoption by Christians, therefore, is not to give orphans parents, as important as that is. It is to place them in a Christian home that they might be positioned to receive the gospel.”
French is right that I don’t think that’s great. But that’s not the main point of my book.
The other 7 chapters overwhelmingly deal with the fact that adoption, as a multi-billion $ industry, had become one where poor or vulnerable families—in the U.S., Ethiopia or beyond—were recruited, coerced or duped into relinquishing children primarily to fulfill Western demand.
Domestic adoptions in the U.S. have too often shuttled vulnerable mothers from maternity homes or CPCs into adoption agencies, where in the bad old days, children were forcibly removed, and more recently, young mothers are simply told they can't possibly be prepared to parent.
International adoptions, in country after country, have taken place in a context where the money each adoption brings in—often averaging around $35-40,000—distorts local child welfare systems and economies, leading to the creation of new orphanages seeking Western support.
Those orphanages then recruit children from poor but intact families on the promise of better resources & schooling, sometimes misleading parents that international adoption is a temporary guardianship or study abroad opportunity, and their children will ultimately return.
(Here, for example, is a piece I reported for @TheAtlantic in 2011: theatlantic.com/international/…)
Weird hybrids of domestic & international adoption also exist, like the exploitation of Arkansas' Marshallese diaspora community, targeted by private adoption attorneys taking advantage of Marshall Islanders’ different (but common) adoption traditions. newrepublic.com/article/121556…
Aside from these basic, systemic problems, there are also the horror stories, such as the two-year investigation I published in Mother Jones (what French calls an “essay”) into how, after Liberia’s civil war, U.S. fundamentalists adopted from the country en masse...
...and how many of those adoptions later failed, many amid allegations of abuse, rehoming and even forcible—and illegal—repatriation. (That is, I spoke to multiple kids who were simply dumped back in Liberia by their adoptive parents.)
Or the 2013 death of Hana Williams, in another fundamentalist family that had embraced adoption as a religious calling but was woefully unprepared to care for the children they took in. slate.com/articles/doubl…
These terrible stories *do not* characterize most adoptive families (and aren't limited to conservatives theappeal.org/before-childre…). But they were enabled in part by transforming adoption—with all its complex questions of race, gender, class, colonialism and trauma—into a movement.
You don’t have to take that from me. The best people to take it from are those who know it most intimately: adoptees and first families. The ranks of adoption scholarship & reform advocacy are filled with them: @arissaoh @jaeran @thirdrootprod @Lost_Daughters & adoption twitter
You could also take it from evangelical adoptive parents like David and Desiree Smolin works.bepress.com/david_smolin/1…, or Jen Hatmaker jenhatmaker.com/blog/2013/05/1…
In 2017 I had the honor of speaking at the annual summit of @OrphanAlliance, the largest umbrella group in the movement. My panel was framed around "civil disagreement" but there was much of the first—civility—than the latter. Dozens of attendees told me they shared my concerns
That's likely why CAFO and the larger movement itself have increasingly broadened their focus—with many groups moving from predominantly promoting int'l adoption to advocating for family preservation & the promotion of in-country foster care & adoption in developing nations.
Countries like Uganda are doing it themselves: trying, slowly, to build up child welfare systems like the imperfect but better systems of the West, to prevent the need for wide scale international adoption: brightthemag.com/in-uganda-fost….
Hate and racism are real. But so are systems that unwittingly perpetuate institutional racism, sexism and classism with less personal malice & often the best of intentions.
I’m disgusted by what French's family endured. But vile, racist attacks, replete with intimidation and violent imagery, and investigative reporting on troubled systems are not equivalent things. To draw such an equivalence is misguided and dangerous.
