Anniversary of Hiroshima Bombing

Well, I'd thought today would be a day free of complaining about racism. Sadly, this is not to be.

I was reading this short post about the Hiroshima anniversary. I clicked through to one of the video clips, but I couldn't watch it because I got too distracted by some of the nasty comments. Why are Youtube video comments such disgusting cesspools? That's a rhetorical question... it seems like any audiovisual type of communication with semi-anonymous comments always ends up that way. As a side note, I'm very interested, from an internet anthropology perspective, as to why that happens.

I am not going to reproduce any of the comments but it's quite typical stuff as to how "the japs" deserved it.

For what it's worth, I feel very ambiguous about the historical necessity of the bombing of Hiroshima. My father suffered from a terrible infection around that time, and he told us that the only thing that saved him was antibiotics his parents bought on the black market, and the antibiotics originated from American troops. Given the dire wartime circumstances, if Japan had not been defeated so rapidly, he would almost certainly have died. So by a certain twist of fate I would not be alive today if it weren't for the bomb.

What I am not ambiguous about... the bombing was a terrible atrocity. It should never happen again, anywhere, to any country. It makes me so sad to know there are people out there like those commenters -- many people -- who would deny humanity to the bombing victims, both the ones that died that day and the ones who slowly withered away from the aftereffects over decades.

Racism encourages the belief that something inherent in Japanese blood and culture that caused their ferocity in World War II. In reality, it's something that could have happened to any group of people infected by fascism. Japan is a complicated country with a complicated history. A hundred years ago it was very different, and a hundred years from now it will be very different. It is not some unchanging ahistorical bizarro-world created to evoke alternating awe and revulsion by credulous Americans.

There's a great interview between two master novelists - Kazuo Ishiguro, British nikkei, and Kenzaburo Oe, the Japanese Nobel Prize winner, that really encapsulates the complexity I'm trying to portray. Like my father, Oe grew up in a rural Japan that has almost vanished. Oe talks in great detail about what it means to be Japanese, not by claiming that his vision of Japan is superior, but by saying that he speaks from the margins, and still has as much right as those who claim to speak from the center. Ishiguro talks about how his Japanese identity slipped away, and how he became a "homeless writer", not Japanese and not fully English either.

Here's a passage from a different interview with Oe, about Hiroshima.

Finding a Voice in Tragedy

The birth of your son was the turning point in finding your voice as a writer. You have written that "Twenty-five years ago, my first son was born with brain damage. This was a blow, to say the least. Yet as a writer, I must acknowledge the fact that the central theme of my work throughout much of my career has been the way my family has managed to live with this handicapped child."

Yes, precisely. I wrote it.

When I was twenty-eight years old, my son was born. When I was twenty-eight years old I was a writer, a rather famous writer on the Japanese scene and I was a student of French literature. And I was talking in the voice of Jean-Paul Sartre or [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty. I was always speaking about everything of this work. But when my son was born with very big damage in his brain, I found out one night, I wanted to find encouragement, so I wanted to read my book -- that was the first time I read my book, [the only] book that [I'd] written up to that date -- and I found out a few days later that I cannot encourage myself through my book; [therefore] no one can be [encouraged] by my work. book cover So I thought, "I am nothing and my book is nothing." So I was depressed very strongly; then I was asked by a journalist who was editing a political magazine in Japan to go to Hiroshima, the place the atomic bomb [had been] dropped. There in Hiroshima, in that year the peace movement -- the anti-atomic bomb movement -- was meeting, and in those assemblies there was big fight between the Chinese group and the Russian group. And I was the only independent journalist there. So I criticized both of them.

I found the hospital of the Hiroshima survivors and there I found the very great Dr. [Fumio] Shigeto. In conversation with Shigeto and the patients in the hospital, I gradually found that there is something that encouraged me, so I wanted to follow this sense that there is something. So I returned to Tokyo and went to the hospital where my [newborn] son was, and talked to the doctors about rescuing my son. Then I began to write about Hiroshima, and this was the turning point of my life. A kind of rebirth of myself.

So there was an interplay between what you saw in the victims of Hiroshima and also very importantly what you saw in observing the doctors who were treating the victims. What you observed somehow moved you to another plane in dealing with your own personal tragedy?

Yes. Shigeto said to me, "We cannot do anything for the survivors. Even today we don't know anything about the nature of the illness of the survivors. Even today, so shortly after the bombing, we don't know anything, but we did what we could do. Every day a thousand people dead. But amidst the dead bodies, I continued. So, Kenzaburo, what can I do except that, when they need our aid? Now your son needs you. You must find out that no one on this planet needs you except your son." Then I understood. I returned to Tokyo and began to do something for my son, for myself, and for my wife.

Your novel about the birth of your handicapped son is called A Personal Matter, and your writings on Hiroshima are collected in Hiroshima Notes. You write in the latter: "When the Hiroshima doctors pursue the A-bomb calamity in their imaginations, they are trying to see more deeply and more clearly the depth of the hell into which they too are caught. There is a pathos in this dual concern for self and others; yet it only adds to the sincerity and the authenticity that we sense...." You are saying that in seeing this duality in the doctor, you were helped to see the complexity of the dilemma of Bird, the protagonist in your novel.

Yes. Until then, my little theme was a duality or ambiguity of human beings. [This concept] came from existentialism in France. I think I found out the true duality and how I can be so-called "authentic." But the word "authenticity" must not be so frozen in my case. I used the word from Jean-Paul Sartre. Today I would use another word. It is very simple. I wanted to be strictly an upright man. The Irish poet Yeats said in his poem, "The young man who stands straight." Straightforwardness. Erect. This kind of young man that I wanted to be, but then I used the word "authentic."

Lionel Trilling wrote that confessing to your feelings is one of the most courageous and valuable things a writer could do. That's what you did in A Personal Matter.

Yes. I wanted to do so. At the time I didn't think of the value of being an upright man. I [felt I] must write about myself. Why not? I cannot be reborn and my son cannot be reborn, I felt, [if I don't]. So when I was by the sea [I decided that] I must rescue myself and I must rescue my son. So I wrote that book, I think.

South Georgia Coast Visit

I've lived in Atlanta for ten years now, and I've never been to the Georgia coast. This weekend we finally made it out there. We left on Friday at 6pm, made it to Jekyll Island by 11pm, visited there and St. Simons and Fort Frederica and then spent a bit of time in downtown Savannah on the way back.

