[ SECRET POST #2370 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2370 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 105 secrets from Secret Submission Post #339.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

I was reading an article on a feminist site recently about how wrong it was for people to adopt from abroad, and was honestly shocked.

The children if adopted very young are not part of their birth culture in any meaningful sense surely? Yes there will be questions of identity growing up, but pretending links to somewhere they have never lived or had any meaningful relationship with as their 'home country' seems rather racist, no?

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

Those are probably the types of people who think adopted kids aren't "real" members of their adopted family. SMH

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[insanenoodlyguy]

You should probably stop going to that site. Sounds like it's full of SJW types. Who have a lot of views oddly in line with 1950's social conservative racists on things like segregation.

If you agree with these guys on certain subjects... (Keep races pure, never embrace other cultures values, fashion, ideas or peoples, but especially that race pure race mixing thing)



YOU ARE DOING SOCIAL PROGRESSION WRONG.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

Noodles got it in one. That's why I'm convinced SJWs are actually racists/ableists/any-other-ists that they attack other people for being....they accuse the innocent of actually being the thing that they are.

Unfortunately the too-precious-to-live PC world/society that we live in today dictates that these SJWs get all the power. So they are able to BE the oppressors, as they are making the very (false) claim that they FIGHT the oppressors.

...I can't decide if these people are LARPing Brave New World, or 1984. Or maybe Brazil.

Let's go with Brazil, that's the only option that doesn't make me want to put a bullet through my skull.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm adopted and I feel 0 connection with my "home land". To be honest if I was forced to identify as another culture that I have no idea and not a part of, it would probably make me feel extremely different.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

I think the idea is that the children should have links to their birth culture, or at least have opportunities to do so if they choose- and adopting from abroad rather than within their culture or even within their country denies them that opportunity.

Adopting from small/shrinking/endangered cultures adds an extra layer of complication. Somewhere like China isn't really going to be hurt by losing a few kids to other cultures, but for a group like the Ivyatim/Cahuilla who have a population of 800 and are desperately trying to keep their cultural traditions alive, it's a real issue. (The fact that in earlier centuries, white families forcibly took Native American children and placing them with white families and/or in boarding schools to 'Christianize' them doesn't exactly help.)

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

for a group like the Ivyatim/Cahuilla who have a population of 800 and are desperately trying to keep their cultural traditions alive, it's a real issue.
I agree that would be an issue but then the people within that culture should keep and the raise the children. If they're not going to do that, of course someone else should adopt the children.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

Unless their concern was about shoddy adoption agency practices, which is a legit concern, I wouldn't take them too seriously. It's weird to dictate how an adopted person should feel about their home land.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

The issue of culture kind of bugs me. There's younger people today that aren't follow their parent's culture, and it's seen as a 'bad thing'. Culture exists because that is how certain people live, but I don't think it should be forced onto people that don't want a part of it.

It's also pretty sad when you also take into account some teenagers kill themselves because they don't want to be a part of it, but have no choice. :(

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

Or vice versa - those cases where the parents kill their teenaged children (almost exclusively girls, from what I've seen) for adopting a new culture instead of maintaining the old.

Culture shouldn't be imposed on anyone, regardless of pedigree. Either you value it yourself and it continues (although it will change - the world is not static, and things change), or it isn't important to you, and you move on to something that is.

Like a lot of other issues, this gets blown up into "this is important to ME, therefore it should be important to YOU."

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

To add another wrinkle: if the country where the adoptive parents live has a significant enough and old enough immigrant population from the adopted child's country/region of origin, that population may have its own culture distinct from that of the parent country and constituting a sub-culture within the adoptive parents' country. If you want the child to have contact with its "proper" culture, would that be the culture of the country of origin or the sub-culture that formed within the adoptive country? The former might seem more genuine, but the latter is probably far more relevant to the child's life.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

This has been a whole thing recently that I have seen because of the US Supreme Court case regarding adoption of a girl who was 1/256th Cherokee. (To anyone who doesn't know the details, the father signed away his rights (apparently because he didn't want to pay child support but he assumed the mother would keep the child and they could get back together later) and the mother allowed a non-Cherokee couple to adopt the baby and their lawyers put the wrong spelling of his name (apparently he went by two forms) and his birthdate on the form, so the baby girl wasn't recognized as Cherokee). That seemed to bring up a whole storm about how people outside of a race/culture cannot understand a race/culture and children who are adopted by people outside of their race/culture will feel upset at the loss of background/history/culture. Or... something like that.

Basically, the vast majority of people I saw on certain sites were saying that people should only adopt within their own race/culture even if they think they have pure motives. As a teacher who has seen how parents of different races have loved their adopted children, I think it is BS, but apparently what do I know? This is why I'm thinking I'll never adopt, even if I had thought at some point I might, as I don't intend to have biological children.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

1/256th Cherokee

Wow, Cherokees are pretty tolerant people. My nation wouln't consider someone with 1/4th of our blood as truly one of us.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

*Does math*

Wow, 1/256th is eight generations away. One of this girl's great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents - of which she has as many as 256 - was full Cherokee. Putting it another way, one of her great-great-grandparents was 1/32 Cherokee.

Getting back on topic, when I first heard about this, without many details, my first thought was that this was an issue of paternal rights in general rather than anything to do with tribal identity specifically. Hearing he signed his rights away, however? Yeah, dude, if you want to have any input on how and by whom your child is raised, don't do that. You can't have it both ways.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

They should have as much contact as they want to. Of course, if they're very young, that becomes a parental call. I think it's a good idea to learn about the customs and culture of one's birth country for adopted kids and their new families.


