BRAND X

Uganda getting pushed to become next “Hot adoption” Supply country

freedominwickedness:

sexgenderbody:

brandx:

As international adoptions have flourished, so has evidence that babies in many countries are being systematically bought, coerced, and stolen away from their birth families. Nearly half the 40 countries listed by the U.S. State Department as the top sources for international adoption over the past 15 years — places such as Belarus, Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Peru, and Romania — have at least temporarily halted adoptions or been prevented from sending children to the United States because of serious concerns about corruption and kidnapping. And yet when a country is closed due to corruption, many adoption agencies simply transfer their clients’ hopes to the next “hot” country. That country abruptly experiences a spike in infants and toddlers adopted overseas — until it too is forced to shut its doors.

Source: Foreign Policy

• The requirements that adoptive parents must live in Uganda for three years and foster the child for the same sum of time are being crushed and flouted

• Holt International (founding behemoth of international adoption agencies) announced a pilot program

• Mainstream liberal outlets hand-wringing/salivating over Uganda’s birthrate, which is ranked second highest in the world

• KONY 2012 DIDN’T HELP ANY
  (But seriously, fuck you Jason Russell & co. for yet another case study of White Savior Industrial Complex doing far more harm than good)

LOATHING EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW

omfg, can we just call out the fucking colonialism??? christianists and oil companies are sending bibles and bullets into the country and extracting money, leaving poverty, disease and murder in their wake. the criminals are white.

Let’s not forget that the fundamentalist/evangelical Christian religious organizations have also been murderously successful in pushing Ugandan Christians to commit democide against LGBT people.

ok so here’s why I’m left to side-eye this commentary^^

Western liberals/atheists are JUST as guilty of the White Savior Industrial Complex as their Christian conservative counterparts. This recent trend to foist blame for the oppressive fuckery of transracial/national adoption (which btw’s the actual topic here, not how fucked up things are in the supply country itself) on evangelicals (most notable case being white feminist Kathryn Joyce’s much-lauded book The Child Catchers) is just another way of perpetuating “Third World Monolith” complacency and dodging the facts.

Do Ugandans face systemic challenges that Westerners can’t really begin to imagine? Yes.

Does that mean that Ugandan children comprise a supply of “orphans” to meet conservative AND liberal demands to play savior from a life of “poverty disease murder democide” ad nauseum? If the answer was yes, then adoption agencies wouldn’t be able to charge 25,000 to 40,000 USD per child. (Yes, those are the prices for Uganda.)

Whatevs, this just reminds of the need to make a post addressing the severe misconceptions anti-war allies have about adopting from “war-torn Third World countries.”

BTW

Any decolonizing international adoptee knows of Holt “Children’s Services” to immediately grasp the implications in this piece, but for those yet unaware

(and I want yall to get this if only so you can better appreciate the mastery of Pleonasmism’s blending of the personal and political)

If the White Savior Industrial Complex had some sort of favorite progeny, it would be Holt Adoption Agency, incarnated in the form of a motherfucking Hydra with heads posted in every country excluded from “the Free World”, a binary that Holt played a direct role in cementing.

Holt began consuming Asia in the aftermath of the Red Scare, then spread to Africa. As more and more “supply nations” in these and other continents came to resent the coercion of “Free World” might and money into giving up their children, thus imposing limits or banning overseas adoption altogether Holt began its descent into even more underhanded methods to procure “orphans” for their clients just to stay in business.

Every global capitalist enterprise must necessarily grow or die.

And if you know how these businesses have operated in the throes and aftermath of war, then you know what happens next.

magicisgreen:

Letters from Mars: ifonlyfor asked: I came upon your blog via AngryAsianGirlsUnited. I’ve been finding a lot of adoptees, especially…

brandx:

…

Know your history.

1. Operation Babylift: How Evangelicals Conspired with Anti-Communists to Create the International Adoption Industry
   “Korean and Vietnamese children who were adopted by Westerners were particular targets for Cold War rhetoric[…] Operation Babylift and Holt…

I am a Korean adoptee and I vehemently oppose transracial adoption. What really gets me? S Korea doesn’t even acknowledge the fact that its economic recovery was on the backs of international adoption. People say to me, ‘you should be grateful for being adopted.’ I say to them, ‘Yes, I’m so grateful for losing my heritage, my blood family, my medical history, my family history, my language, and feeling like I belong, somewhere.’ I’m too polite to say, ‘Take that gratitude and shove it sideways. Fuck you and your Messiah syndrome and talk to someone who gives a damn.’

and BOOM.

glittergeek:

i am living cultural appropriation. something white ppl bought because they thought i was exotic and beautiful and world-embracing and then they thought they owned me.

