Adoptee Perspective in the Social Justice Movement

(The Asian adoptee community was highlighted at our recent OFP convening – written by Margie Andreason, Program and Administrative Associate in Minnesota.)

OFP participants at our recent Minnesota convening

The Organizational Fellowship Program (OFP) organizations from both California and Minnesota were recently brought together to discuss how to strengthen social justice movement-building efforts. Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota was the site for the convening. The “Twin Cities” have a unique Asian and immigrant population and a rich history of organizing communities of color.  Minnesota is also home to over 30,000 Asian adoptees and is the highest concentration of adoptees in the U.S.

Yours truly was asked to give context for the Asian adoptee community here in Minnesota. We rarely hear about the adoptee community in larger Asian American contexts so I appreciated the opportunity to share my perspective to a bus jam-packed with new and veteran social justice activists.  The challenge to the group was to expand our understanding of “Asian American” experiences and to place ourselves from the adoptee standpoint so we could look at social justice work from a new angle.

A theme that continues to bubble up in our dialogues on social justice movement-building is “power.” As one OFP participant put it, “Power analysis needs to be ongoing and collective to keep us nimble.”  Power dynamics play out in the services for adoptees as well. We have a number of nonprofits and social networks that are led by adoptees. There are also a variety of culture camps led mostly by adoptive parents.  Minnesota is home to some of the largest adoption agencies and these are led by professional social workers. I mention who’s leading the different services because it matters in how each work with the adoptee community. Many agencies for example work from the same common mentality of adoption that larger society has –the “save those poor children” view.  This mind-set is disempowering and patronizing, especially when we’re not children anymore.

To highlight this attitude in current issues, all you have to do is look at how the world reacted to the Haiti earthquake. Our solution to “saving the Haiti children” was by taking them away. Why not give the money that would have gone to adoption instead to the families or work on building the social welfare infrastructure? Why do we think we’re being good heroic people when we separate families?

The images on TV right after the Haiti earthquake calling for us to adopt, remind me of very similar images of children from Korea and Vietnam during the wars. It’s a reminder that when you look at international adoption history, including the ebbs and flows and where the children are being adopted from at different times in our history, it’s very much related to war and colonialism. Adoption history mirrors the history of white imperialism. It’s the same history of refugee Diaspora and is ultimately the history of all of us, as Americans.

The story of how we became American is something we can all share. I think the best way for me to talk about Asian adoptee issues is by sharing my own experience and analysis growing us as an adoptee, being a mentor to others and from working with adoptee orgs. It has shaped my identity as an Asian American and as a woman of color.

I was adopted when I was 2 ½ years old from Daegu, South Korea and grew up in a white suburb of North St. Paul.  My Norwegian and Italian parents tell me stories of how my sister (not birth-related) and I would sing “Twinkle-Twinkle” only I’d be singing it in Korean and my sister would be singing along in English. I was too young to remember this but I do have some vivid snippets whirling around in my head of other moments…

The racist incidences are well known in other communities of color but the challenges of being isolated and dealing with racism from even within your own family and close friends makes it harder for adoptees, especially when you grow up and identify as “white.”

Growing up I felt more comfortable in a room crammed of white people than in one of Asians. I couldn’t really relate to the refugee immigrant experience that some of my Vietnamese and Chinese friends talked about. I also recognized my privilege growing up in a middle-class white family. At the same time, I felt marginalized by those in the Asian community because of the stigma around being adopted. Addressing this stigma is the cultural change work that I believe the adoptee community needs to do within our families and friends, and within the Asian community, larger society and in our birth countries.

While there are many things wrong with adoption policy including the incredible lack of accountability, it’s not good enough to just work on ending all international adoption. It doesn’t stop the number of children who are given up due to social, economic, and political reasons. It doesn’t address how thousands of girls are denied the right to live because they happened to be born female. Just doing policy work won’t stop these cultural practices because all the issues, some as specific as adoption, are all influenced by the racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia imbedded in our culture and how it becomes normalized. This is why I think social justice work is about cultural change and that what we work on is to un-normalize peoples’ thinking and being in the world.

In sharing my story and perspective with the OFP groups, I wrapped up by asking these API social justice organizations to think about these two questions:

1) How do you define your communities? Do you know how many adoptees you work with and or organize and are you intentional in how you work with them?

2) How do we take into consideration the complexity of Asian American identity? If you organize with only a racial-lens, how is that inclusive to the lived experiences of adoptees, Hapa and other mixed racial identities? How do we ensure the bringing of our whole selves in doing the work?

My words are not meant to make you feel sorry for me but to think about the perspective of adoptees in the social justice movement and give adoption a political lens to see it through. I want us to think about you and I as change agents and be able to hear the truth of experiences of those in our communities. For continuing to question our assumptions and challenge power systems is the ongoing work that is needed for us to organize better collectively and for the social justice movement to thrive.

*Thanks for reading and feel free to comment here or email me your thoughts (margie@aapip.org).