It's beautiful down there! My favorite part of the trip was our visit to a sea turtle rehabilitation center. My husband and I both love sea turtles so we always head straight for a sea turtle center anytime we go on vacation.

This was a much-needed mini-vacation.

Email to Universal Studios

Responding to a notice from Reappropriate and Angry Asian Man about yellowface in the new movie I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. (Yes, I know Rob Schneider is a quarter Filipino, but that is no excuse whatsoever).

I may send this as a letter too, if I can find the right address.

Contact Form for Universal Studios
I have been notified that your new movie, "Chuck and Larry", contains multiple racist and insulting depictions of Asians.

Universal Studios obviously believes that depicting Asian men as clowns and Asian women as whores is supposed to be humorous.

Not only will I not see the movie, I will warn everyone I know not to see it, and also leave negative reviews warning others of these racist depictions on popular reviewing sites such as Netflix and IMDB.

Really Really Local News

- There's a ball python on the loose.
- Dekalb County has changed their recycling bins from blue to orange. The new bins are going to look ugly and the reasons for the color change are unclear and the whole thing sounds very wasteful.
- Crime in our neighborhood is generally of the petty, crackheads-stealing-lawn-tools variety. Recently there was a burglary on a larger scale. The thieves pretended to be cleaners. They pressure-washed two sides of the house while they robbed it in broad daylight. We have a good neighborhood watch program, but how can you be on the alert against something like that? Damn!

Racist Bullying

I rarely read the local Sunday Paper, but I'm glad I checked it out this week. It has an article on bullying that talks a fair amount about racist bullying. The article leads with the story of an Asian adoptee who was bullied and in turn became a bully. It's extremely sad. Several Georgia counties, including the much-maligned Cobb County, are doing some good work trying to address the problem.

I wrote about my experiences with racist bullying in my "Handling Racism as a Child" post. To summarize that post, there is really no way for a child to "handle" it. It's like getting hit on the side of the head by a 2x4. For an adoptee, it's probably like getting hit on the side of the head by a 2x4 while trying to walk a tightrope.

My experiences harmed me for life, but it could have been a lot worse. When I was in college my neighbor was a young Hispanic dark-skinned woman. She told me she had gotten a lot of this type of abuse growing up and remembered a very unhappy childhood. She confessed that when she was a teenager, she used to go nightclubs, pick fights with white girls and beat them up. That was her way of working out her rage. She told me she'd gotten a lot better since then.

I'm proud (and thankful) of the fact that I don't think I ever took it out on anyone else.

I wish people would take this issue more seriously.

One thing I decided early on is that there is noooooooooooooooooooooooooo way I am going to let any child of mine go through this. At the first sign I'll go straight to the principal, find out the names of all the children and parents involved, contact them, and basically overreact in every way I can possibly imagine. And if it happens again after that, I'll pull them out of the school. I am not going to wait and see if it gets better. I am not going to tell them to "tough it out".

Bully!
Georgia schools try new ways to fight an old problem
By Diane Loupe

With most metro area schools starting classes again within the next month, a lot of parents and kids are worried about a problem as old as school itself: bullying. It's especially common in middle school and may be far more dangerous than many would think.

"James" has seen bullying from both sides of the playground.

Kids at his metro Atlanta middle school picked on the slender Asian student, calling him "Wang Chong" and other racial epithets. He tried to laugh and pretend they didn't bother him because otherwise, he says, "they would pick at you more."

James (not his real name), who is now 14, says, "It made me feel bad. They take everything you have and smash it to make themselves feel better."

James' teachers rarely got involved in his battles unless a fight broke out. As the rage boiled up inside him, James began to bully other kids, calling them names. He started picking on his younger, disabled brother.

"You bottle up emotions and feel like you're going to explode," he admits. "Sometimes you need to feel better by picking on someone else."

Eventually, the bullying led to fights, expulsions and therapy. James was hospitalized for serious mental illnesses connected with his aggression. His mother was so afraid he might harm his younger brother that she got an apartment for James and herself, leaving her younger children to live with their father.

She explains that James was bullied because of his ethnicity and because he was adopted.

"The kids told him, 'your mother threw you away,'" she says.

Both mother and son share a frustration with school administrators who didn't take the initial bullying seriously and didn't act to prevent a host of problems for the young man—problems he's still struggling to overcome.

"The bullying set off reverberations that got very distorted in his own thinking," says his mother. "It made him feel very unsafe, very alone. And he lashed out and figured he'd be on the offense. It was way out of proportion."

Bullying is as common in public schools as cafeteria mystery meat and considered by many educators and parents an unpleasant and inevitable rite of passage. In 2001, 14 percent of U.S. students ages 12 to 18 reported that they had been bullied, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Bullied kids were more likely to admit they'd carried weapons to school and gotten into fights. According to federal figures, they were also more likely to have performed poorly academically. In his 1999 book, "Real Boys' Voices," psychologist William Pollack reports that about 160,000 students skip school each year because of bullying. Some even drop out.

According to Charles Gallagher, a sociologist at Georgia State University, racism, like the kind directed at James, is often the root of bullying. Homophobia also asserts itself among students in bullying. While the behavior manifests in cafeterias and playgrounds, it may have its roots in a household where physical or verbal abuse is tolerated or is the default setting for dealing with problems.

"It's never just one thing," says Gallagher. "But, for example, if you have a kid who has older brothers who beat him up and who is shut down anytime he says something, so he constantly retreats to his room where there is no shortage of violent video games and other media, what do you think he is learning?"

Long-term consequences of unchecked bullying can be seen in the adult social context in civic meetings, government bodies and other groups that feature hierarchies and the potential use of power. Those who shout down others in public meetings or officials who refuse to allow those who disagree with them to speak out may have been bullies when they were kids. Or they may have been bullied themselves.

"We see those who typically don't have power—and when they get it, how do they use it?" Gallagher asks.

A dangerous rite of passage

But there are worse reactions to having been bullied than being the local zoning board tyrant: If nobody steps in to change the behavior of bullies when they're in sixth through eighth grade, 60 percent will have criminal records by the age of 24, according to research cited by the International Bullying Prevention Association.

