Markers of Ethnicity (p. 50)

A baby is removed from its country of origin, an act that one of my graduate students...has pointed out to me is a form of forced migration, and the parents/purchasers work on turning that act into something cute. Something vaguely identified as "culture" or "ethnicity" displaces race and class... That may work for Asian children brought to the United States--but not for our own black children. Can you picture the motif white parents could use for their African American babies that would be the equivalent of pandas for Chinese babies? Watermelons, anyone? You could turn to Africa and kente cloth, but anything that would mark American black would be automatically offensive.

Rothman often has a tone when talking about parents who adopt internationally that suggests she has little sympathy for them; she almost seems disdainful. I hesitate to quote some of these passages because her tone can seem so judgmental, and I have many friends who've adopted internationally and I would not like to offend them. It seems hard for Rothman to see these parents as caught up in the same kind of web of good intentions, doubts, love, and sorrow that those of us who adopt Black American children are. Look at that sentence up there: "Asian children brought to the United States," versus "our own Black children." Who does she imagine herself speaking to? Why do our Black children get to be our own, while Asian children are spoken of differently? Why does she not see adoptive parents of Asian children as part of "us"? I know I do.

At the same time, I take her point about markers of ethnicity. A friend of mine recently referred to her daughter on Facebook as "the Khmer Princess," and I found myself wondering what similar nickname I could possibly give Yehva that would have the same note of playful acknowledgment of where she came from, without being horribly offensive. I won't tell you any of the things I came up with, because none of them seemed playful and they were all horribly offensive. It can't be done.

I did briefly play with calling Yehva "shorty" after we got the birthfather's deposition during which he called her "the shorty" or "my shorty" much more than he called her a baby or his daughter, and I would say to Yehva as I changed her diaper or combed her hair, "You're my shorty." But "shorty" is one of those expressions from Black Vernacular English that you just can't say in a white Midwestern accent without sounding stupid and pathetic, so I gave it up.

I wonder what it means to reference our children's ethnicity when it's different from our own? Is it empowering or distancing to call a daughter "the Khmer princess"? Is it both? Should comments about ethnicity or background be saved for serious discussion, or can they be playful? Should I correct Carl when he announces that Yehva is made of chocolate? How will our children hear comments about their racial and ethnic background? How will they hear our silence?

I think one thing Rothman is getting at is that when we adopt from Cambodia or China, we don't automatically overcome our cultural tendency to exoticize that part of the world and its people. At the same time, though, we don't have the same kind of direct and complex, ongoing relationship of living in a divided society with them--we may know what damage America has done in those parts of the world, but that's mostly history to us, perhaps. Race relations in America are something we struggle with and think about--or, if we don't, they're something we're aware of, we know we're choosing not to grapple with them.

Rothman talks in this chapter on "Motherhood in the Marketplace" about the commodification of babies. She seems to see parents who adopt internationally as complicit in that--look at that "parents/purchasers" comment there, something I don't think she'd ascribe to those of us who adopt in the US. And yet Black babies are commodified here; we have a similar relationship to our children and their culture. I'll try to say a little bit about that.

When David and I were preparing to adopt, we had to take a course on "becoming a transracial family." When the materials for it arrived in the mail, he and I looked through them and were frankly offended. They seemed to assume that we had never thought about race at all, that we had to be told that race was a vexed subject. There was a list of "bad reasons to adopt a black baby" ["because little black babies are so cute," for instance] and another list of nicknames you should not call your black baby ["brown sugar" is one I remember].

Then we had our first class, and except for one lesbian couple, the parents were overwhelmingly clueless about race. "Well, there are no black people where we live, but racism really isn't an issue here," one woman said. "We figure people are just people." And I realized that the teachers of the class, knowing who their students were, had made the class for them.

Last year, a woman said to me guilelessly that she and her husband were thinking about adopting interracially "because little black babies are so cute." That's a piece of the commodification of black babies--this idea that they are something cute we can acquire, like a doll or a Pomeranian. And I sometimes feel, uncomfortably, that there is a little of that even among those of us who know better. Yehva gets a lot of attention everywhere we go--much more than Eric or Carl ever did, cute as they were--and a friend who has also adopted transracially and I were talking about the suspicion that, in a primarily white community, there's a element of not just "what a beautiful baby" but "what a cute black baby you have there."

Rothman's going to have a chapter on The Trophy Child in a bit, and we'll revisit some of these themes in a bit of a different way.