Shifting the spotlight: exploring race and culture in Korean-White adoptive families

Abstract

We “open up” an emerging symbol of racial progress in post-Civil Rights America, Asian-White adoptive families, to reveal the contemporary process of racial acceptance and explore how it differentiates between non-White groups. Using data from our “Asian Immigrants in White Families” study, we examine childhood narratives of Korean adoptees for the role of race and ethnicity in their families’ motivations for adopting them and the messages they received regarding race, racism, and birth culture. We also link their experiences to a provocative new thesis suggesting that the U.S. is moving beyond its historic hierarchy of Whites over non-Whites to what has been referred to as an emergent hierarchy of non-Blacks over Blacks. We build on this perspective by examining the process by which Whites come to accept non-Blacks over Blacks, in this case Asian adoptees over Black adoptees. We conclude with a discussion of what the phenomenon of Asian adoption means for racial progress in post-Civil Rights America.