Ruby Payne, A Framework for Understanding Poverty

Over the last few years, I have found myself increasingly interested in issues of social class, perhaps especially as I have seen them playing out in my Quaker meeting. Because my reaction to any random thought or question I have is to read twenty or thirty books about it, I have, well, ready twenty or thirty or more books on social class in the last few years. One of the first I read was Ruby Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty, which I found very useful. Payne's premise, as I recall it, is that people from different social classes have different ways of seeing the world; of relating to authority, time, and money; and of solving problems.

When I read the book, I felt like all sorts of things that had confused and vexed me about my family of origin, about certain friends and lovers, about many of my students when I was teaching at the community college, became coherent and intelligible. Behaviors that seemed dysfunctional or mistaken came into focus as adaptive ways of dealing with challenges and conflict; choices that I simply could not understand or view without judgment were revealed in a context that helped me make sense of them. I found the book tremendously helpful, and it has stayed with me for a long time, which is really saying something. I read about 300 books a year, most of them non-fiction, and since most of them are only OK, I forget a lot. So when a book keeps feeling resonant to me after over the years, when it teaches me something or changes my mind in a way that stays with me, I pay attention to that.

However, since reading Framework I have become aware that Payne is not just an author but the head of a training network that goes into schools and leads faculty and staff in workshops based on her work, and that both her writing and her work in schools are very controversial. Many people see Payne as buying into and promoting a stereotyped but untrue view of poverty, and of encouraging educators to see poor students as deficient and in need of fixing. The strength of the opposition to her is in proportion with her influence: by one measure I recently saw cited, she and her trainers have been in over 70% of school districts in the United States. She is seen as having tremendous, but detrimental, influence.

I have found this very interesting. I read Framework as proposing a model which recognizes both the strengths and deficiencies of different class-based cultural norms. But others--who are certainly more familiar, overall, with Payne's work than I am--see it as promoting middle-class ways at the expense of poor children. What did I miss?

I can see a number of possibilities for our different views of the book. It's been a few years, maybe as many as five, since I read the book. It's possible that I was relatively new to thinking about social class and did not recognize problems that would jump out at me if I were to read it now. It's possible that I have overlooked, or forgotten, the book's weaknesses while remembering its strengths. It's possible that the book itself is not horrible, but the uses it's put to in schools are.

A year or so ago, I went looking for some of the critiques of Payne, and I found a number of writers on-line who criticized her without being concrete. The accusations were repeated again and again, as if they were simply true, but without specific reference to her work. Again and again, I saw her accused of not being an academic, not being a Ph.D, [edited: my mistake. Payne actually is a Ph.D., so clearly whatever people actually have said about her, it's not this.] not giving enough attention or respect to the work of scholars who study education and social class. Now, God knows I am as big a fan of the peer-reviewed journal article as anybody, but it was very interesting to me to see people who set themselves up as experts on classism wielding their academic credentials like a sword and shield.

Yesterday, my friend Jeanne, who does a lot of reading, writing, thinking, and educating about social class (she blogs, along with others, at Class Action) linked to this very critical article about Payne. And I said pretty much what I just wrote here, a bit more briefly:

It's interesting to me how critical people are of Payne's in-school training, which I don't know much about, because that book was so helpful to me. Maybe I read it wrong, but what I took away from it felt like a better understanding of both strengths and deficits of the different ways people from different social classes communicate and solve problems. It made sense of some things about my family, about some of my friends and lovers, and it felt like it challenged me (a middle/upper-middle class person with a lot of education) to be more resilient and accepting when people communicate in ways that challenge me.

But what I hear over and over is that the book and training are used in schools as a way to encourage working-class and poor kids to adapt to middle-class ways of doing things, something I think ought not to be undertaken uncritically--what about training middle-class teachers, bosses, co-workers to accept more than one style of dealing with conflict, or with authority, for instance? So that the work of bridging a gap isn't always piled on the shoulders of people who are already swimming upstream.

You'll notice what I wrote isn't even remotely a defense of Payne's work. But the author of piece, Paul Gorski, responded and told me, in so many words, that--well, I'll show you. He said:

Su -- you may, indeed, have felt that Payne's book helped you better understand ways people from different social classes communicate and solve problems. The question is, did she help you understand accurately. A lot of people connect with what she says because we're already socialized into the deficit model. But just the way you put your own point demonstrates one of the serious liabilities of Payne's work and mainstream thinking on poverty in general. There is no "way" poor people communicate and solve problems. The range of ways poor people do that is exactly the same as the range of ways wealthy people do it. So if it helped you with what you say it helped you with, then it appears as though it only cemented simplifications and stereotypes.

