Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love

I wasn't sure about reading Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in US Adoption Practices by Christine Ward Gailey. I've read a lot of books about adoption, and as has happened to me with some other topics, although I remain interested in the subject, I've reached the point where I've heard the information and arguments so many times that a new book is not likely to yield a lot that's new.

I'm so glad I decided to give this book a try. For one thing, it's an academic book, and Gailey is more interested in reporting her findings than supporting an argument, and that's refreshing--it doesn't feel like I have to try to read through her biases as I have had to do in other books.

More importantly, though, Gailey addresses some adoption scenarios that no other book I've read has touched on (this may be a function of my own interests; there could well be a whole adoption literature out there that I'm not familiar with). One is public (from foster care) adoptions by working-class families, especially single mothers. Gailey talks about the forces that bring the least-adoptable children--those who have been traumatized and may be displaying behavioral problems--with the least-desirable adoptive parents--those who have few resources and no partner to share the work. She describes the bitter irony that leaves parents of the most challenging children, who need the most support, with the least. These parents often experience significant downward mobility after an adoption, in some cases losing jobs because of the demands of caring for their children, or flirting with bankruptcy, or losing homes.

I'm only 40 pages in, and I'm in a section right now where Gailey discusses the adoption of black children by black families. You wouldn't know it from the kinds of adoptions stories that get media play, but most black children available for adoption are in fact adopted into black families, and Gailey is (uniquely, in my experience) interested in the experiences of those children and families, both in their own right and in contrast with transracial adoption.

After a long section in which she has discussed the various strategies white adoptive parents use to address their child's race (ranging from denial of the child's race, interestingly enough, by such techniques as asserting that a child is mixed-race, not black, or by commenting on the lightness of the child's skin; to active efforts to create a more racially-integrated social circle), Gailey moves on to looking at how black adoptive families deal with their adoptive children's race--and this is fascinating.

Gailey found that adoption researchers had been almost universally unwilling or uninterested in looking at issues of color preference among adoptive families. But she wanted to know if, and how, that played a role, and so she asked both adoptive parents and adoption workers about it. She says, with what I can only take to be monumental understatement, that these were uncomfortable conversations:

For African-American social workers and adopters, it meant having to confront patterns of color preference and racial stereotyping within black communities in front of a white person who was going to be writing a book. It meant deciding or not deciding to speak or not to speak to an audience that would include whites. For some of the white adopters, it meant finding the words to talk about their children having been rejected by potential adopters who were black, without condemning a racialized community or appearing self-righteous or entitled. I could sense their struggles, and some expressed their discomfort to me. (38-9)

One African-American social worker was willing to talk about her experiences placing black babies, but only after talking about her own experiences growing up, in which her family privileged her brother over her because of his lighter skin and "better" hair. "It's a problem, but it's not much compared to what happened to me because I was a black woman in this society. Just get that down: I want that in the book." (39)

This social worker went on to talk about the reasons she sometimes had problems placing black children with black adoptive families. Often, the reasons are what makes children hard to place in any case: developmental delays, a history of abuse, behavioral problems. These children are often refused by black and white adoptive couples and end up with the "least desirable" adoptive families: single white women. But the worker talked about how these factors intersected with the darkness of the child's skin and the type of hair the child had. One baby, who had been born prematurely, was turned down by two black families before being placed with a white family, one because she had "bad" hair, and the other because they expected her to "darken up" too much to fit into their family.

As a white adoptive mother, this kind of story feels a little bit like a get-out-of-jail-free card, and a little bit like a point of solidarity, if that makes any sense. For good or ill, according to Gailey, black adoptive families wrestle with some of the same questions white adoptive families do, and are just as imperfect in their responses to the multiple issues raised by adoption.

She goes on to quote a number of social workers at length, who thoughtfully consider the issues and talk about how placing black children with white families, while being an option of last resort, is nonetheless an option they turn to more often than they'd like. And then she gets this refreshingly "curt" response from one adoption worker:

They're not kidding when they say these kids are "hard to place." We're lucky to get anyone to adopt them. I should, but I don't even bother about whether it's transracial or not anymore. The ones [social workers] I know who handle the crack kids would tell you the same. If [the prospective adopters are] alive and not child molesters, we'll place 'em. (40)

Only one of the adoptive families in her study said they'd had a color preference for their adopted child; in that case, an interracial couple wanted a child who would not be obviously adopted, but who might plausibly have been their biological child.

