From Lynelle Beveridge at ICASN:

Our topic is Intimate Love Relationships, whether they be of same or opposite sex than yourself.  I think all people, adopted or not, find intimate love relationships challenging and rewarding but I’m interested to know how inter-country adoptees navigate this area of our lives and whether being adopted makes it easier, harder, or has no impact at all?

Feel free to write what you wish to share and in case you want some questions to jog your thoughts to begin:

• Describe & identify any type of patterns in your intimate love relationships to date?  Eg. What types of partners do you chose?  How does their non adopted or adopted status impact your relationship? What cultural or ethnic backgrounds do you tend to be attracted to?  How does that fit with your sense of ethnic/cultural heritage?  Who typically ended the relationships?  Who pushed the most for the relationships to reach certain milestone like “marriage” or “children”?
• Do you avoid intimate love relationships altogether?  How does that impact you?  What would need to happen to help you not avoid these types of relationships?
• How do these words fit within your thinking and experience of having intimate love relationships – trust, security, fear, abandonment, loss, independence, over or under achiever, connection, heritage, ethnicity, shame, attraction, aloneness, anger, love, family, push, gratefulness, sensitive, …..
• How does your adoption impact your intimate love relationships?  If it doesn’t, please also share your thoughts on this.

You can be anonymous or put your name – just let me know your preference.

I look forward to hearing from you as I know that in this topic, it is an area that we all have experience in so hoping that many of you will be able to share your thoughts.

If you’d like to view previous ICASN Perspective Papers, please go to http://www.icasn.org/perspectives.html

Regards,

Lynelle Beveridge
Founder/Director
Inter-Country Adoptee Support Network (ICASN)
email: icasn@bigpond.net.au

NPR recently presented a few stories on transracial adoption:

‘Colorblind’ Adoption Scrutinized

Report Criticizes ‘Colorblind’ Adoptions

Growing Up Black in a White Family - An interview with transracial adoptee and actor Aaron Stigger

From MSNBC:

At the heart of the debate is the fact that the foster care system has a disproportionately high number of black children, and on average they languish there nine months longer than white children before moving to permanent homes. The latest federal figures showed that 32 percent of the 510,000 children in foster care were black in 2006, compared with 15 percent of all U.S. children.

Of the black children adopted out of foster care, about 20 percent are adopted by white families. The Donaldson report said current federal law, by stressing color blindness, deters child welfare agencies from assessing families’ readiness to adopt transracially or preparing them for the distinctive challenges they might face.

“There is a higher rate of problems in minority foster children adopted transracially than in-race,” said the report. “All children deserve to be raised in families that respect their cultural heritage.”

Read the full article here: Major Changes Urged in Transracial Adoption.

From Lynelle Beveridge/ICASN:

Hello to you all in the broader Inter-Country Adoption Community!
Have you read the “Orphan Angels�? website that represents Deborah Lee’s Campaign for Adoption Reform in Australia?

As an adoptee, I think the language used in the website needs to be challenged and questioned. As an example, the name of the website – am I the orphan and my adoptive parents the angels? Or, the “save a child�? concept – what about the adoptive family who mutually benefit from adopting and the birth/natural and extended family who have lost their child legally forever? Also, the launch of Adoption Awareness week on Mother’s Day - as one adoptee pointed out, the insensitivity of this when it is the one day adoptees keenly feel the loss of their natural/birth mother.

What concerns me is the Orphan Angel campaign appears to neglect the larger picture of Inter-country adoption and its complexities, for example, the adoptees, the birth/natural families, post adoption support services that are needed for all involved! The campaign seems to promote change that benefits only the prospective adoptive parents and it appears to uphold the USA model of adoption as the end goal! The USA has only just signed up to the Hague last month and have problems with unethical adoptions due to a commercialised model of adoption!

I totally believe there is a place for ethical and well thought adoptions - done in a way that doesn’t promote child trafficking or activities that take advantage of people in unfortunate situations – done in a way that is sensitive to all parties involved. I disagree with the imbalanced perspective that only the orphaned child benefits or able to achieve their full potential through being adopted as promoted by Orphan Angels!

