BRAND X

Other international adoptees have rightly taken NPR to task for their typically clueless, racist article so full of FAIL that I had to make another post for length’s sake just to adequately address one part of it-

NPR profiles a couple of White Saviors(tm) from the U.S., who express the general Western frustration that it’s getting slightly more difficult to buy children of color abroad. To cut the long brainturd short:

The couple considered Guatemala, but because of a baby-selling scandal, adoptions there had been suspended.

Right. And there I gotta go the fuck auf, because

“A” baby-selling scandal…
”-A- BABY-SELLING ‘SCANDAL.”
LIKE IT’S A FUCKING SINGULAR EVENT TANTAMOUNT TO A HOLLYWOOD ACTOR’S DUI.

via Foreign Policy (which is also terribly Eurocentric but still journalistically roundhouses NPR’s pasty American Volvo-cushioned ass):

“Guatemala is a perfect case study of how international adoption has become a demand-driven business,” says Kelley McCreery Bunkers, a former consultant with UNICEF Guatemala. The country’s adoption process was “an industry developed to meet the needs of adoptive families in developed countries, specifically the United States.”

[…]Last year, 98 percent of U.S. adoptions from Guatemala were “relinquishments”: Babies who had never seen the inside of an institution were signed over directly to a private attorney who approved the international adoption — for a very considerable fee — without any review by a judge or social service agency.

If just ONE (white) American mother were literally knocked out and her baby kidnapped then sold overseas, there would be global outrage and not a single media outlet in the world would dare to euphemize it as a “scandal.” They’d call such shit for what it is - a crime and atrocity.

But when it happens to women in Guatemala on an unprecedented, massive scale?

Well, even the Americans go so far as to admit: “Adoption is and has always been deeply imbued in classism, as it is adoption’s intent and most often outcome to move a child from lower to higher-class status. This is truer today than ever, as adoption has become a business of finding children for clients.”

Here’s what happens when that classism intersects with the racist, colonial attitudes that white folks (especially NPR listeners) maintain towards PoC in foreign countries:

You can get away with buying babies around the world as a US citizen. It’s not a crime.

You think I’m joking. That’s quoting fucking verbatim from the senior special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement by Foreign Policy (same guy who investigated the child trafficking criminal who allegedly delivered Angelina Jolie’s Cambodian adoptee)

And I love how NPR, that bastion of white liberalism and self-appointed beacon of progressive politics & cultured erudition, reduced GUATEMALA of all places to coverage so obnoxious and flat out incorrect.

Of all “supply” countries colonized and forced to give up their children, Guatemala has most notorious records of corruption in foreign adoption IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. Even more than South Korea or Ethiopia (and if you know anything about international adoption, you know that’s saying something).

To the point where even after it officially closed down American adoption channels in 2008, thousands of Guatemalan children are still being processed and sent to the U.S., many of whom have been discovered to be kidnapped, with authorities expecting more.

Your receipts.