Gailey points out that transracial adoption is less common in public (foster) adoption. Private adoptions are common in the US, and take many overlapping forms. One is "facilitated" adoption (adoptions arranged by a person who might or might not be an attorney but whose role is to match adoptive parents with babies). Another is adoptions in which prospective adoptive parents are primarily responsible for making contact with birthmothers, through placing ads, posting websites with contact information, and so on. There are also private agency adoption, like our adoption of Yehva, where an agency maintains a pool of potential adoptive parents and is also the contact point for prospective birth parents; the adoptive families do not advertise or attempt to find birthmothers. [Many potential adoptive families pursue more than one of these paths at a time.]

Gailey points out that all of these forms of adoption are illegal throughout Europe, where they are seen a constituting a market in children. [I am curious about the details of this, as I know that, for instance, our agency places babies with European families, but Gailey didn't go into detail.] And I admit to feeling a bit uncomfortable when she talks about how much easier it is to get approved for private adoption than for public adoption, even though private adoptions often deal in the most "desirable" children: newborns, especially white ones, with no health problems or risk factors. For instance, a family seeking approval to work within the foster system, either as a foster family or in hope of adopting, needs to complete a course: a 3-hour class once a week for 12 weeks is typical. On the other hand, David and I were required only to take a course in "Becoming an Interracial Family" that lasted for, IIRC, 3 2-hour sessions.

The point Gailey is trying to get at, I think, is that private adoption skews more toward meeting the demands of potential parents for babies, while the public adoption system has no choice but to wrestle with meeting the needs of children, including the challenging ones. There are not a whole lot of white babies placed for adoption, compared to the number of families who would like to adopt a healthy infant, so, even though Gailey reports that adopters are less likely to cite "the long wait for a white infant" as a factor than they were 30 years ago, there are certainly "market forces" driving the higher number of transracial adoptions in the private adoption arena.

There's a part of me that does agree that private adoption and international adoption constitute a market in children and babies. I think it's naive to not take that into account. On the other hand, I think the private agency option was a good one for Yehva: she was drug-exposed in utero, and her birthmother was on drugs when she arrived at the hospital to give birth. K.'s decision to place Yehva for adoption allowed Yehva to bypass the foster care system, where she might have moved through multiple placements before being either reunited with her birthmother, or released for adoption. Gailey cites research that has found that 8 out of 10 black girls over the age of four have been sexually abused while in foster care [edited: this was her finding in her own research for the book. She was unable to find any other research that tracked this statistic, and hoped that her sample for the book was somehow anomalous]; although Yehva might have entered foster care as a newborn, it's a risky system that is not often able to provide stability for children, and I'm glad she, and other newborns like her, didn't have to spend time in it.

I didn't mean to digress; Gailey doesn't need to be argued with. She's thorough and clear-eyed and, so far at least, doesn't seem to have an axe to grind. This is a really worthwhile book. At least, the first third of it is.

Angry Adult Adoptees

When I was first thinking about adoption, I read a lot of books about it, because that's what I do. I remember reading one or two by and about transracial adoptees, and coming away from them feeling like I would be damned if I did, and damned if I didn't, no matter what choices I made. One essayist would write that her mother's insistence on her participating in a group for mixed-race adoptive families made her feel like her race was the most important thing about her, that it was the defining feature of who she was, and that she was thus always set apart from her white family. The next would bitterly recount how little her mother did to help her connect with black culture and black people, and how this left her adrift and confused, without a clear racial identity or sense of her place in the world. I was both amused and bemused by this.

Recently, I had a book of interviews with transracial adoptees home from the library. I dipped into it, but didn't read much before returning it. "The interview format just doesn't work for me," I said to myself, and this is true: I don't normally enjoy reading or listening to interviews.

But the other reason I didn't read it deeply is that I have Yehva now, and I did not want to imagine her in some angry adult complaining about how her mother (it's always the mother) got it wrong. The book may not even have had any angry adults complaining about their mothers. It's just that I'd read that kind of thing before, pre-Yehva, and I didn't want to encounter it again now that I could be the mother in question.

I agree with you 100% that this is cowardly of me.

So, the other night I decided to make the best of insomnia by finally spending some time reading what adoptees have to say. If you go to John Raible's blog and look at his blogroll, you'll have a pretty good idea of who I was reading, though I also read some that aren't on that list, and I don't necessarily remember who they were or how I found them, and I couldn't necessarily find them again; they link and inter-link to each other, though, and it's clear there's a community there of activist, sometimes angry adult transracial adoptees (or TRAs).

I have a few observations about my reading.

One is that there seem to be more--I want to stop saying angry because it might seem dismissive and judgmental--maybe politicized is a better word?--OK, politicized international adoptees. Often these are people who were adopted from Vietnam or Korea after wars that America was involved in, and it seems to have been very common for families to simply ignore or deny racial and cultural differences. I found myself hoping that we do better these days, that maybe even the imperfect ways that families wrestle with questions of race and culture will mean that we're doing better by the children we have now. People who were adopted from Vietnam after the war have a common refrain: "I was pulled away from my culture and every person I had ever known, and expected to be grateful for it." I hope we do a better job of not laying that kind of burden on our kids. (I think I'll come back to the gratitude thing later.)