Disclaimer: Chinese descent, grew up in the U.S. My westernized upbringing already separates me from people in my country of origin, but I think my experience would be poorer if my parents hadn't tried to teach us about the customs and holidays they grew up with, etc. I'm not bi-lingual so it's not 100% best of both worlds, but I'd feel weird as an adult with absolutely no knowledge or experience of Chinese culture other than what the average American has. And frankly, I like having both cultures to draw from. Celebrating Thanksgiving AND Chinese New Year kicks all kinds of ass, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'm not sure what you're asking about re: racism. My siblings weren't born in my parents' country of origin, have never lived there and arguably don't have a "meaningful relationship" to that country. I don't think it's racist for them to be interested in the culture or customs, and I certainly wouldn't characterize it as "pretending links". I'm, uh, a little taken aback about that suggestion, if that's what you were indeed suggesting. If it's not, I apologize for my misunderstanding.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

Culture doesn't matter. At all. It's completely pointless. Eventually the earth is going to be destroyed. Either from the sun becoming a red giant, or some sort of cosmic junk. If humans live long enough to get to that point, which is a few million years from now, they'd have to invite some sort of space travel.

Now, keep in mind that planets are so far away from each other, that it will take hundreds of years to even get to one. That's hundreds of years humans would have to live on a spaceship, and self sustain itself. Eventually, things are going to break down. They'd need to find a livable planet ASAP. Space travel is very, very unlikely to ever really be possible on that scale.

So in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter. As everything the earth ever created will disappear into a fiery molten ball, as the sun is going to be so close it'll melt the surface.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

Completely depends on the kids and the family. Each adoption is unique. Some birth parents may request a connection, some may request they try and raised with at least an awareness of their heritage. Others don't care. Some kids may want that connection, some don't care.

It's not a matter of generalized should or should not, it's up to each individual adoption and the relationships therein.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think it's necessarily racist, but I think it's partially ignorant of what "culture" actually is. Culture is entirely social and ultimately invented. There is no innate connection to a particular culture.

On the other hand, there is a long history of Western civilization attempting to force its culture upon others out of a misguided notion of superiority. Many critiques of foreign adoption touch upon this. There are people who adopt from abroad because they erroneously think that a child outside of the West can't possibly have a good life, which is simply not true. Additionally, an argument could be made that we should be adopting unwanted or orphaned children in our own countries before we look abroad, and that there is a degree of fetishization involved in foreign adoptions (but is that ultimately okay, since it gives a child a home regardless of the circumstances?).

It's kind of a complex issue that I don't think can or should be reduced to notions of cultural identity. Would you be willing to post the article, so we can all better assess where it's coming from?

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

Personally, I think the child should be have opportunities to explore and learn about the culture, but it shouldn't be something that's forced.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

My adopted brother is Vietnamese - but born in Canada. We left the choice up to him, ie. whether he wanted to learn the language etc, but he didnt really want to. He loves Vietnamese food though.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

1. It's not wrong, what the fuck is wrong with them. Those children have the options of death, starvation and little future. They're orphans and children given up because family can no longer support them

POC is seriously the stupidest fucking word. Just say adopted children.
Culture is also misleading because it's not about culture, this is the place they were born. It's about familial connections.

No it is not racist. Depending on the child, they may or may not feel connected. They may have links, especially since a large portion are adopted around age 5 or so. It doesn't matter at what point the child is adopted, if they want contact with the area they were born in they are allowed to have that.

They're not pretending, they DO have links. The country of origin is a part of them. There's no shoulds about it and it is none of your business. If they want contact, they can have contact. They can track down family members, writer letters, go see the place they were adopted from, meet the people who cared for them until they were adopted. This is a VERY important part of their life and NO-ONE gets to claim that they are pretending links or don't have a meaningful relationship and JFC it is most CERTAINLY NOT racist for them to ACKNOWLEDGE THE PLACE THEY WERE BORN

You don't know SHIT about adoption abroad in technical aspects, let alone the details of raising adopted children from across the world. The place they were born is a part of them. If they don't want to connect to it, fine, cool! But if they do they CAN and it is NOT racist or fake or pretended and that is a HORRIBLE thing to think if you do think so

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

Oh yes, it's super bad to adopt from a different culture. Much better that the kids grow up alone and without a family, especially in cultures which attach a stigma to being orphaned or adopted such that those kids are staggeringly unlikely to ever GET a family within their own culture. How dare people offer kids who are alone in the world a loving home.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[darkmanifest]

On the one hand, it shouldn't matter what culture the kid comes from if there's people anywhere willing to love them and raise them. On the other hand, I keep thinking of an article I read where native American children in the modern day U.S. were habitually placed with non-native families, even where there were native foster families nearby legally and financially able to take the children so they wouldn't have to grow up apart from their roots. There's also cases where the kid still has living family and is still adopted out instead of any effort being made to keep them with relatives that are able and willing to take them.

So there does seem to be a bit of an issue with adoption being done with prejudice, under the assumption that the only place suitable for any child anywhere in the world is a wealthy Western family.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[blunderbuss]

I think some of that attitude came from reports of some families adopting from another culture but naming their kids a nice generic white name and doing everything they could to sever their new children from that icky old one and immerse them in the superior western one. And when the kid had identity issues growing up, the parents were so confused, because why would you care about that culture when ours is so much nicer?

Especially with some attitudes, especially in some conversative christian groups, that they're 'rescusing' these kids from bad cultures/religions and are going to raise them 'right'.

But just pointing out that cross-cultural adoption can have a lot of problems does not mean its ALWAYS wrong. If we stopped doing things because some assholes were fucking it up, we wouldn't do ANYTHING.

Re: How much contact should adopted PoC children have with the culture of their birth?

[(Anonymous)]

There are many, many problems with overseas adoption right now.
If you have an interest in the subject, this is worth reading:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/christian-evangelical-adoption-liberia