One review of Payne's work found literally hundreds of examples of misinformation in it -- points she makes that directly contradict decades of research. So you might feel that she helped you better understand something, but that doesn't mean your understanding is accurate even if you could relate it to experiences with this or that person from your life... This is why it's not important only for us to be critical of the information we take in, but also to be critical of the lenses with which we've been socialized and the way they filter the information we're taking in. That Payne's work rings true for you says less about her work than it does about how strongly we're socialized to see things in stereotyped and deficit-laden ways... After all, what rang true for you (and for many, many others) has been shown to be completely and wholly inaccurate. It's based on a paradigm (the culture of poverty) that was rejected forty years ago in the social sciences.

Which, as insults and dismissals go, is pretty erudite. I liked Payne's work because of my failure to overcome my socialization, and my lack of awareness that "the social sciences" rejected her paradigm forty years ago. OK! This is not the first time--and probably won't be the last--that I have said to someone, sometimes indirectly as here, and sometimes directly--"tell me more about why you see that way"--and been told that my failure to already see it their way was proof of my classism or cluelessness or insularity. Oddly enough, I don't find this helpful.

I asked if he had a link to the article he mentions, and Jeanne sent me a link to one of his articles on Payne, which you can find here. I found it really helpful; after reading it I feel I have a much better understanding of the criticism of Payne and her work. Gorski does the kind of specific critique I had not found before, looking in some detail at the content of Framework.

I didn't plan to write about it, so I didn't take notes. But it has stuck with me overnight and this morning, so here I am writing about it. So far since I've started, I've had to help a kid on the potty, I've had to stop to feed someone, I've had to mediate a dispute, I've had to answer about 20 questions, and I've had to take a phone call from the hospital about my surgery on Monday. My point is that I am squeezing this writing into a morning in which I don't really have time to write, so I'm not going to do what I should do and do a second reading of the article. I'm going to work from memory. Which means I'll probably make a mistake or two. And I'll certainly end up focusing on what most stayed with me, which means I'll probably overlook some things. But there you have it.

First, Gorski makes the same complaint I've seen others make: she is not a social scientist, and she does not pay attention to the scholarly work being done on social class. I'm of two minds about this criticism; on the one hand, I am a big fan of scholarly work. I appreciate that social scientists think carefully about methodology, are aware of potential biases and work to design studies that overcome or avoid them--that the work of social scientists is a tremendously useful tool for helping us see beyond our own limited circle. On the other hand: do we require that everyone either be a social scientist or be conversant with the work of academics before they can speak publicly about social class? Because that's a pretty high bar, and even I, who have failed to overcome my socialization, can see who it excludes.

Admittedly, Payne is a special case: she's not just any old writer on social class. She and her minions are in, apparently, the majority of school districts in America, telling teachers how to understand and relate to their students who are poor and working class. To the extent that's true, she wields tremendous influence and should be held to a very high standard. But "she ignores me and my friends and our very important work" feels a little dicey.

Of course, that's not Gorski's only criticism. One of his complaints about Frameworks is that the hypothetical families Payne creates to illustrate her points are all stereotypes of poverty: single mothers of children whose fathers are in prison; families that include alcohol or drug abuse; and so on (Oops, that's actually in a different article: page 137 of this one). I don't have either a copy of the book or a clear memory of this, but Gorski provides such a long list of Payne's case study families that it wouldn't surprise me if he had named them all. And in that case, I agree with Gorski: that sucks. And Payne should have known better.

Eventually a couple of things rose up to me as central issues. One is that Payne is perceived as buying into and promoting the idea that there is a "culture of poverty," which is an idea that has been used as a way to blame the poor for their continued poverty. The other, very related criticism, is that Payne does not pay attention to the systemic forces that create poverty and trap people in it. I think this quote puts it nicely:

I believe the Ruby Payne phenomenon illustrates the temptation of the path of least resistance. Her work allows us to content ourselves by learning a set of cultural rules and helping a dominated group fit into a dominating system. She never insists that we secure social justice or eliminate educational inequities. She never challenges us to confront classism. In today’s anxiety-ridden education milieu, many of us may experience A Framework as a reprieve from the difficult reflective and transformative work called for by Kozol (1992), hooks (2000), and others. Their work challenges us to be part of institutional reform. Payne’s demands shallow awareness and no commitment to authentic reform. In other words, if I am from the upper or middle socioeconomic classes, Payne protects my privilege and gives me permission to do the same.

