Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship

3. Navigating Racism: Avoiding and Confronting “Difference”in Families

3 navigaTing Racism Avoiding and Confronting “Difference” in Families How we comprehend others and conceive our social relations and how we come thus dialectically to some sort of self-understanding are molded by concepts central to the dominant sociodiscursive scheme. —David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture B ecky Drake was adopted from Korea in 1984 at the age of five by her white American parents. The Drakes had already adopted a two-year-old girl from Korea in 1979. When they applied for their second adoption, Mr. Drake was in his mid-forties, which, according to Korean regulations, disqualified them from receiving an infant. Mr. and Mrs. Drake, both on their second marriages, were also parenting together the three sons from Mr. Drake’s first marriage. In an interview with Becky (age twenty-three), I asked her why she thought her parents chose to adopt from Korea. She said: The reason why my parents picked Asian was not because they wanted Asians in any way; they didn’t care what ethnic [sic] they would get. It was more or less my brothers who had a say on that. They asked my brothers, “Do you have a preference what your siblings would be?” And they decided if it was going to be another race, it should be Asian because the way they saw it, the Asians were more accepted and didn’t have much of a struggle compared to any other race. So that was the reason they adopted Asian girls. And I think the whole girls issue was just because they already had boys and my mom wanted some girls, so I think they made that preference. Becky’s characterization of how she, as a Korean female, became a member of her adoptive family points to some of the questions raised by Navigating Racism 51 institutionalized adoption practices. What are the race-based paradigms that shape adoptive parents’ preadoption decision-making processes and how have these paradigms become normalized? What lessons are learned as adoptees witness racialization in their families and communities? And how do both parents and adoptees anticipate, respond to, or change their views on racism and diversity as a result of their family experiences? The thoughts and behaviors associated with the answers to these questions and others constitute what Hawley Fogg-Davis (2002) refers to as adoptive family members’ “racialnavigation processes.” Though racial-navigation processes could be identified in all families, adoptive and otherwise, this chapter considers specifically how the race-related narratives of white adoptive parents of Korean adoptees reflect and often reproduce the racialized hierarchies endemic to American society. Korean adoptees’ narratives are also a response to and sometimes a reproduction of the racialized social order, but these narratives reflect adoptees ’ very distinctive standpoints and resistance to racially confining assumptions and structures. Scholars have long documented the workings of white privilege in the United States through comparisons to male privilege (McIntosh 1997; article originally published in 1988); through analyses of the assimilation processes of white ethnic groups (Brodkin 1998; Ignatiev 1995; Roediger 1991); and with regard to the “symbolic ethnicity” of white identities (Gans 1979; Waters 1996). These studies document the unfair advantages extended to white people in the United States and capture the ways whites profit and benefit from the unmarked nature of whiteness (Dyer 1997; Lipsitz 1998). Authors of these studies and others often reflect on the white privilege extended to their own European ethnic groups (Wise 2008). The now-extensive body of scholarship that maintains a focus on the language and “norms” of whiteness (see, especially, Delgado and Stefancic 1997), whether “in the black imagination ” (hooks 1997) or in the white gaze on various racialized and criminalized groups, the persistence of white supremacy seen in stereotypes, structural and institutional discrimination, and everyday culture continues to be abundantly documented (Wu 2002; Smith 2006; Bonilla-Silva 2010; Alexander 2010; Chou and Feagin 2008; Hartigan 2010). The fact that the dramatic rise in transnational adoption through the 1980s predates the development of much of the critical study of whiteness might help to explain the reluctance of adopters and adoption facilitators to call attention to the role of whiteness in the practice. When transnational adoption practices are characterized according to notions of altruism and war relief, as they were in the early days, critiques of racialized entitlement were eclipsed by assumptions of generosity and goodwill. The confluence of 52 Chapter 3 criticism leveled at the...