Gallagher points to the Columbine High School massacre and the more recent tragedy at Virginia Tech and the factors that led to the suicidal gunmen's attacks. Though there is absolutely no excuse for such actions, there is an easily recognizable set of circumstances that can have a particularly damaging impact on someone who, like the gunman at VT, has a mental illness or develops one: feeling like an outsider and experiencing severe isolation that includes being shunned.

With such incidents in mind, Joel Meyers, director of Georgia State's Center for School Safety, is studying conditions that foster aggressive behavior to support development of violence-free schools. He acknowledges how much the effect of bullying is underestimated by parents and teachers.

"There is a tendency in society to dismiss bullying as 'kids will be kids,' just a natural part of growing up," he says.

Society often recognizes and rewards bullies. Donald Trump, Ann Coulter, Rosie O'Donnell, Michael Moore, Donald Rumsfeld and Bobby Knight all owe their fame in part to behavior that could be called bullying.

Michael R. Carpenter, a bullying prevention trainer with the Cobb County school system, says many school administrators and teachers use forms of intimidation to manage teachers and students.

"Some administrators like having an upper hand, they like using bullying behavior," says Carpenter, pointing out that some sports teams, police departments and military groups have famously used bullying. He suggests that if a parent walks into a school and finds that the front office "treats you like dirt," it might be fair to suspect a climate of bullying. Teachers can bully students by being sarcastic, picking favorites and letting kids choose teams in P.E. It's also true that kids can bully teachers.

Besides hitting, kicking, pushing, pulling hair or other physical abuse, bullies can wield psychological weapons, such as mean nicknames and social isolation. Students also use the Internet to harass or intimidate others.

Although bullying was once considered a male-dominated behavior, girls now bully as much as boys, tending to use gossip, rumors and social isolation to express their dominance, says Carpenter. Bullying peaks in the older elementary grades and drops off during high school. Hot spots for bullies vary from school to school, but bullies thrive in arenas with limited adult supervision, such as the playground, lunchroom and hallways. Even a substitute teacher can be a license to bully for some kids.

Self-esteem, Carpenter adds, isn't a problem for most bullies, who tend to feel good about themselves and have plenty of friends.

But, like James, some bullies are also victims, as Georgia State's Meyers notes. In GSU's bully prevention programs, researchers work with victims on strategies to cope with bullies.

Since bullies enjoy an audience, bystanders are taught to take actions that interrupt bullying, he says. Simply saying "stop" is better than implying approval by keeping silent.

What schools are doing

Some Georgia schools have started standing up to the bullies. Twenty-three schools in Cobb County have implemented a bully prevention program developed by Scandinavian researcher Dan Olweus, widely considered the world's leading expert on the subject.

In the program, which is also used in Forsyth, Cherokee and Henry Counties, educators learn how to identify and address coercive or bullying behavior, and schools adopt anti-bullying rules and encourage consistent positive and negative consequences for behavior. Additionally, teachers meet regularly to discuss bullying issues. Educators work with students who are bullies as well as victims—and their parents.

In Cobb County, the results have been dramatic. Five of its schools have cut their incidence of bullying by half. Pine Mountain Middle saw a 55 percent drop in bullying, according to surveys of all students taken both before and after the program was implemented. Kemp Elementary saw a 45 percent drop; bullying was also halved at Tapp Middle and Lewis Middle. Milford Elementary reported a 43 percent drop. Schools are also noticing fewer fights and disciplinary referrals.

"If we intervene early, we could reduce kids going to prison," says Carpenter, who helps stage the International Bullying Conference, scheduled for this fall in Florida.

James' mother advises other parents to speak to administrators if they suspect their child is being bullied. Experts agree that getting teachers and administrators involved is of the utmost importance. If students tell one teacher who does nothing about the situation, they should tell another teacher, or an administrator.

James, at least, knows what has prompted his behavior.

"Being bullied makes you feel like you can't live any more," he says. But when you bully someone else, "it feels kinda good." And, like anything that feels good, "It's hard to stop. You're so used to feeling good again." SP

A New Foster Care Blog

Lawrence Adams, author of Lost Son? A Bastard Child's Journey of Hope, Search, Discovery and Healing, now has a blog called "Reflections of a Foster Youth". I've seen his posts on message boards before, and he has an amazing life story and a lot of insight into the foster care system. Check out this introduction post and this post on foster parents.

Foster Care Adoption, Capitalism and the failure of Charity

There's an interesting dialog started by Claudia from the Adopt America Network. It's a very obvious foster care adoption question. Why do counties and agencies keep recruiting families who are interested in adopting young children? Why do they keep perpetuating a system where a healthy 5-year-old has 100 families interested in adopting, and a 17-year-old has no one, and ages out of the system?

Claudia takes the question in a certain direction.

One of my missions is to recruit families who are willing to life through the horrors to end up to be resilient people of faith who will take on the harder things. As Bart said, quoting Jaiya John this morning, "what we currently have in our country is not a "child welfare" system, but a "help parents get the child they want" system, when it comes to adoption."

[...]

If we were looking at the issue of waiting children in foster care, we would be recruiting families for teens with on probation with an array of mental illnesses. We would be looking for families willing to take large sibling groups. We would be looking for parents willing to parent children with FASD or RAD or sexual acting out or the dreaded "fire-setters."

FosterAbba has already responded with a personal analysis of how her family both can and can't answer the call. I'd like to take it in a different direction, and use a cold, hard, cynical "follow the money" approach. Please don't take this as an attack on anyone involved in the system trying to do good work, but rather a critical examination of the system itself.

I don't think the current system is really geared towards adoptive parents. It's geared towards saving the government money. An adoptive placement costs the government less than a foster placement over the life of the child. An adoptive parent will agree to take over much of the cost and labor of raising a child. Why? What reward do they get? Do they do it out of love? Altruism? Selfishness? It doesn't matter from a cost perspective.

Economically speaking, adoptive parents are not really clients of the government, but neither do they actually work for the government. They're a cross between an intern and a volunteer. They're willing to work for very little material reward, as long as they get some intangible benefits. Foster parents are not full-time workers either; they're more like a cross between interns and temps. Some do it mainly for the money, others do it mainly for the intangible benefits.

