Transracial Adoption Research Articles

The intersection of race and adoption: Experiences of transracial and international adoptees with microaggressions.

Adoption has been viewed as inferior to birthing, carrying social stigma which has resulted in members of the adoption triad, specifically adoptees, experiencing discrimination at all levels of the ecological system (Baden, 2016; Wegar, 2000). Transracial and international adoptees holding marginalized racial or ethnic identities contend with discrimination around their adoption status and their racial designation. Unique to the transracial adoptee experience is belonging to families who do not share their racial and cultural backgrounds. A grounded theory qualitative approach was used to understand the experiences of transracial and international adoptees with racial microaggressions (RMAs) and adoption microaggressions (AMAs). Results from this study reflected interviews from 11 transracial adoptees, with specific attention on AMAs and RMAs. All participants reported experiencing AMAs and RMAs both within and outside of their families. Counselors, counselor educators, and researchers are urged to understand this unique, intersectional experience to develop competency in effectively supporting this population. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

From model minority to racial threat: Chinese transracial adoptees’ experience navigating the COVID-19 pandemic.

From model minority to racial threat: Chinese transracial adoptees’ experience navigating the COVID-19 pandemic.

Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship by Allyson Stevenson

Reviewed by: Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship by Allyson Stevenson Dian Million (Tanana) Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship .By Allyson Stevenson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 314 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.95 paper. Allyson Stevenson brings a deeply personal yet thorough historical examination of the ongoing settler-colonial onslaught on First Nations, Métis, and Indigenous families through the destruction of their kinship ties. Stevenson builds her history first through a specific case of adoption, her own. As a Métis adoptee from Saskatchewan and an academically trained historian, Stevenson understands her own role in bringing personal knowledge back to her own lineages, a witnessing that is invaluable to her families, both biological and adoptive, and restorative to her generations, her own and her children’s. Saskatchewan, a Plains bastion of Canadian national imaginary, saw a challenge in the assimilation of Indian and “subnormal” Métis families into its body politic after 1951. The solution was closely aligned with the same reasoning that established residential schooling, that Indigenous children were better off being raised by White Canadians. Soon the province had “the dubious distinction of the highest percentage of [Indigenous] children in the care of social services and the Department of Northern Development,” ranging from 62.8 percent in 1976 to 63.8 percent in 1981. Saskatchewan achieved transracial adoptions with equal veracity. In 1977, 91 percent of Indian children adopted were by non-Indian families (203). This pattern closely followed one that the United States equally perpetrated for years. The evisceration of Aboriginal, Métis, and Indigenous families closely mirrored the same attack going on in the United States [End Page 363] against American Indian, Alaska Native, and Indigenous children. Importantly, the author also details the immense effort of Indigenous activists and supporters to intervene and to return child welfare to Indigenous communities. Stevenson notes the inability of Canada to produce a nationwide policy such as the Indian Child Welfare Act that was achieved in the US. The current ruling against Canada for human rights abuse in the unequal funding of child welfare identifies an ongoing and crucial concern and this history as important context. Stevenson remarks: Indigenous suffering from almost a century of colonial dispossession, residential schooling, poverty, trauma, and dislocation from loss of land was recast as a child welfare matter, leading to interventions and the crisis of over-representation in child welfare systems across Canada. (227) In particular, the author’s focus on little-known Métis resettlement policies is an important chapter in portraying Saskatchewan’s specific role in this Canadian national history. This is a beautifully written and felt history that informs a core context of a continuing struggle. Allyson Stevenson states, “The right to Aboriginal motherhood and to define Aboriginal motherhood and kinship are a very key area where decolonization is taking place” (232). More than key to decolonization, the question of Indigenous children who know their identities and their citizenships are key to any Indigenous future. Dian Million (Tanana) Department of American Indian Studies University of Washington Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

“You Will Be Missed You Know, but This Is No Place for You to Grow”: A Critical Metaphor Study of Pre-Adoption Narratives

This article discusses (pre-)adoption narratives by investigating a selection of children’s picture books featuring multi-ethnic families. The research examines both textual and pictorial resources, focusing specifically on the use of metaphors as a tool of cognition which may help an audience of young readers understand and become acquainted with unfamiliar notions connected to the process of interracial adoption. Attention is also devoted to the identification, interpretation, and explanation of recurring metaphors in the books as a means of framing (pre-)adoption experiences, i.e. foregrounding certain aspects of the target domains and backgrounding others. The analysis has revealed an almost ubiquitous presence of the journey metaphor in the sample of books.