I totally agree that across the nation, there should be a process that is fair, equitable, and accessible to all prospective families who wish to adopt a child. It should also include comprehensive education to prospective families and the community, along with support and services after the child arrives and into the child’s life time. I also believe we do need Adoption Awareness educational events that challenge societal adoption attitudes, misconceptions, and judgements to ease the identity issues adoptees face as they grow up.
As a well informed Inter-Country Adoption community, let’s not stand by and allow this type of campaign to have the Government’s full support without advocating for changes to be done in a way that represents a more balanced perspective of inter-country adoption? Please help us tell the Government what you think of Deborah Lee’s “Orphan Angel�? campaign and what you believe Adoption Reform should include to ensure all voices in the Australian adoption community are heard.

For your views to be included in a collation that will be sent to the Attorney General and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, go to http://intercountryadopteesupportnetwork.blog.com/ and add your comments. You can remain anonymous or include your name. Alternatively, you can email me directly at icasn@bigpond.net.au .

Kind Regards,
Lynelle Beveridge
Founder/Director
Inter-Country Adoptee Support Network (ICASN)
www.icasn.org/

From Anti-Racist Parent:

I take a special interest in the media images my children consume, as do most parents I know, regardless of race. I don’t rely on entertainment executives or book authors to affirm or protect my children. That’s my job. But I do seek out age-appropriate books, movies, and other media that reflect the diversity of the world in which we live, with characters who look like us and the people we know and love.

But what about fairytales and the other “classics,” those all-white, generations-old stories and characters that are presumed staples of American cultural literacy, likely to turn up as “Jeopardy” questions? We love “The Sound of Music” and “Mary Poppins”, but quick: Name an American children’s classic featuring a black cast. The good, but depressing “Sounder”?

Should classic stories and movies be avoided then because they tend to feature all-white casts?

Read the rest of the article, which also includes a review of several wonderful children’s books, here- The Princess Problem: There’s More Than One Way Of Being Pretty.

From Lynelle Beveridge, Founder/Director of Inter-Country Adoptee Support Network (ICASN):

Hi all,

Advising that our Newsboard will be archived for the Month of April by Friday this week … http://www.icasn.org/newsboard.html

May news will be available as of Monday next week. The Newsboard is updated on an ongoing basis so check it regularly to keep abreast of ICA news/info.

All archives are accessible at http://www.icasn.org/news/newsarchives.html

Thanks to those who continue to send through news and info to share on our newsboard!

A reminder, if anyone wishes to have any inter-country adoption issues addressed at the first Australian Peak Group meeting, held 21 & 22 May this month – I’ll be attending and you need to send through your items to me by 19 May at icasn@bigpond.net.au

For more information, visit www.icasn.org, or view our articles from ICASN.

From The Korea Times:

The number of orphans adopted last year declined from a year ago, falling for the sixth consecutive year. But a greater number of orphans found a new family here than overseas for the first time.

Also, about 77 percent of elementary, middle and high school students studied at cram schools and other privately run learning institutes, spending a monthly average of 220,000 won. It took 11 months for high school and university graduates to land a job.

According to the National Statistical Office (NSO) Sunday, the number of Korean orphans adopted both at home and abroad stood at 2,652 in 2007, down from 3,231 a year earlier. It has decreased for the sixth straight year since 2001.

But more orphans were adopted by local families than by foreign ones last year for the first time. Local households adopted 1,388 orphans, accounting for 52.3 percent of the total, while 1,264 orphans, or 47.7 percent, found a new home in foreign countries.

Read the full article here: Domestic Adoption Exceeds Overseas for 1st Time

We’ve added a new article to our site: “Nurturing Healthy Racial Identity Development Vs. Internalized Racism In Transracially-Adopted Youngsters”. The author of the article is Jane Brown, MSW, creator of Adoption Playshops, and a longtime adoption social worker and educator. She and her husband are parents to eight children, five of whom joined their family through adoption.

Here’s an excerpt:

She focused on the emotional content of her daughter’s words, conveying that she was listening to understand, and wanted to help. “I’m guessing that lots has been on your mind– worries over fitting in and whether or not you are as attractive as those girls– the White girls– in your school.

From New Demographic & Talking Points Memo Cafe:

As I follow the discussion we’re having here at TPMCafe, I keep thinking about The Mother Teresa Effect, a concept based on her quote: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Jae Ran Kim explains:

“In 2004, Carnegie Mellon University conducted an experiment to see if this quote held true in real life. They gave participants five $1 bills to participate in a fictional survey, then presented half of the participants with a fact sheet about starving children in Africa along with an envelope for a donation. The other half of the participants received the same envelope, but instead of a fact sheet, they were given a photo of a young girl named Rokia and a paragraph about how her life would benefit from the participant’s donation.”