You have to keep adoptive and foster parents a little bit happy so that they'll continue to work for you or absorb some of your costs. The children are not as important a priority. They can't go on strike or quit. But if you behave really badly to them, child welfare advocates will sue you, so there are limits. You also have indirect accountability to "client" families. Bad and incompetent behavior might result in unwelcome media attention, lawsuits and bureaucratic shakeups.

I need to detour here and talk about the problems of voluntary charity. I'll disclose that I'm a leftist with an MBA, and I don't like charity but I donate to it… I don't find any of this be contradictory, but I realize it might be confusing to some readers.

The problem with charity is that it relies too much on appeals to the emotions. Successful charitable appeals involve three characteristics: 1) cuteness 2) visibility 3) ego. People are more likely to give money to something cute. Pandas get a lot more attention than beetles. Young children are cuter than older children. Children are cute, but they're often made invisible. Visible problems are easier to address than hidden problems. Issues hidden behind closed doors or looming in the future get less attention, and less money. And then there's ego, which is kind of obvious, what with all the charitable foundations named after rich people.

My family used to sponsor a child when I was young, but I decided I don't agree with sponsoring anymore. I just give money directly to Save the Children. Why do I need a thank you letter from a child for my donation? It makes me feel better for a few minutes, but it's really just feeding my ego. The few cents it took to mail me that letter could have gone to more useful purposes.

For me, an ideal wealth distribution system wouldn't involve charity. It would look more like taxes. An equal percentage is taken off the top of your paycheck then distributed by experts -- accountable experts -- to where it does the most good. This system has plenty of potential problems, of course. However, it's the only system where hidden, non-cute, ungrateful sorts of problems have any chance at all of being addressed.

Then there's the problem of charitable volunteers. Anyone who has worked for a non-profit knows that volunteer burnout is a major issue. A volunteer who works for a living can't have their volunteer job as their highest priority. If their family member gets sick, or their paying job is in danger, guess where they have to cut back. On the other hand, if your volunteers are all well-off people who have the resources to put volunteering as their number one priority, your organization starts reflecting a narrower, upper-class set of values and stops being representative of the general population.

For Claudia and the Adopt America Network to succeed in recruiting more parents for hard-to-place children, they need to find people with the right combination of altruism, insight and resources. I think altruism is the easiest part. That's where I stop being cynical… I think almost every human being (except for the true sociopath) has the capacity for altruism. It may not be expressed very strongly, but it's there and it can be stirred up with the right appeal. The insight is much harder. Can you stifle your own impulse to feel protective not just to children who are small, soft and helpless, but also those who are tall, looming and hard-faced? Force yourself to see and even jump into problems that used to be invisible? Know how much you can really handle, without believing you are weak, or a superwoman?

The resource portion makes the goal incredibly difficult. Looking back over my blog you can see how many times I have bitched about the fact that we only have one bedroom for children which means the sibling group would have to be two boys or two girls. I'm not a good example, really, because we're pretty well-off for a middle-class urban couple. But our house that we own is 1050 square feet with a third of an acre yard. If I earned the same amount of money and lived in New York City, we'd probably live in a 500-square foot studio and spend 60% of our income on rent. How can people like us adopt or foster large sibling groups? That's a very literal question. Special housing loan programs would be one partial solution.

Housing becomes much easier if you live in the country, but then you run into the representativeness problem then. For example, given that a) African-American children are disproportionately represented in the system b) African-American parents live disproportionately in urban areas then focusing more on rural placements increases cultural dislocation.

Many people who have the insight and understanding may not have the resources. Our economic system does not place a high value on human services. Elementary school teachers, social workers, foster parents… all professions that are culturally coded as female and low-paying. They're jobs that certain people find very fulfilling. And since they're so fulfilling, we don't need to pay them very much. It's nice to be nice. But if you really want to get ahead in life, be a lawyer or a CEO. That's the general attitude.

Foster care adoption is a dysfunctional system located inside a dysfunctional culture. That's kind of an obvious statement. Kids wouldn't enter foster care, much less need to exit it, if things were better all around.

To get more foster and adoptive parents where they're needed, and to get them to perform better, what are some practical measures that can be taken? By practical, I mean things that don't involve massive changes to society as we know it.

Telling them they need to be more altruistic isn't sufficient. If they answer the call as altruistic volunteers, they'll have high burn-out rates just like altruistic volunteers.

Religion is not sufficient. This is according to what I heard from a plainspoken, very religious woman at an orientation meeting. She said she kept a close eye on the parents who told her that God told them to take the hardest cases. Too often, they would call her up in the middle of the night and say "I can't handle this child, take them back." She joked she would ask them, "Now where is your 'patience of Job?'"

Paying them more money would help a lot. It would also make foster and adoptive parents more representative of the general population. On the other hand, you might get people who do it for the money and not the passion, so more money needs to come with stringent controls and training requirements.

More education would help; not just top-down training, but horizontal information sharing. There are a lot of foster parents blogging and communicating on the web, but I don't trust the internet to be truly representative of the general public.

Stop moving kids around so much. If a child is reunified with their family, but the reunification effort is uncertain, pay the foster carer to reserve the bed. If they are removed again, they go back to the same foster carer. If the child has to be shuttled back and forth, at least it should be back and forth between the same two homes. This would help children and keep foster parent morale higher.

How about a special union? Once you get your foster license and join, you have access to a credit union and special housing loans. The union encourages information sharing and sponsors training events along with the government. It sponsors a youth club "Future Child Welfare Workers of America". The military has ROTC! Encourage the ideal of pride in service. Wear special hats in parades. Offer AA, BA and MA degrees in therapeutic foster care drawing on fields of psychology and child development. Pay people who have those degrees higher wages.

I've heard foster parents complain they have the image of "those people in the neighborhood with too many kids running around a messy yard". Change that image to "the people who have the great union and job security and high standards and fun social events and I want to be one when I grow up." I hear PSAs on college radio that say "you don't have to be perfect to adopt a teen from foster care". It's a good PSA for now. But in the future, it would be nice if the message could evolve into "can you meet a high standard of excellence in child welfare?" from the current "we're desperate, do you have a pulse?"

Of course all these ideas require vast amounts of money which are currently being spent on more important things like the war in Iraq. Sigh... I wish I could end on a more positive note.