In other words, Payne's work does not challenge the status quo. At best--and Gorski and others question the accuracy with which she does this--she merely describes it. At worst, she helps to perpetuate it.

As I read, one of my reactions was that Gorski and others were criticizing Payne for not writing a different book--they wanted theory. He quotes Payne, responding to one of his critiques, as saying, “Gorski states that his lens is critical social theory. My theoretical lens is economic pragmatism. The two theoretical frames are almost polar opposites.” So, for a bit, one of my reactions to Gorski was that he and Payne were talking past each other.

As I read more, though, I began to feel like there was a question Gorski wasn't addressing that feels important to me: just what exactly are classroom teachers supposed to be doing? I wanted him to acknowledge how challenging it is for a teacher in the classroom to navigate the mess of resource distribution, home and neighborhood influences, academic expectations, administrator pressure. Teachers and their students are at the center of a big complicated mess, and it is not at all clear how best to behave within that mess.

I was a teacher for 13 years; I taught freshmen at community colleges, a course that every incoming student was required to take, so I dealt with students with every level of preparation for college work (though "well-prepared" was vanishingly rare) and a spectrum of class backgrounds.

I believe in theory, and I believe in understanding the systemic reasons why poverty persists and the institutional barriers that prevent individuals (except in rare cases) from getting out of poverty. But I'm not sure how helpful that theory is in the classroom. As a teacher, I might be inclined to say, "You want me to help dismantle structures of inequality? Great, I can do that with you on the weekend. But Monday through Friday, I am in the classroom with students who are already victims of those structures. All the critical social theory in the world is not going to help these kids right now. What do I do?"

Payne has an answer to that. Maybe it's the wrong answer--her critics say that the answer she's peddling is that poor and working-class kids should become more like middle-class kids, should buy into the existing structure to the extent they're able, in the hope of moving themselves to a more comfortable and secure place within it (I don't know how accurate this is, as I am not at all familiar with her teacher trainings or her writings other than Framework). Gorski et al are right that this solution does nothing to dismantle the structure. But what else is a teacher to do?

I have faced this myself, teaching students whose home language was a dialect of Black English. Yes, it's a language. Yes, it has a coherent (and complex) grammatical structure. But in my students' lifetime, writing that uses the vocabulary and grammar of that dialect will not be accepted in an academic setting. What am I to tell my students? Am I not supposed to teach them to code-switch, to write in the voice that will let them stay in school? If I do help them develop an "academic" writing voice, am I helping to support the system? Am I doubly burdening those who already bear the brunt of inequality, making it their job, their responsibility, to learn to fit into a system that denigrates them? But if I don't teach them to write that way, am I helping to trap them in marginal economic circumstances?

Gorski creates a list of what authentic anti-povery education would include. He mentions eliminating tracking, creating integrated school districts, using vouchers. Most of these kinds of changes are things that classroom teachers have little or no control over. He also mentions things like, "transcend[ing] identity politics and examin[ing] the ways in which these sorts of policies and practices help to concentrate power in the hands of the corporate elite" and "[a]cknowledg[ing] the interconnectedness of poverty, classism, racism, sexism, linguicism, ableism, and other forms of oppression" (pp 145-146 here). OK!

(To be fair, he ends with a list of practical things that can be done immediately, that includes things like "Assign work requiring computer and Internet access or other costly resources only when we can provide in-school time and materials for such work to be completed," and that I mostly applaud.)

It seems like the core of the problem is that Payne embraces a model in which there are class-based cultural differences, and Gorski rejects that notion. He is, I think, very conscious of a history in which the idea of a "culture of poverty" has been used to blame the victims of poverty and to absolve the rest of us of responsibility, and he fears that Payne's work perpetuates this. I fear that denying class-based cultural differences can deprive of us of tools we can use both to reach that high-falutin' glittering dream of a world in which we have "transcended" and "overcome" and "acknowledged," and also to improve things in the little slice of the world we live in.

