Given Madonna's recent decision to adopt a child from Malawi, news and entertainment are abuzz with what you've observed yourself—in your own family, or the family next door, or passing the neighborhood playground—there's a boom in transracial adoption. Most coverage focuses on the struggles of good white parents wishing to adopt "unfortunate" children of color. Some touches on the irony of Black babies in the United States being exported to Canada and Europe because of their "unwanted" status here. Some even addresses the trafficking of children (of course, it would—that's sensational). But few look ato why babies are available for adoption in the first placeo what happens when they grow up ando how we come up with solutions that are humane and just Healthy white infants have become hard to locate and expensive to adopt. So people from around the world turn to interracial and intercountry adoption, often, like Madonna, with the idea that while growing their families, they’re saving children from destitution. But as Outsiders Within reveals, while transracial adoption is a practice traditionally considered benevolent, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural, and even economic toll. Through compelling essays, fiction, poetry, and art, the contributors to this landmark publication carefully explore this most intimate aspect of globalization. Finally, in the unmediated voices of the adults who have matured within it, we find a rarely-considered view of adoption, an institution that pulls apart old families and identities and grafts new ones. Moving beyond personal narrative, these transracially adopted writers from around the world tackle difficult questions about how to survive the racist and ethnocentric worlds they inhabit, what connects the countries relinquishing their children to the countries importing them, why poor families of color have their children removed rather than supported—about who, ultimately, they are. In their inquiry, they unseat conventional understandings of adoption politics, ultimately reframing the controversy as a debate that encompasses human rights, peace, and reproductive justice. About the Editors Jane Jeong Trenka, born in Seoul, Korea, was adopted into a white family in rural Minnesota in 1972. She was reunited with her birth family in 1995. Her book, The Language of Blood, received the Minnesota Book Award for Autobiography/Memoir and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. Trenka has received many literary fellowships and commendations. Sun Yung Shin is a poet, essayist, journalist, and writing teacher who has won literary fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Loft Literary Center. Adopted from Seoul, Korea in 1974 into a white family, currently Shin lives in Minneapolis with her husband (a domestic kept-in-the-family adoptee from Chicago) and their two children. Julia Chinyere Oparah is a transformational leader, executive coach, social justice educator, and activist scholar. Oparah has published extensively on black maternal health, decarceral politics, research justice and transnational black feminisms. She is co-founder of Black Women Birthing Justice, and co-author of Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy and Childbirth, a seminal text that puts black women at the center of debates about the crisis in maternal health care. She is lead author of Battling Over Birth, a human rights report that challenges existing research paradigms used to investigate black women’s perinatal health, using a research justice framework. More recently she has published on Black birthworkers and Birthing mamas during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chinyere is a National Equity Project fellow and member of the Center for Executive Coaching. She lives in Oakland with her partner, daughter and labradoodle. She can be found at the Center for Liberated Leadership.
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