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My anthropology class is talking about “ethnicity” /”race” / and the “nation”…..and I am starting to have some questions.
I know some people identify as transracial or transnational due to international adoption - and I’m wondering if transethnic would also fit into that category -…
Thank you for this, I wasn’t too informed on what these terms meant but I have seen them in use and I was wondering what they meant - especially when I was learning about it in my anthropology class (which is very messed up so I never trust what I’m hearing is correct.) I apologize if my post hurt or oppressed anybody who relate to these terms.
no worries! like i said i don’t blame poc, the anger’s righteously directed to those at fault for such toxic appropriation, i.e. stupid ruinous white folks. glad it informed, now spread the good word when this ish next arises in your class and sundry. X
(p.s. re: anthropology you may be interested in this post with regards to how deviant and inherently destructive Western adoption is from a global anthropological perspective, and how that intersects with sustainability and ethnocidal capitalism in my subsequent rant that I’ve still yet to hammer into polite language but eh i’m sure you can catch the drift ^^ )
15 notes (via raybg89 & raybg89)
Earth’s Systems in Rapid Decline
So I have this epic post in the hopper debunking the stupid white savior narrative of international adoption being this oh-so amazingly sustainable (“but but but there are sooo many unwanted children and too many people on this earth!!!11!!”)-cum-humanitarian act as self-aggrandizing wholly unscientific BULLSHIT
because in actuality ADOPTION IS the MOST UNSUSTAINABLE GLOBAL TRANSACTION increasing consumption in ways that can’t even be quantified numerically — not just in the literal mass purchasing of children themselves as agencies scramble to fill increasingly ravenous Western demands for ‘orphans’ that overwhelms comparatively nonexistent supplies (that awkward moment when Foreign Policy gets adoption workers to admit to the number of babies available for int’l adoption if money never exchanged hands would be ZERO)
but also more consequentially in the cultural and ethnic genocide of non-Western and indigenous cultures wherein their most critical means of surviving to future generations are literally taken away; children systematically stripped of our personhood, colonized on historically unprecedented levels, then shipped into by far the most rapacious and disgustingly wasteful culture (or lack thereof) on earth — one coincidentally wanting our birth families’ lands and natural resources. Oop.
Cos it’s surely a huge fucking coincidence and my own personal oversensitivity spurring the fact that the Western mode of adoption just happens to be extremely deviant in worldwide anthropological terms in its extra-familial heteronormativity, enabled and spread rapidly via prestigious international conventions, to the effect of destroying/replacing non-Western traditions of fostering children among tribes & extended kin networks
(I’d like to think that if I wasn’t a war-torn Class Bastard I’d still be smart enough to connect the dots in all this and beyond to state mandated collective erasures and severance adopted orphans endure, but there’s something about the kind of sheltered privilege First World spawn possess that just shortcircuits global perspectives and critical thinking)
White folks got it backwards. You people are the ones whom comprise the Monolith.
Once upon a time, you destroyed our families for the principle of the thing. Nowadays, there’s simply too much money at stake not to (adoption industry’s profits in one continent alone realizes annual multi-billions). Nowadays, if ever it’s personal, it’s because it makes you feel like a World Citizen(tm).
You’re welcome.
48 notes
Yasmin Mogahed
^Attachment is a profoundly Western, clinical construct that has pathologized non-Western forms of love and relationships to catastrophic result.
This is why non-Western children adopted into Western homes are often diagnosed as ‘unattached’ or DETACHED - it’s the oppressor’s refusal to recognize non-possessive relationships (not surprising when our adoption is the product of a violently capitalist, colonial society) and the purposeful cutting us off from our roots into this possessive, anthropologically deviant framework that destroys and replaces non-Western traditions of fostering children among extended kin networks, all the while claiming to save us.
(Source: heartofabeliever)
10,197 notes (via queergiftedblack & heartofabeliever)
[I]nternational adoption reflects a particular Western adoption method, which nowadays spreads rapidly across the globe through international conventions, destroying and replacing non-Western traditions of fostering children among extended kin networks.
The modern Western notion of adoption is deviant, in a worldwide anthropological perspective, in the sense that it is overwhelmingly extra-familial – there is no biological relationship between the birth and adoptive parents; above all, the link between biological parents and the adoptee is totally cut off in order for them to remain unknown to each other, while the adoptive parents give the child a completely new identity by law.
This unique and peculiar Western mode of adoption can be seen as a compensation for the complete break-up of the extended family in Western countries and its replacement with the nuclear family following the process of modernisation. As a result, contemporary Western middle-class concepts of abandonment and abandoned children diverge fundamentally from those of non-Western societies, where the practice of fostering and circulating children among relatives is much more common than adoption itself. Such concepts are today made hegemonic through conventions on international adoption, like the Hague Convention.
- Tobias Hubinette, Between European Colonial Trafficking, American Empire-Building and Nordic Social Engineering: Rethinking International Adoption From a Postcolonial and Feminist Perspective
Bolded mine. See last post.
31 notes