For instance, my friend Jeanne sees class-based differences in how people deal with conflict. She writes about it here, for instance. If, as Gorski says, "There is no 'way' poor people communicate.... The range of ways poor people do that is exactly the same as the range of ways wealthy people do it," then Jeanne is wrong. And if Jeanne is wrong, then when I am dealing with that person who makes me uncomfortable by being very direct and using language that sometimes strikes me as rude or crass, we don't have a social-class problem. We don't have a problem in which I was raised to a (dominant) middle-class model of suppressing emotion and avoiding conflict, while that other person was raised to a working-class model of direct confrontation. And I don't have a responsibility to think about my class position, or to challenge myself to accept a different way of communicating. No, if it's just human variation, then I get to say, "That person is behaving inappropriately." And since my mode of discourse (if you will) is the dominant one in most places, other people there, and people in authority, will agree with me and conspire with me to silence her or drive her out.

I'm trying to say that, to my mind, denying class-based cultural differences carries its own set of dangers. I get that talking about these differences is a risky business, but nothing I have yet seen or read has convinced me that these differences don't exist.

Social Class, Female Solidarity, and the Child Welfare System

In the Baltimore Law Review, Chris Gottlieb, a lawyer who represents parents who have been accused of abuse or neglect, talks about the child welfare system, the rights of parents, and why women with privilege should feel more solidarity with those whose parental rights are challenged.

(Adapted, shorter, non-pdf version in the New York Times here.)

I'm only about halfway through and am already kind of goggle-eyed at the analysis she's making and what she has to say about the child welfare system. Some quotes:

In advising my clients, I frequently tell them that the single most important factor in whether they will be able to keep their children (keep their children!) is how well they get along with the caseworker. You've seen the pictures of the burnt and beaten children who have suffered at the hands of abusive parents, some ending up dead. Those are the children whose stories motivated our child welfare system and continue to fuel efforts to be more protective of children. Yet, as almost anyone working in the field will tell you, those instances of severe abuse, which garner all the attention in the media, are unrepresentative of the cases that clog the system.

Most children in foster care simply are not there because of child abuse. In most cases abuse is never even alleged. Neglect is the charge and neglect is broadly construed. It entails everything from having a dirty or run-down house, to refusing special education or recommended psychotropic medications, to corporal punishment, to smoking marijuana. In other words, neglect includes many things that reasonable people have very different ideas about. Indeed, it includes many behaviors that my yuppie friends and I engage in without threat of government intervention. (pp. 378-9)

And this:

But these cases are often viewed by the caseworkers and judges not as being about material, economic problems, but as being about parenting ability. The parent who "chose" to leave her ten-year-old alone while she went to work is deemed to have such bad parenting judgment that she may not be trusted to keep her child safe under any circumstances. Of course, a mother who leaves a child home because otherwise she will lose her job and means of supporting that child was choosing between two bad options. She may have made the wrong decision (though, of course, this is one of the many parenting questions on which contradictory views are held), but she may be an excellent parent. She certainly is a parent who could be given better options. Similarly, the mother who "chooses" to let her child live in sub-standard housing may not be taking every step another parent would to address the situation, but that doesn't mean she's unworthy to be a parent (whatever "worthy to be a parent" might mean.) It surely does not mean her children must be better off without her.

Acting as if these cases are about parental judgment is dangerous and ultimately bad for the kids involved. None of us would pass the test of always exercising the best possible judgment when parenting. It's just that some of us have luxuries that mean our bad choices don't have to be between two really bad options (and our choices, whether good or bad, are far less likely to be seen by government officials). (p. 381)

And this:

The point is not that rich, white kids are never abused, and certainly not that we should be less concerned about the poor and minority children who are. The point is that, just as when there is any severe discrepancy in how rich and poor or black and white are treated, we should question what is underlying the disparity. Clearly, we are far more willing to allow government officials to judge the parenting of poor and minority parents. We have allowed, indeed encouraged, government officials to be judgmental of certain--but only certain--parents. With respect to these disadvantaged groups, rather than limiting intrusion into family life to the relatively rare extreme cases of parental behavior that are truly beyond the pale, we have invited the government to engage in an endless game of "What is wrong with that mother?" As any mother knows, this is a game no mother can win. (p. 382)

And this:

Even when mistakes are caught and unnecessary separations ended, those children can never again have what we like to believe is the birthright of all children: a feeling of security that their parents will always be there for them, that their parents have some power to control an otherwise scary world. We take that away when we act as though parents are so great a threat to their children that it should be easy for government workers to come between them. (p. 385)

It's very much worth a read.

"There oughta be a lemon law": More About Social Class and Adoption

I just re-read what I posted a minute ago, and I noticed that I said "Yehva was born into a family of introverts." I didn't catch that when I was writing it; technically, of course, Yehva was not born into our family. She was adopted into it. But I like my little slip of the tongue, and I don't think I'll change it.