Cobb County Hates Families

This is an irritating proposal I read about at one of my favorite local blogs, Blog for Democracy. Cobb County's overlords are always trying to doing stuff like this. They are the geniuses behind the "Evolution is just a Theory" stickers for biology textbooks.

Cobb officials want to ban home crowding

Under Cobb's proposal, a house must have at least 390 square feet of "total building square footage" for each adult resident and for each car parked overnight. It also would limit the people living in a home to one family or two or fewer unrelated adults and their children and/or grandchildren. Family is defined as parents, children, grandparents, grandchildren, brothers and sisters.

Officials say they could make exceptions. For example, if a family wanted to let its adult children live at home, it could apply for a land-use permit.

Arzate said she lives with her husband and two children, her father, her brother, and her other brother and his wife and two children. She said everyone living there is in the U.S. legally.

"I don't know what is the problem. I don't have too many people here," said Arzate, speaking in English. "It is only my family."

Arzate says she suspects she's being picked on because she's Hispanic, an accusation her neighbors deny. They have complained repeatedly to Cobb officials about Arzate's property.

The county has issued citations to Arzate for litter on her property and for cars parked in her yard. Cobb authorities issued a warrant for her arrest this month after she failed to appear in court on the charges.

"They are in the back playing volleyball on their days off," said Carolyn Warner, a retired Delta flight attendant who lives around the corner from Arzate. "They are probably illegal. ... They are all young men."

I actually believe that rules regarding outside appearances of houses and apartments are justified and important. I used to live in an apartment building with way too many junked cars used as secondary storage; the rules against them were not enforced well enough. That being said, it seems blindingly obvious that this woman is being targeted because of racism. The nasty remark by her neighbor... oh my god, they're playing volleyball on their days off! How dare they!

I have a strong feeling there is a Caucasian family several blocks over from Arzate, and they have a junked pickup truck and a mouldy sofa in their front yard, and no one has bothered to give them a citation so far.

Anti-Hispanic racism is very strong and very ugly in the suburbs around Atlanta.

I believe the proposed ordinance about living space is racist, promotes class warfare against the poor and is anti-family. You should have the right to let your uncle sleep on your couch, or put up your sick grandmother, or have your adult children live with you. Not everyone belongs to a neatly symmetrical nuclear family living in a damn McMansion. Why does that model have to be legally enforced as the most desirable one for American living? It's wasteful and often isolating.

If I lived in Cobb in the same size house as I have here in Dekalb, and the law went through, it would have been illegal to have my dad stay with us for two months while he recuperated from ankle surgery.

Also, Cobb families would not need so many cars if suburban lawmakers did not support racist, dumbass measures against public transportation while slurping up bribe money from road construction equipment lobbyists (read here for a high-level analysis if you are further interested).

The Two New Members of Our Family

My mom and stepdad gave me a surprise present a few days ago: two diamond doves. These are parakeet-sized doves who make quiet harmonious coos and have a reputation for being easy to take care of. On the left is Coco, the female. On the right is Special D (the "D" stands for "Dove").

I just bought them a full-spectrum light today. This seems to have upped their activity level. They're from Australia so they must like a lot of sun. What a pair of sweeties!

Food Idiocy

The Atlanta Journal Constitution was already a pathetic rag before they laid off most of their journalists a few months ago.

They've sunk to new lows with their Best of Atlanta online feature. A couple local blogs have alerted me to the comical awfulness of this list.

Best Indian Restaurant: Imperial Fez.
- This is a very good restaurant. And as others have noted, it's Moroccan, not Indian.

Best Japanese Restaurant: Benihana. "Benihana restaurants are traditional Japanese-style hibachi steakhouses where meals are prepared and served right at your table."
- I don't know whether to laugh or cry about this one. My dad is pretty serious about Japanese food, and if he ever found himself in a Benihana he would probably grab one of the steak knives and disembowel someone.

Best Sushi: Ru Sans.
- Never heard of this chain before. A local blog advised putting the name plus "food poisoning" into a google search. I did. Yikes.

I'm always telling people that Atlanta has incredible restaurants. We have great barbecue and soul food. We have dim sum and pho and hot pot and pozole and imam bayildi. We also have a bunch of crappy chain restaurants that must have paid off the AJC to be placed on the list. If the editors listed them for free, that would be the greatest idiocy of all. If you're a visitor to Atlanta in search of good food, please start off using other resources instead.

In terms of current local stuff, I should probably touch on the Genarlow Wilson and Troy Anthony Davis stories, but I feel like these have already been getting some pretty good analysis on both a local and national basis, and I don't have any fresh insight to add.

Vague Recrimination

I hate reading posts that talk in vague terms about being done wrong without naming any names. Unfortunately I'm going to have to make one right now. I'm pulling out of a site that I had gingerly hoped to make a lasting positive contribution towards.

In my introduction I stated very clearly who I was, what I come from and what I believed. I was very much aware of being in the minority there (as I am pretty much anywhere), but I felt like I was welcomed. I had a lot of good discussions, learned a lot and was able to teach other people something as well.

The welcome mat just got pulled out from under my feet.

This whole thing makes no difference in how I'm going to act in future. I am not giving up on anything I believe in. I am still heading in a positive direction in terms of personal growth and effectiveness as an Asian-American woman.

I'm turning off comments on this post just because there's really nothing left to say about it. Consider this my one "vague recrimination" post allowable per blog year. Stay tuned for a return to regularly scheduled adoption content, specific recrimination and just plain crimination.

Food and Racism

There have been some interesting posts on this topic at Racialicious and at Zuky (quoted below). These posts are sparked by a resurgence of the typical stuff: "flied lice" jokes, cat eating and so on.

What I find rather amazing is that so many non-Asians continue to find these moronic clichés funny and/or fascinating, to the point that lurid stories about tainted Chinese food have been at or near the top of corporate fake-news for weeks.

I suppose part of it is that eating is among our most primeval physical activities, along with having sex; so it's easy for lizard-brained racists to focus their disgust and derision on those two basic areas: both emasculating and hypersexualizing our bodies, both grossed out and intrigued by our food, repulsed yet attracted by our exoticized ways. I think Tony Bourdain was on the money when he connected fear of dirty food with fear of dirty people.

This is especially interesting to me because a) I've held a lot of food service jobs when I was young, some of them in quite filthy locations b) I've encountered food-based racism.