Adoptive Parents Navigating Adoption Microaggressions through Discourse Dependency and Preparation for Bias Lenses

ABSTRACT Adoptive families must navigate public discourse about adoption. This study examined how transracial adoptive (TRA) and same-race adoptive (SRA) families communicated to their children through internal boundary management, teaching external boundary management strategies, and preparation for bias as ways to address adoption microaggressions (AMAs). 104 U.S. adoptive parents (TRA = 77; SRA = 27) completed a survey about their communication about four types of AMA situations (i.e., Lucky, Destiny, “Deficient” Birth Parents, Search). What parents directly communicated to the child to address these AMAs and links to what parents thought of AMAs were explored. Nine themes emerged within parents’ communication reflecting different uses of internal boundary management, teaching external boundary management, and preparation for bias strategies. Findings illuminated the complexities in parents’ direct communication involving nuanced messages to adopted children about navigating AMAs. Enhanced education and training for adoptive parents can improve their understanding and ability to help children who are adopted address adoption bias.

The Reclamation of Self: Kinship and Identity in Transnational Colombian Adoptee First Family Reunions

In this qualitative study the researchers interviewed 17 adult transnational Colombian adoptees in reunion with their Colombian first families. Through thematic analysis methodology three themes emerged: (1) first family influences, (2) navigating between families, and (3) identity reclamation. Participants in the study described the impact reunion had on their perceptions of family and their identities. The Competencies for Working with Transracial Adoptees and the Transracial Adoption Kinship Network (TrAKN) served as a framework to discuss implications for adoptees and family counselors.

Transracial adoption practice in South Africa: The Western Cape as a case study

AbstractTransracial adoption (TRA) represents the largest number of non‐disclosed adoptions in South Africa but remains under researched. This exploratory research investigates practices in the Western Cape, via semi‐structured interviews with adoption social workers and magistrates. Thematic analysis of data revealed the following themes: knowledge and attitudes towards the legal/policy framework of TRA; influences on placement decisions; preparation before and support offered after transracial placement; problems faced by adoption practitioners; and the Western Cape as supportive of TRA. A reluctance to engage with race and a de facto acceptance of TRA undermines a critical view of current practice.

Transracial Adoption as Continued Oppression: Modern Practice in Context


 
 
 Transracial adoption has existed as a mode of forced displacement and oppression throughout the history of the United States. Starting with Italian children, who were once racialized as non-white, non-white children in the United States have undergone systemic oppression resulting in forced separation from their biological parents. The displaced children have typically been placed with white parents who have not been adequately prepared to provide the culturally competent, trauma-informed care that the children need. As a result, transracially adopted children have historically struggled to form a sense of identity and have faced a wide range of physical and mental health vulnerabilities. Part I of this paper will present an overview of how transracial adoption has been implemented throughout U.S. history, discussing both past models (such as the Orphan Train) and contemporary models (such as the foster care system, domestic private adoptions, and the global adoption industry). Part II will draw connections between past and present implementations of transracial adoption, illustrating that the phenomenon is best understood as a continuation of previous forms of oppression. Part III will propose a number of recommendations for social workers to facilitate better outcomes for transracial adoptees.
 
 

Adopting a position—analysing, theorising and decolonising transnational and transracial adoptions in Sweden

Abstract Decolonisation was first known as the return of land when the colonial states let go of their illegal settlements in the countries or territories they conquered by violence. However, today decolonisation is also known as the practice of how structures may be decolonised, through knowledge production. The aim of this article is to decolonise Swedish transnational and transracial adoptions through the lens of feminist post-colonial theory and theorisation. The methods involve analysing the field through theoretical concepts within feminist postcolonial theory, followed by autoethnographic writing and theorising of new concepts which can lead to new theoretical positions and thus a decolonisation. New theoretical concepts added to the field are ‘the first world mother’, ‘the second world citizen’ and ‘adopting a position’. By using these theorised concepts, the article contributes to the decolonisation of transnational and transracial adoptions. This new knowledge can be of use for various stakeholders. More specifically, it can be useful for therapists and counsellors if they want to follow and explore adoptees’ lived experience and contribute to decolonisation. Although the article is based on the Swedish context, it is relevant to a wider European and global setting, in that it deepens the theoretical understanding.

