Thread by @b_lts_

Naming adoption as violence, and as a tactic of colonialism, begins to express how adoption is built and reproduced by racial capitalism. 🧵1/8

#NAAM2022 #NAAM #AdoptionAwarenessMonth #AdoptionIsTraumaAND #AdopteeTwitter #FFY

The idea of Racial Capitalism suggests that all capitalism is racial because racism and capitalism mutually depend upon one another. 2/8

Racial capitalism reproduces and exploits racial difference to extract profit. 3/8

As abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, “Capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it.” 4/8

Adoption depends on the transfer of Black and Brown children from their families and communities to wealthy white adopters. 5/8

This transaction exemplifies racism, or as Gilmore describes, “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,”... 6/8

…or in other words, the ways the government and unregulated parts of industry abandons people to die by marking them as racially different. 7/8

Adoption is racial capitalism because racialized people are seen as having disposable, and therefore exploitable, kinship ties, which then are broken in service of profits in an adoption marketplace (which we'll cover next week when we talk about Commodification) 7.333/8

Under neoliberalism, where Racial Capitalism is exalted & capital ($$ that is used to generate income) is proliferated by whatever means necessary, the child/future adopted person's kinship is devalued in service of churning $$ through adoption and foster care systems. 7.666/8

Just as we cannot undo racism without undoing capitalism, we cannot undo adoption without undoing racial capitalism. 8/8

If you, like me, are just beginning to learn about / are still learning about Racial Capitalism, I recommend this video with Ruth Wilson Gilmore: Geographies of Racial Capitalism. 9/8

I also recommend this short piece by Robin D. G. Kelley, What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism? 10/8

bostonreview.net/articles/robin…