I remember in 5th grade, I was having lunch in our portable with the rest of my class. I went to one of those schools so overpopulated that half the classes were held in rickety trailers, called "portables". My mother had fixed me a nice obento with fried noodles. As I was eating my noodles a boy at the other end of table yelled "They're worms! she's eating WORMS! GROSS! WORMS!"

I didn't take this sitting down. In fact, I stuffed as many of the noodles as I could into my mouth, got up, and started chewing on them as I walked over to his end of the table. Then I spit them out all over the top of his head. Then he threw up. The teacher had to call a "code red" over the intercom for an emergency janitorial visit. We both got in trouble -- and I almost never got in trouble at school -- but boy was it worth it!

I think the Zuky post really gets to the root of the issue, so I don't have much else to add other than that anecdote. Maybe I'll continue this post later and talk about the weird racial dynamics of the restaurant industry in Miami.

Someone from our class got a placement

I know him from our class and several other events, including the conference on fathers and men in the foster care system. He's one of the rare single dads. Because of that, I'm surprised he got a placement so soon.

On the other hand, this man is almost ridiculously perfect. I mean, he belongs on some kind of Most Eligible Black Bachelors of the Southeast list. He's handsome, but more than that, he radiates quiet confidence. He's service-oriented and has a teaching job. He's empathetic and compassionate, knowing when to listen and when to offer advice. Totally competent, organized and determined... out of our large licensing class, he had his paperwork finished before anyone else.

Single dads are subject to a lot of scrutiny by caseworkers. But workers must really appreciate them sometimes. For those children who happened to grow up with an abusive mother and no father figures, being adopted by a single dad could be the least traumatic outcome and the one that creates the least feeling of conflicted loyalty.

I know he was willing to accept higher levels of attachment disorder, up to and including RAD. He's educated and has a fair idea of what he's going to need to work on. I don't feel strong enough to go there, but I'm glad he does!

His new son is coming soon from another state for the first placement visit. Mr. New Dad is super-excited and promises to keep us updated.

To my discredit, I do feel some twinges of envy, but overall the news really lifted me up. Yay for Mr. New Dad!

Not Cheerful

Well, I'm semi-officially depressed. We had our first rejection this week; rejection meaning that we didn't pass to the next round of families being considered. I'm also getting upset about how hard it is to reach people.

I asked our worker to fax in our homestudy on a boy in another state several months ago. I don't usually do this, but I wanted to make sure it was received, since the state has a lot of kids listed and the situation there seems kind of chaotic. I spent two weeks leaving messages and trying to get in touch with the original contact. I finally found out that wasn't the caseworker, and got the real caseworker's number. Then I spent another two weeks leaving messages and trying to get in touch. When I finally got her on the phone, she told me that the boy had been in an adoptive placement since January. She was mildly surprised his listing hadn't been updated. "Oh, I guess that's too bad, we should really do something about that..."

I knew about all these issues beforehand, and I thought I was prepared for the fact that most of the work I do in trying to make contact is completely wasted. It's affecting me more than I thought it would. And then I'm starting to have doubts about our homestudy. Maybe it doesn't show us in a good light. And is our worker really staying on top of things?

We're only two months into the matching process and I am NOT a happy camper. I need to get that sense of forward motion back. I'm starting to develop a plan so that I don't slide down into actual chemical depression. Overall I have an extremely stable emotional baseline, and I've never been on any kind of medication, but during a few times in my life, lasting for about a month at a time, I've gotten into that state where all I effectively did was sleep, cry or think about sleeping or crying. I don't want to go back there ever again.

Photolisting and Separation

I officially hate photolistings. I have sent off close to 40 photolisting inquiries and it just keeps getting harder.

Of course, browsing them can't be anywhere near as emotionally devastating as actually being on them.

Today I saw a little girl that I'd seen several months ago, pictured with a brother. I wanted to put in an inquiry, but I skipped over, since we can only get a placement approved for two brothers or two sisters (I explained the reason here).

Here's what was once written on a public site trying to find them a home.

Siblings Long For Shared Home [...] "They are a sibling group that's never been apart. They've had each other through all the time in foster care" [...] "They have always had each other and, in some ways, I think they take care of each other. But we really need a family that's able to take care of them."

For whatever reason, it didn't work. Now she's in a photo by herself.

[...] sometimes has difficulty managing her emotions but is learning healthy ways to express her feelings and addressing her grief and loss. She was recently separated from her older brother with whom she had lived her entire life.

Damn, I feel so sad, and angry too. It must be hell on earth to have family gradually subtracted from your life and not even understand the reason why.

I put in an inquiry. I wish I didn't... I wish they could have stayed together.

Weekend Update and Assorted Racial Negativity

I'm slowing down a bit, but I do promise to keep writing at least one post a week until things start heating up again.

This week we had a big lefty activism event called the US Social Forum here in Atlanta. My work schedule meant I couldn't attend, although I would have liked to see this presentation on the politics of transracial and transnational adoption. I did volunteer to host some people at my house. We have a spare bedroom after all!

One of the guys staying with us was a veteran former Marine and environmental activist. After he grew up and left home, his mother had adopted from the foster care system. The story was fascinating, and has no happy ending, although it's not quite a tragedy either. I don't feel like I have the right to tell it, so I'll just say it involves true and false sexual abuse allegations, adoption disruption, siblings split apart...

They left for their home state this morning, and then my husband and I went to see the Nuwaubian exhibit at Eyedrum gallery. The Nuwaubians were a cult led by a crazy pedophile named Malachi York who split off from the Nation of Islam and created his own Egyptian-plus-UFO mythology. In the 90s, the Nuwaubians moved from Brooklyn to a rural area to the southeast of Atlanta. The cult is now defunct because their leader is serving 135 years for child molestation. The exhibit was composed of Anderson Scott's photographs of their abandoned Egyptian-themed compound, as well as some of the relics left behind.

From an article on the exhibit
The perfect encapsulation of the look of this meta-Egypt may be the artist's own: "a version of Egypt, but with the color scheme and impermanence of a Mardi Gras float." The sizzling tangerines of the walls inside one building or the pea greens and cobalt blues ornamenting another create a startlingly artificial, human-made contrast with the verdant Georgia landscape and blue skies.