It reminds me that I have been wanting to say more about the book Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love, which I blogged about back in June, when I was only partway through it. Having finished it, I have a lot more to say about it, and it's been rattling around in my brain in a very annoying way, so I'm going to try to get it out before I shower and load the kids into the van for homeschool park day. It may not be very well-organized; more of a brain-dump.

I have a lot of respect for Christine Ward Gailey, the sociologist who did the research and wrote this book. I so appreciate her willingness to think about, in particular, social class and how it affects the experiences of adoptive parents and their children. In her study, there were differences in how adopters from different social classes talked about their adopted children and their role in the family, and this is what my slip of the tongue about Yehva reminded me of. In her interviews, it was only among the working-class adopters that people said things about their adopted children like, "He reminds me so much of my Uncle Louie." On the other hand, it was only among the middle-class and wealthy parents that people said things like, "We love him like he was our own." One international adopter described going to Guatemala for an infant in these terms (I have a note but not a direct quote, so I'm paraphrasing): "We went to Guatemala because we'd heard they had very healthy Caucasian infants there, and we wanted to get as close to the real thing as possible" (p. 107).

"As close to the real thing as possible." "Love him like he was our own." Hmmm.

Adopters also varied by social class in how they responded to troubled children. Gailey says that children adopted into working-class homes are more at risk of being hit, but children adopted into middle-class homes and wealthy homes are more at risk of emotional abandonment within the home when they don't meet their parents' expectations. For instance, wealthier families whose kids have behavioral problems are more likely to isolate the children from extended family. "I just leave her home with the nanny; it's easier for everybody." But working-class parents say things like, "I always take him to family get-togethers. He is part of the family. We stay as long as we can; sometimes it's two minutes, sometimes it's all afternoon." Wealthier families also tend to build a buffer of professionals between themselves and their troubled kids: therapists, special schools, nannies. Working-class families look to extended family and friendship networks for support and help (interestingly, single women who adopt, even if they have middle-class professions and backgrounds, often adopt working-class style strategies for support, relying on extended family, surrogate family in the form of neighbors, and alliances with other single parents).

I have often heard people speak with extreme vitriol about international adopters and the agencies that serve them, and I haven't really gotten why. I know that there are ethical problems and risks associated with international adoption, but I think that's true of domestic adoption as well, and I have always seen international adopters as embedded in the same complicated mix of love, risk, and privilege that we live in. I know many international adopters, and they are compassionate people who do not shy away from the ethical complexities of their choice, or from the responsibility they bear to their children, so I just couldn't understand where the anger toward international adopters was coming from.

And then I met the people Gailey interviewed for her book. And I get it. Oh, oh, oh, do I get it.

In her sample, international adopters were significantly more wealthy than other adoptive parents. International adoption costs more, in general, than other forms of adoption, and what adopters get for their money includes less-invasive home studies and fewer education requirements. International adopters generally pay about twice as much for their home studies as domestic adopters, but are subjected to less scrutiny.

At one point, Gailey called an international adoption agency to see if she could set up some interviews with staff for her study. The person she spoke to on the phone mistook her for a potential adoptive parent, and Gailey decided to run with that. She was told that her home study would cost about $5000 (for comparison, ours cost $1500; $1500-2500 is pretty typical, as I understand it) and would take a few months to complete. Gailey said she was in a hurry because she had already identified a child in a Peruvian orphanage that she was interested in; she was told that for $10,000, she could have her home study in two weeks.

Gailey decided to throw up as many red flags as she could. She told the representative that two weeks would be great, but she was very busy at work and often not getting home until late in the evening. The agency rep said that was no problem; they could do her interviews over the phone. "What about this class we're supposed to take? I don't see how I have time for that," Gailey said. The rep replied that they could send her the reading materials and then someone would go over them with her by phone.

In other words, this agency essentially said that for $10,000, Gailey could have a completed home study in 14 days, without ever having a home visit or meaningfully fulfilling an educational requirement.

Of course, this is neither typical or ethical. But it was only an extreme example of a trend Gailey found in her study, that the wealthiest people in her study, who chose international adoption most often, were able to use their financial resources to avoid the rigorous process other adopters go through.

