Culture Keeping: White Mothers, International Adoption, and the Negotiation of Family Difference

Chapter 6. Conclusion: Keeping Culture, Keeping Kin

165 6 Conclusion Keeping Culture, Keeping Kin Formal adoption in the United States presents an interesting mechanism that makes visible contentious issues regarding family formation and social stratification. The process of moving children from one familial context to another taps into ideologies and assessments of “parenting fitness,” the “rights” of children, and which kinds of children should be included or excluded from belonging with which kinds of parents. These issues, which are emotionally intense and sometimes volatile, have a long history. In 1904, for example, forty white Irish American children from a New York City Catholic orphanage were transported via “orphan trains” to Arizona and placed with Mexican Catholics. After only one night with their new families, the children were forcibly removed by Anglo vigilantes who felt duty-bound to “rescue” and redistribute them among their Anglo neighbors. The children had been originally placed with the Mexican families due to their shared Catholic religion, but they were ultimately removed because they did not racially or ethnically match—a move that was upheld by the United States Supreme Court (Gordon 1999). The “Great Arizona Orphan Abduction” (as it is called by Linda Gordon in her book of the same name) is a dramatic example of the ways in which battles over children in adop- 166 Culture Keeping tion often occur in the context of race. This case was particularly remarkable as it not only involved interracial adoptions in the early twentieth century, but had white children originally placed with nonwhite parents. In contrast, racial “matching” has long been the historic norm in formal adoption (Melosh 2002), reflecting racial boundary crossing as a contentious issue in family formation. Issues of race and belonging continue to shape contemporary family formation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Debate persists, for example, over the proper permanent placement and care for racial and ethnic minority children in state care. Culture keeping developed as a response to the issues that swirl around the family as a racialized unit. It is largely an attempt to negotiate race and ethnicity and to normalize international adoptive families within a white, middleclass social milieu that characterizes them as different. The family normalization process begins early. While all family formation in the United States occurs in the context of a socially stratified society, adoptive motherhood involves a conscious and intentional construction and maintenance of a family along the lines of race and ethnicity. Non-adoptive family formation also involves decisions along racial and ethnic lines. However, in adoption, parents must actually articulate what “type” of child (i.e., along the lines of race/ethnicity, gender, and disability) they would be willing to parent. This deliberate process forces women to consciously confront and articulate their perspectives on race, ethnicity, and family. For international adoptive families, because their adoptions transgress norms of biological kinship and racial matching that dominate white, middle-class discourse on families, they are often seen to symbolize progressive change on both micro and macro levels. Much of the literature on international adoption poses these placements as allowing for new ideas of race, ethnicity, and kinship to circulate within individual Conclusion 167 families, especially among white parents (Bates 1993; Evans 2000; Klose 1999; Newman 2001; Reddy 1996; Register 1991; Wolff 2000). Interracial families, in particular, are seen to potentially symbolize progressive new attitudes in the United States at a socie­ tal level regarding race (Bartholet 1999; Evans 2000; Lazarre 1996; Luke and Luke 1998; McBride 1996; McCabe 2003). Interracial marriage has longed been looked to as a barometer of race relations (Fryer 2007; Moran 2001); international adoption is now similarly characterized in the literature . What light does my research shed on these supposed shifts in the “American Family”? Does parenting an adopted child change one’s feelings about race? Does it shift how one conceptualizes kinship? In examining these questions, I would like to return again to one of the most significant differences between the two groups of mothers: China culture keeping is public and ­ visible, while Russia culture keeping is private and fa­ milial. With this in mind, the ways in which these two groups of women approached an act often expressive of ethnicity, the naming of their children, are striking. Naming and Race The naming activity is ultimately a social process, and the resulting pattern of name usage reflects the combined influence of the imagery associated with each name, the notions parents have about the...