The exhibit was fascinating, and beautiful in a very sad way.

In internet news, I'm still stewing over a post I read at Racialicious.com. The post was an analysis of another article written by a white woman who moved to a black neighborhood and decided it was OK to be racist because of the petty thefts she was experiencing. I am not going to link to the original post. What was quoted in the Racialicious.com article was irritating enough.

From "Racism as a Lifestyle Choice" by Latoya Peterson

Reading both of their pieces, I was struck by the idea that this may be a new form of privilege - two women who openly proclaimed their racism and benefited from it with exposure, media attention, and a sympathetic ear from other whites. Other whites who have the best of intentions, but damn it, these brown people make it so hard NOT to be racist.

Or maybe I am struggling with my racist thoughts because I am unable to muster up sympathy for white people struggling with their inner racism. Maybe I’m just weary of dealing with people who missed the point of Michael Richards’ rant - it wasn’t about the n-word, it was about the noose and fork reference. Maybe I am tired of listening to white people talk about how much they hate themselves or their past deeds, but ultimately have nothing come from the conversation besides a slight lessening of white guilt.

I left quite a few comments on the post because I had a strong emotional reaction to the material. Excuses for racism are infuriating. There is never any excuse.

I'm someone who struggles with internalized racism. I'm psychologically infected with the same "dangerous criminal" stereotypes about black men. I'm also infected by stereotypes about my own race, and about multiracial people. Just this afternoon I was walking into a hardware store, and a white guy looked at me and said "damn, I've been wanting one of those!" I had a surge of adrenaline come over me, a red flash of "HE THINKS I'M AN ASIAN WOMAN SEX OBJECT" and I thought I'd have to get into a possible violent confrontation right there in the parking lot... and then the next second I realized he was talking about the shiny new gas grill on display right next to me. Do you know how stupid I felt? There is so much of this foggy nastiness all around me, as soon as you beat it off it comes floating back in, directed at me, directed by me at other people if I don't stay on guard and watch myself. I've put up with casual cruelty and petty humiliation from people of all races, and I have to try so hard not to let myself react by forming stereotypes, and instead tell myself "they do these things because they are flawed human beings."

The original writer felt that it was too hard to view non-white people as human beings. So she just gave up. She should be ashamed of her apathy, lack of compassion and intellectual laziness.

Speaking of depressing racial stuff, I had a comment this week from a local woman who came upon one of my adoption in Japan posts. I'm going to quote part of it:

From Autumn
My husband is Japanese third generation and we have 2 daughters one bio and the other adopted. [...] We also adopted from China recently after being turned down by the Ga Foster care system (we also live in the Atl area)to adopt a caucasian baby we fell in love with being fostered by a neighbor. Turns out my husband was the wrong color.

I went through a lot of turmoil about how my race would affect adoption, and I can really empathize with my commenter's position. It must have been hellish. And to my commenter: I'm glad you found my blog, I promise to keep writing, and please stick around and let us know if you start your own blog. So far I have faith in my agency (I'm not signed on directly with the GA foster care system).

To wrap up on a positive note, I saw a really gorgeous sunset tonight, all shades of gold, orange and mauve.

Gay Pride Post

Today is gay pride day, so I thought I'd post a great anecdote passed on from my stepfather.

I'll have to give some background. My stepfather grew up in a very poor family in a small town in East Texas. His father was a violent and manipulative alcoholic. When he was on a bender, my stepfather and his younger brother were often responsible for feeding the family; they would go out into the copperhead-infested swamp with rifles and kill game for dinner. At 15 he left home. He joined the Merchant Marines and later the Army, served out the Vietnam War as a medic in South Korea, then wandered for several decades.

Their family was involved in a high intensity brand of Charismatic Pentecostalism. They didn't have snake handling, but they did have exorcisms. They were very fond of casting out demons. The religion was one of the reasons my stepfather left home. The exorcisms really got to him.

The default demon was the demon of homosexuality. There was one young man in town who could be relied on for a good exorcism. Every week, he would confess to having homosexual thoughts. Then the preacher would cast out the demon. My stepfather explained that when this happened, the man would froth at the mouth and run around on all fours like a dog. And he kept coming back, and confessing, and getting exorcised, and frothing at the mouth, and running around on all fours like a dog, every week, for years. What an insane, terrifying, heart-breaking dysfunctional communal relationship. The other church-members weren't allowed to watch television, but I guess the exorcisms were better than television.

After a few decades of wandering, my stepfather came back one year to visit his family for Thanksgiving. While walking around town, he saw a man sitting in a convertible, looking very conspicuous in a fishnet shirt! It was the exorcised man! My stepfather ran up and said how glad he was to see him again... and how glad he was that they had both escaped. The man said he now lived in a gay neighborhood in Houston, and had made peace with his family and with himself.

From the depths of hatred to redemption and peace... it can happen.

Father's Day

My father went off to travel in China for a while. I wished him happy father's day yesterday.

"A stupid barbarian holiday, there is no such thing in Japan."

"Actually, I looked it up and there is a father's day in Japan."

"If it exists in Japan then it's stupid commercialized garbage."

"Well happy father's day anyway."

"Hmmph. Thanks."

I wished my stepfather happy father's day too. He appreciates it a lot, especially because he's never had any children.

The New South

I've been really slack about blogging. There's not that much going on right now, and I'm in a low-energy phase. As a reminder to myself, I need to finish that that long-suffering post on the Japanese foster care system, update my links and email expert reader Mom2Many with a description of my dog's social awkwardness with other dogs.

I just read a nice summary of Georgia's changing demographics at Creative Loafing, and it's worth quoting in full. Self-satisfied non-Southerners irritate me when they go on and on about our horrible primitive racist existence down here. Their condemnation ignores two huge points:

1. Believing that "southern culture" = "white Christian southern culture" erases the existence and historical contribution of a vast number of people.
2. We are probably more multicultural than you are.

Georgia’s changing demographics
June 15th, 2007 by tbarnes in Hot Off The Press

Georgia is on track to join an exclusive club, that of states with a majority population of racial minorities, according to the Afro-American Newspaper.

Only Hawaii, Texas, New Mexico, and California have majority-minority populations now. But, according to the paper, the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that by 2025, Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Arizona, and Nevada are also expected to have less than 50 percent of their population as white.