Another thing the international parents were able to avoid was knowing much about the nations they were adopting from, and the political, social, economic, and racial conditions there. Some of them avoided this deliberately. International adoption agencies sometimes actively advertise, "We have caucasian babies!" Seeing an ad like this in the program at a conference, Gailey asked a woman she was talking to, who was in the process of international adoption, whether she knew that in other parts of the world, "caucasian" doesn't necessarily mean what it does in the US; in other words, a baby might be "caucasian" but be olive-skinned, with dark hair and eyes. This woman actually held out her hand to stop Gailey talking, said, "I don't want to hear about this," and walked away.

Many of the international adopters in Gailey's study had little or no information about their children's biological families. In the absence of information, they were free to construct their own stories, and they did. The stories they constructed were often Tales of the Deserving Poor. "I didn't want to deal with some crack whore's damaged goods," they might say when explaining why they didn't adopt domestically, and then go on to say something like--remember, this is in a complete absence of actual information--that they thought their child's birthmother was a pregnant teenager who had no family support, or a woman who had all the kids she wanted and could handle. In other words, your birthmother is immoral and bad, but mine is a decent woman in a hard situation making a responsible decision.

So interesting.

Gailey found that international agencies did little to educate potential adopters about the risks associated with adopting children who have been institutionalized, (most children adopted internationally have spent time in orphanages) and the adopters themselves generally did not seek this information. As a result, adopters were surprised, disappointed, and ill-equipped when their children displayed attachment or behavioral problems, or learning disabilities. And here is where social class again comes in in a very interesting way: working-class parents whose children (usually adopted from foster care) exhibited problems tended to attribute the problems to the traumatic experiences their children had had. "Who can blame him, with what he's been through?" they'd say, and focus on process rather than outcomes: "But when I think about how far he's come..." International adopters tended to give genetic explanations that absolved themselves of responsibility: "I used to think nurture mattered most, but now I see that some kids really are just bad seeds." (That's not a direct quote, except the "bad seed" part, which more than one international adopter used.)

Working class parents also tended to take a very long view in dealing with their troubled children. One parent said, "There are some wounds that take more than one generation to heal." Another said that when things were hard for her with her child, she would remind herself "that I'm doing this for the grandchildren." In other words, they accepted that their damaged child might not be healed, but they hoped they were taking a step that would make things better for the next generation.

Wealthy parents, on the other hand, tended to draw back from their children when it became clear that their children would not meet their aspirations. Reproduction of social class was an issue, and children were sometimes written off when it became clear that they weren't "college material." These parents often felt they had been duped into believing they would get a healthy, normal child, and thought that someone other than them should be accountable when that didn't happen. One father said, "There oughta be a lemon law for these kids. You ought to be able to send them back."

In Gailey's study (which she is careful to point out was done with a snowball sample, not a random one, so may not be generalizable), international agencies and adopters colluded to shield adoptive parents from the realities of conditions in children's home countries and the real risks associated with international adoption, with lamentable outcomes for the children involved.

(There are exceptions: Gailey's study included a small cohort of international adopters she called "academics." These are people who adopt from a country in which they have been doing work of some kind over extended periods of time; usually they adopt in response to observed conditions. For instance, one parent in this cohort adopted her daughter after seeing young girls selling their bodies on the streets in exchange for food. These adopters usually speak the local language, and continue to spend extended periods of time in their child's home country. Some of these children spend as much as 3-4 months per year in their country of origin, and it was only among this cohort that some children continued to have relationships with extended biological family.)

I could say so much more, about the word "orphan," what adopters think it means and what it really means (it's often a legal fiction, allowing adopters to believe they're adopting a child whose parents are dead, when in fact it may simply mean that their legal relationship has been severed); about wealthy adopters who meet their child's need for cultural knowledge by hiring domestic help from the child's country of origin; about so many other things--I have pages of notes.

But this stuff about international adoption and social class has really stayed with me. The international adopters I know are (thinking a minute) all Quakers, and almost all lesbians. In my experience, both Quakers and lesbians would be unlikely to ignore social and political realities. I would like to think that my sample is typical and Gailey's is exceptional, because the international adopters in her study really did not come off well at all (and by "really did not come off at all," I mean that they provoked rage in me). But I fear the opposite is true.

I have to get the kids fed and ready to go the park; I have to shower and load up swimsuits, towels, and snacks; I have to look up directions to the park and get my laundry out of the dryer if I want to wear a clean shirt. And I have to do all of this in the next 32 minutes, ideally. So I'll leave this here. I have tremendous respect for Gailey and her willingness to look at issues of social class, which I do not think most researchers have done.