“My adopted daughter is the most beautiful child in the Third World”

yourmanicpixienightmare:

Remember the time I made a post about how someone I knew had two of their children kidnapped and then sold to white families in Europe? Remember how many people immediately jumped on that post and said that it was better that the mother lost her children and never found out what happened to her kids even though she’s been searching for the past 20 years because these kids would have a better life with the white people? Remember that?

It just goes to fucking show you that people are fucking monsters who don’t give a fuck about human trafficking or the lives that were destroyed in the process. 

Human trafficking is a fucking problem in POC countries, especially when it comes to babies and children. If you don’t understand that there is a black market that exists solely for catering to white families in need of POC children and that the families of the POC children are often straight up lied to about their fate then you REALLY need to stay off posts that discuss it.

Human trafficking is evil you assholes, there are no goddamn exceptions.

“Westerners have been sold the myth of a world orphan crisis. [They] are told that millions of children are waiting for their “forever families” to rescue them from lives of abandonment and abuse. But many of the infants and toddlers being adopted by Western parents today are not orphans at all… and there’s too much Western money in search of children. As a result, international adoption agencies work not to find homes for needy children but to find children for Western homes.” [Source: Foreign Policy]

Bolded mine.

(Source: yourpanicpixienightmare)

Also, to this day:

When Romani mothers are arrested for begging, European police frequently take the healthiest among their children and place them for adoption with white Christian families.

Adoption as a Tool of Genocide: Part II

[TRIGGER WARNING: kidnapping, racism, forced institutionalization]
A brief timeline to build upon from my last post on transracial & transethnic adoption.

1568. Pope Pius V orders expulsion of all Roma from domain of the Church.

1710. Prince Adolphus Frederick II orders the Roma be deprived of their children, exiled, and executed upon return. It is decreed that the children be raised by Christian families.

1773. Empress Maria Theresa decrees Romani children over the age of five be taken from families and raised as Christians by Hungarian farmers in need of extra labor.

The 18th century sees the abduction and forced assimilation of over 18,000 Romani children in Austria alone. Adopted Roma are also coerced to marry Christians so their own bloodlines will be diluted.

1926-1973. Swiss organization Pro Juventute runs “Operation Children of the Road,” systematically kidnapping children and placing them in Christian foster homes. Romani parents who oppose mass abduction are themselves put under legal guardianship and committed to mental institutions. Pro Juventute sets modern adoption industry standard by falsifying records of proceedings so birth parents will never find where their children are placed.

1927. Czech authorities launch similar program, forcibly taking children from their families to be put in orphanages and state boarding schools.

1988. Kidnapped Romani children are discovered to remain incarcerated in institutions, despite statements by Swiss and Catholic authorities.

1997. Czech and Hungarian Romani refugees arrive in Eastern Canada. Ontario Catholic Children’s Aid Society warehouses the children in general Canadian foster care.

2010. Slovakia’s Prime Minister announces program to “put as many Roma children as possible into boarding schools and gradually separate them from their life they live in the settlements.”

Pro Juventute exists to this day. Together with the Swiss government, it still refuses Romani adoptees access to any of their records that would help them find birth families.

Gaslighting

the-queerdo-brigade:

bastardplanet:

dickensian-werewolf:

createsomething:

Gaslighting is a form of mental abuse in which false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt his or her own memory,perception and sanity.^[1] Instances may range simply from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.

Sometimes it is as literally as simple as telling someone that they’re crazy.

I didn’t like it when adults would walk in on me dressing or taking a shower. I would yell, and my adopted family told me I was crazy. Also, I cried a lot, expressed myself in “gender nonconforming” ways, and didn’t like talking to people. I got called crazy so often I believed something was really wrong with me.

The gaslighting and ableism to trans and queer adoptees especially who do not conform to adoptive families’ cissexist and heteronormative fantasies is horrific.

My adoptive mother (an anti-social narcissist) is always gaslighting my sisters and I. For her, gaslighting involves not just telling us, with certainty, what “actually” happened, but what we think and feel. If I say I need to go to the doctor, I’m not really sick. If I say I don’t want to be in a relationship, I’m told that I really do; I was in one before. If I were to tell her I wasn’t a girl, she would tell me I really was, I’m making it up. It’s horrible and pervasive, and it took me my whole life to figure out that I’m allowed to have an opinion on how I feel and who I am.

But we must be so grateful to be adopted by our SAVIORS.