The Complexities of Mixed Families: Transracial Adoption as a Humanitarian Project

Along with other types of racially mixed families, families built through transracial adoption in the United States have solidified as an increasingly recognized family form. Along with this increasing acknowledgement, transracial families must also contend with narratives that formulate transracial adoption as an act of humanitarianism on the one hand and as a replication of systemic racism and colonialism on the other. This article explores how members of transracial families respond to these contradictory narratives through interviews with 30 transracial adoptees and their white siblings. Their experiences highlight three responses that transracial family members have regarding the idea of their families being classified as a humanitarian project: recreating transracial adoption as humanitarianism within their own lives, reclaiming their identity and family as separate from humanitarianism, and resisting the humanitarian aspects of transracial adoption altogether. Specifically, this study adds nuance to the question of how mixed families navigate the enduring power of humanitarianism within their own lives.

Epistemic trauma and transracial adoption: Author(iz)ing folkways of knowledge and healing

BackgroundDespite contested definitions, trauma is often conceptualized as an event that shocks or overloads human systems, shaping memory and meanings as the body and mind attempt to cope and survive. Adoption is often the presumed redress for childhood trauma. Thus, few scholars have examined how, or if, some conditions of adoption or the status itself might involve unique traumas or adversities. ObjectiveIn this paper, I argue that the condition of being transracially adopted can represent intersectional minoritized statuses, which in turn activate potentially distinct formations of epistemic trauma— structurally and relationally transmitted harms to a person as a knower and to their capacities for claiming, making sense of, and healing through their lived experiences. Participants and settingI draw from my personal and professional standpoints as a black, mixed-race, woman who was transracially adopted from public foster care as an infant, became a child welfare caseworker and later, a child welfare scholar. MethodsUsing a critical and reflexive autoethnographic method I ask how theories of epistemic injustice might help to highlight conditions tied to the status “transracial adoptee” that distinguish adoption-specific trauma. By reflexively analyzing my experiences in the context of extant theory and research, this paper brings theories of epistemic injustice into conversation with an emic perspective on adoption. ResultsIn my experience, “transracial adoptee” and “mixed race” operated as statuses that occasioned epistemic injustices. I propose these conditions can become traumatic when they chronically and structurally disenfranchise claiming and cultivating folkways essential to one's healing and resilience across the life course. ConclusionsThis paper is a call to invest in advancing epistemologies of adoption and theories of trauma that are anchored within diverse adoption experiences. I also invite future scholarship to explore epistemic injustice in adoption as trauma, and to identify and disrupt the many spaces in which it may be enacted culturally, relationally, familially, and in a society through its laws, policies, practices, and scientific knowledge.

The Sociological Perspective of Interracial Adoption and Child Development

Transracial adoption or interracial adoption is becoming quite popular worldwide as the number of people who are against racism is increasing. The particular article sheds light on the societal views of Indian society on interracial adoption as most of the Indian population still believes in racism. Acceptance of inter-cultural people and interracial children is low in India and people believe that interracial adoption is not good for a particular culture. The researcher has arranged a survey among the people between 25 and 50 for gaining their respective opinions on interracial adoption. A total of 51 participants from different occupations have provided their opinions which are collected as data and evaluated in this study. The results are properly discussed for a better understanding about the perspective of society towards interracial adoption in India. It is identified as a result that most of the people still disagree that interracial adoption can be beneficial for social development. All the findings are converted into graphs and statistics with the use of SPSS software which are elaborated significantly. . Keyword : Cultural Discrimination, Interracial Adoption, Racism, Social Norms, Social Perspective

Adapt and Serve the Community!: Voices of Families of Youth of Color in Predominantly White, Rural Communities

Currently, there is limited research that centers the voices of youth of Color and their families living and attending school in rural communities in the United States. This lack of representation is even more prominent among rural youth who identify in culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse ways and who reside and attend schools in predominantly white contexts. This qualitative case study sought to explore the experiences of parents of children who identify as youth of Color and who reside or attend school in predominantly white, rural settings. Drawing from in-depth interviews with five parents from four families, findings reveal that same-race biological parents and transracial adoptive (TRA) parents enact multiple forms of cultural capital as they navigate their communities and their children’s schooling experiences within a broader culture and climate of onlyness. Additional findings indicate the critical need for culturally competent and sustaining practices in predominantly white, rural schools.