Another is that they make some right-on, valid points. For instance, it it certainly true to my own experience that the primary voices that are heard talking about adoption are adoptive parents. Apparently there are a lot of people like me, who are so fascinated by this whole thing they're going through that they churn out endless blogs and memoirs and confessionals. I would say the second most common speakers on adoption are people who work in the field; birthparents are a very distant third, and adoptees are rarely sought out for commentary when adoption hits the news for some reason. So when John Raible asks us to call media outlets on this--to drop them a note saying, "Hey, why did you not interview a single adoptee in your recent story?"--he has good reason to.

This issue also matters because the perception of parent and child about how the family is doing can be very different. And it matters because adoptive parents are not necessarily very good at listening when adoptees speak; Harriet at Fugitivus later apologized, sort of, for asking adoptive parents to stay out of the comments on one of her posts, but her original request came from experience. She wrote:

I put that disclaimer out there because in the adult adoptee blog sites I’ve frequented, thread derailments seem to be most often started by adoptive parents who are terrified at having their choices, motivations, and privilege questioned.

*su sheepishly raises hand*

But, on the other hand, sometimes people complained about an experience they had in their family, and attributed it to adoption, when it just seemed like bad family shit to me. In a conversation about adoption on MetaFilter, one person described feeling like she did not fit in with her family at all. She didn't look like them, she was the only one who was musical, and so on. This was painful to her, and she attributed it to being adopted; for her, being adopted meant she never fit in with her family. A number of people chimed in to say that they had felt exactly the same way about the family they were born into, but she insisted that her situation was different. Maybe it was, or maybe it was just easy to blame this unfortunate dynamic on adoption.

A few weeks ago, an adoptive mother told a story on her blog (I am so sorry I don't have links for a lot of this; I didn't bookmark stuff and the content has stayed with me but I can't seem to recreate the path I took to find this stuff) about telling her teenage daughter to stop complaining: "If you were still in China, you'd be working 14 hours a day in a factory."

This gets to that gratitude thing I mentioned above. You can see that Asian adoptees are not making it up, and I hear it sometimes from people, who tell me that Yehva is lucky to have us. Sometimes they just mean we're good parents, and I appreciate that. But sometimes they mean that she is lucky not to be living where she was born (which, for the record, is Chicago). I don't think about it that way, and hope that I would never suggest to Yehva that she is lucky that her birthmother was a drug addict and her teenage birthfather was ignorant of how to protect his parental rights, because that meant she got to be in our family instead.

But I also thought this mom's comment about factories in China wasn't necessarily an adoption problem at all--it seemed like a parenting problem to me. Any woman who would say something so unkind to her daughter would say something unkind to any daughter she had, biological or adopted. In a parallel universe where that woman had a biological child instead of adopting from China, she'd be saying something just as nasty and posting about it on her blog as if it were the most OK thing in the world. Adoption shaped the form that her disrespect for her daughter took, but I have seen too many biological parents treat their children just as badly to assume that adoption caused the disrespect.

That sounds dismissive, and I don't mean it to. Maybe it is and I shouldn't have said it. Maybe that was just me being defensive again. Maybe I'm just reacting out of my hope, as one of those bad-fit kids (I was convinced through most of elementary school that I was a changeling), that parenting can make a difference, that if this woman (and I) had had parents who did a better job of accepting our differences, we wouldn't have felt so out of place.

The truth is, it is hard for me, as an adoptive parent who wants everything to be good for her kid and isn't sure how best to make it good, to listen to adoptees talk about what wasn't good for them. And to hear the challenge in what they say. I took a break from writing to read this post on white LGBT families adopting children of color, and the particular tensions that can arise. I was very interested in what he had to say about the white siblings of adopted children of color, since I have those kids, too, and I was chugging along nodding my head at how on-target he seemed, and then I was suddenly brought to tears by the question: When will your child get a break from being the obviously adopted child?

Raible was talking about the subtle pressure that is always present for transracially adopted kids, and for some reason that question made it real for me. As a lesbian, I experienced that background tension that gets so familiar you forget it's there until you walk into a place where practically everybody is a lesbian and you feel it melt away. When and how can it melt away for Yehva as she gets older, and stops being, in Raible's words about his own childhood, "a cute and cuddly curiosity in [the] neighborhood"?

I did not when Yehva was born, and do not now remotely meet Raible's criteria for white adoptive parents. If I am being honest with myself, this means I probably have some changing to do.