As you might expect, those with the picture of Rokia gave more than twice as much as those with just the fact sheet.

The researchers tried the experiment again, this time giving one group the fact sheet and the story about Rokia and the other group just the story about Rokia. Again, those with just the story of Rokia donated more than the group with both the story and the facts.

In other words, not only are we more likely to do something to help an individual than an abstract problem, the inclusion of factual evidence actually reduces our ability to empathize and take action.

Am I advocating that we throw all our facts and statistics out the window? No, of course not. What I’m arguing is that there is power in the specificity of the personal narrative and we should make use of it in our anti-racist efforts.

When I think back on how my own views about race have evolved over my lifetime, I realize that some of the most profound shifts in my thinking resulted not from reading theoretical treatises, but from learning about specific individuals’ experiences.

Read the rest of the article here: http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/04/03/what_is_the_human_cost_of_raci/

From Anti-Racist Parent (originally published at Heart, Mind and Seoul):

On numerous occasions in the past, I’ve been fairly unsuccessful in trying to convey how many times I’ve felt that the messages and attitudes perpetuated by our society about adoption often leads me to feel that I am reduced down to nothing more than a commodity. . .a tangible item that people with the right kind of credentials and qualifications can pick out and pick up. . .a product that in theory, shouldn’t be available for return, but in fact, sadly is. . .an object that is believed to come from some other place, manufactured by another country instead of being born to two living, breathing human beings.

And time and time again, I’m told that somehow along the way I must have lost my sense of humor or the ability to empathize or that I should really try harder see other people’s points of view. After all, they probably had good intentions behind whatever it was they said or did.

So I’m trying to find the humor and the good intentions behind these t-shirts. But I have to be honest; I keep coming up with nothin’.

Read the full article here: http://www.antiracistparent.com/2008/03/19/why-oh-why-are-these-t-shirts-still-available-2/

***

In her latest newsletter for New Demographic, founder Carmen Van Kerckhove wrote this very interesting piece on the recent events in American politics:

Is America ready for a real conversation about race? That’s the question on many people’s minds after Barack Obama’s historic speech last week.

Judging by some of the discussion I’ve seen on cable news since, I’m not so sure. There was talk about Obama “throwing his white grandmother under the bus” because he mentioned that she feared black men who passed by her on the street. There was indignation when in a subsequent radio interview, Obama made reference to a “typical white person” harboring racial stereotypes.

Seriously? Is it that controversial for Obama to suggest that white people — like all of us — have internalized racist stereotypes, and that those stereotypes impact their interactions with others? If we can’t even own up to that simple fact, how on earth are we supposed to move forward?

On Friday, I spent some time on the phone with a reporter from The Los Angeles Times (read the article here). I told him that I believe one of the biggest obstacles to dismantling racism is the way each of us is only interested in our own oppression.
We’re up in arms when someone in our own community is discriminated against, yet when the same thing happens in another community, we couldn’t care less. We’re more interested in playing oppression olympics — arguing that our group is worse off than any other — than in finding a way to uplift all of us at the same time.

And that’s exactly what I see happening here. Instead of absorbing one of Obama’s core messages — that just because you have the privilege of not thinking about racism, doesn’t mean racism no longer exists — some white folks are using this opportunity to cry “reverse racism” and paint themselves as the ultimate victims.

I really hope we can break this cycle of self-absorption and get real. If we’re serious about dismantling racism, we need to go beyond the concerns of the specific community to which we belong and recognize that when one group is discriminated against, it is an affront to us all.

Warmly,

Carmen

From Anti-Racist Parent & Rice Daddies:

Seeing Pink: Gender Stereotyping in Toys

Before my daughter was born, I knew what kind of father I wanted to be for her. My babygrrl was going to be raised to be a fierce, strong woman of color. I was going to make her iron-on onesies emblazoned with portraits of Yuri Kochiyama, Angela Davis, and Frida Kahlo. Her toybox would be filled with both dolls of color, preferably made by either anti-corporate crafters or small indie companies, and things traditionally coded as “boy�? like trucks and cars and tools. Both toy guns and Barbie would be equally verboten in our home, and her closet would be a pink-free zone. I knew the constricting, restricting and damaging messages the world would soon bombard her with about race and gender, and dammit if I wasn’t going to all I could inside our home to inoculate her against them.

So yeah, it would’ve only served me right to have been gifted with a stereotypical “girly girl,�? a little karmic payback for putting all my crap on my poor baby’s head before she was even born. That hasn’t happened, luckily (more…)