Race is a Fiction that Colors Children and Parents Nonetheless

• In Event: 130 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Transracial Families

Abstract

Transnational and transracial adoption are normally not considered like processes. Statisticians count separately these demographic actions, if and when they count them at all; policy makers tend to deal with one or the other kind of adoption but not both; adoption agencies run their businesses to handle either one kind or the other. Yet these adoptions share similarities where race permeates the adoption process. Race shapes the sociopolitical and economic conditions that make children of color available the world over. When prospective adopters reach across national boundaries and color lines for a child born of another, they make a racialized choice of child to adopt. In making this decision, prospective parents’ desires are also shaped by other agents in the adoption process (e.g., policymakers and legislators, as well as adoption agency staff, each of whom have their own practices to influence the ‘adoption market’). They must decide, too, the influence phenotype and national origin make in the child’s rearing, and – no matter what the parents’ choice on the matter – all nonwhite adoptees (whether born domestically or in foreign lands) accumulate a lifetime of racialization and difference. This chapter examines the way race permeates transracial and transnational adoption’s boundary-crossing family-formation practices.

Author

• Vilna Francine Bashi Treitler, City University of New York-Baruch College and Graduate Center