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Racial Identity and Transcultural Adoption

Transracial/transcultural adoption is defined as a child of one race or ethnic group placed with parent(s) of a different race or ethnic group. An estimated 2 million children in the United States were identified as adopted in the 2010 census, and approximately one-fourth of these were transracial adoptions. Both a history of adoption and a strong ethnic or racial identity are specifically associated with health-related risk and protective factors for psychosocial, academic, and health behavior outcomes. A patient with a history of transracial adoption presents unique and important considerations for culturally responsive nursing care. This article begins with nursing practice considerations for transracially adoptive patients and provides an overview of epidemiology; relevant trauma informed nursing care; laws and racial identity formation, and a mental model of health disparities to guide future directions. We synthesize information relevant to nursing care of individuals who are transracially adopted and racial/ethnic identity formation, including socialization and a merging model to conceptualize identities. The article also discusses principles of trauma informed care and health disparities and future improvements in the context of this population.

Altering the Legal Framework to Serve Historically-Underserved Transracial Adoptees

Altering the Legal Framework to Serve Historically-Underserved Transracial Adoptees

Nice White Lady: Whiteness and Domestic Transracial Adoption in Helen Doss's The Family Nobody Wanted

Nice White Lady: Whiteness and Domestic Transracial Adoption in Helen Doss's The Family Nobody Wanted

July's People: Adoption and Kinship in Andrea Levy's Fiction

This essay sees Andrea Levy's prolonged preoccupation with matters of family, kinship, and adoption as central to her literary articulation of race, empire, and slavery. It explores how Levy presents the colonial legacies that have entangled Britain and Jamaica as distinctly bodily affairs that impact upon kinship and family-making and argues that her representation of these histories is part of her firm attempt to expose the centrality of colonialism and slavery to the constitution of both Britain and Britons. Yet in pursuing this vital and politically urgent task, Levy risks upholding the synchronisation of corporis and cultura—the body and its historical cultivation—essential to colonial modernity's exalting of "blood cultures" that assume the sanguinary transfusion of historical and cultural particulars within the body itself. This risk can be sighted particularly in Levy's representation of transracial adoption and her appropriation of the rhetoric of "illegitimate" kinship. With particular reference to The Long Song (2010), the essay considers how Levy's invaluable attention to the history of forced adoptions at the heart of slavery's brutality is problematised by adoption's figurative requisitioning for wider (well-intentioned) critical purposes. Ultimately, the essay claims that Levy's laudable literary mission does not always exert sustained pressure on the biocentric norms of colonial modernity's sanguinary imagination.

Writing to Right the Spirit of Adoption: The Adoptive Mother / Savior in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s "Uncle Tom’s Cabin", Harriet E. Wilson’s "Our Nig", and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Moses: A Story of the Nile”

The trope of interracial adoption is complex but fairly common in American literature, particularly as it results in the racist and racialized hallmark of displacing and depicting Black women as bad Black mothers—the antithesis of White maternity. This essay posits the trope’s genesis at the center of abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe’s extraordinarily influential anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom’s Cabin". The novel has been heralded as the most significant literary accomplishment by an American writer, both nationally and internationally, during the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding, Stowe’s novel sets in motion the cultural ideology that Whiteness—in the form of adoption by a free, White, Christian mother / savior—is a direct route out of bondage for enslaved Black children. Necessarily and in direct response, Harriet E. Wilson’s autobiographical novel, "Our Nig," and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s poem, “Moses: A Story of the Nile,” bring the complicated anti-Black and White constructions of power, motherhood, consanguinity, and kinship into sharp relief. Taken together, their writings form an episodic and polyscopic perspective on belonging, bondage, freedom, and agency. Most importantly, Wilson’s and Harper’s texts amplify the historical remainder of and tension between ways of understanding racialized adoption and insist that the literary (human) being that is the Black mother be made legible.

ADOPTION AND RACIAL/CULTURAL SOCIALIZATION IN DIVERSE ADOPTIVE FAMILIES: ASSOCIATIONS WITH DEMOGRAPHIC FACTORS, ACADEMIC OUTCOMES, AND PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS

As families in the United States (U.S.) are increasingly diverse in race and family structure, it is essential to understand family socialization around identity and possible associations with family relationships and child development. In this study, we investigated adoption communicative openness (i.e., how parents talk about adoption) and racial/cultural socialization among 96 adoptive families (46% completed transracial adoption) with lesbian, gay, and heterosexual parents and school-age children (Mage = 8 years) who lived across the U.S. We found that these practices (described by parents) were associated with children’s reports of parent-child relationships and children’s teachers reports of their academic functioning. We discuss the importance of considering distinct forms of identity socialization practices, as reported by different informants, among adoptive families diverse in race and parental sexual orientation, and as related to associations with individual outcomes and family relationships. We describe how our results could inform future research, policy, and practice.