Whereas growing Latino populations account for most of the nonwhite population in majority-minority states, blacks will be the primary minority in Georgia. Blacks currently make up 29.8% of the state’s population, according to the 2005 census.

Atlanta is already majority-minority, with 68.7% of its population as nonwhite or Hispanic, the Brookings Institute’s analysis of the 2000 census shows. The city attracts minorities because of its strong, diverse economy and reputation for international business, Brookings demographer William Frey reported.

Conversation with an involved brother

I had a nice conversation this morning with someone about my age I know from church. I told him where our family was at, and he told me that when he was 9, his parents had adopted two children from foster care, biological brother and sister. As is usual, they had abuse issues. The aftermath of the abuse is still very much impeding the older sister's quality of life, but the younger brother is doing really well and recently graduated from college.

I told him that I felt like adopting from foster care is dominated by two myths: "all you need is love" and "no matter how hard you try, they're still going to burn your house and kill your pets". The truth is a lot more complicated. You just have to do your best and hope for the best. I feel lucky to have a realistic outline of what it's going to be like.

I have two cousins, one of whom I've written about before. She's one of the most competent people I've ever met in my life. My other cousin has ADHD, and a huge amount of talent he tends to waste in doing incredibly boneheaded things. I don't want to give any examples, but it's the kind of stuff that really makes you want to bang your head against the table.

I recently read an article that gave me a lot of hope for him, though. It said that many people with ADHD have brains that mature differently. They have unstable thought patterns until they hit their late 20s. Once a person with ADHD learns to properly tap their potential, they can shine like a star and shoot past "normal" people. So right now, my cousin is a young man living inside the emotional pattern of a fourteen-year-old, and he hasn't been able to get it together yet, but after five years or so, who knows.

If there's a point to any of this, I guess it's that there are no guarantees in life.

Two picnics

We went to two picnics today, a foster-care-related event and a neighborhood event. I just want to note that I'm proud of my little dog. He's so great around children! He's calm, quiet and lets them pet him very happily.

If we could only convince him to get along with other dogs. He turns into an instant Mussolini in any canine social situation, barking at much larger dogs and working himself into a neurotic frenzy if they don't obey his incomprehensible instructions.

My theory of bad internet behavior

I lurk on several forums and post actively on a few. I have a theory that the dynamics of many internet communities are heavily influenced by their sex balance.

Men and women think differently, but not radically so. Most of this is social and some of it is chemical. I think of male and female style of thinking as two overlapping circles. It's not too hard to go back and forth between the two circles... if a woman starts taking testosterone shots, for example, she'll move way over on the male side. I really dislike the "Men are from Mars" stuff that uses evolutionary psychology to justify vast differences between men and women. I think the reason behind the difference is fairly simple: upbringing (social and cultural factors) plus a little bit of chemistry (hormones).

When people behave badly on the internet they behave badly in different ways, depending on whether the community is dominant male or female. Male communities love rank and hierarchy. There are a few alpha males that establish dominance. The community tries to develop a stable hierarchy in which everyone knows their place. But if the hierarchy doesn't come together or isn't stable, conflict develops over the alpha position. Men start to wave their penises around via their keyboard. A frustrated alpha contender finds out they're outclassed, and decides to be a lone wolf instead of accepting a follower role.

Female communities consolidate according to a group identity. Multiple groups form, and even though each group is actually clustered around a few strong personalities, they invoke the idea of equality to maintain cohesion. Within the group, consensus, lack of competition and a feeling of togetherness and support is upheld; the success of one (in outside competition) is the success of all. If one member of the group feels attacked, the rest of the group launches a counterattack. The community works toward integrating all the different groups and becoming one big group. However, conflict is inevitable as subgroups battle each other.

Let's say two people have a disagreement. In a male community, the man will be able to shrug off an attack, regard their feelings about the message as irrelevant to the message itself, and perceive it as a disagreement, not an insult. They won't personalize it... as long as they are secure in their position in the hierarchy. In a female community, the woman will tend to personalize it more. She will feel attacked, and her group will leap to her defense, sparking off a much wider conflict. However, when conflicts develop, men are usually the blinder followers. Women question the hierarchy more; they realize gradations in between blind obedience and outright rebellion.

Adoption forums are usually 95-100% female! I also post at an adoption-unrelated forum (the Fighting 44s) that's more like 70-85% male. While superficially scarier, and much more R-rated, I think the Fighting 44s actually has less serious conflict than the main adoption forum I post at.

I don't think people are doomed to fall into negative sex-related behavior. It's not something that rules us completely, it's more like a magnet pulling us in a certain direction.

A healthy community has a complex environment where both kinds of organization -- hierarchies and groups -- coexist in a flexible way. Hierarchies are the best way to satisfy a desire for competition and debate. Groups are the best way to satisfy a desire for mutual support and consensus.

Murderer Probably Caught

It looks like my husband's friend's murderer has probably been caught.

My husband had been pessimistic about the chances, but I told him the guy was almost certainly going to get caught. Criminals like that are usually amazingly stupid. It was obvious he was low on the food chain to be doing such a petty mugging and carrying it off so badly. He told someone, and they tipped the police, I bet.

I've been through this before when I was on the outskirts of a serial murder case in college... but the inevitable revenge fantasies really, really bother me. I have no stomach for them. When grief over death turns into rage it just makes me want to put my hands over my ears. I don't wish a horrible death on the murderer, or prolonged suffering. I just hope he's prevented from harming anyone else, ever again. There's one less idiot with a gun and a hair trigger wandering the streets.

Transracial Adoption Essay

This is such a neat, cover-all-the-bases essay that I decided to make a quick link post for it.

From The Transracial Korean Adoptee Nexus blog: My Sister’s Adoption Essay

Loyalty

The concept of loyalty has been swirling around in my head lately.

Loyalty or allegiance is not a prominent part of the modern American psychic landscape. It's too connected to old or alien ways, feudal kings and queens, primitive tribes.

I free-associated the word. It connects with solidarity. But solidarity implies more of an idea of equals working together. There's the possibility of power inequality in loyalty. Dogs are the paragon of loyalty. Parents are not loyal to their children. Brothers and sisters are loyal to each other. You're supposed to be loyal to your friends, but not to your parents. Unless you're in a divorce custody case or family feud. Then, you might have "divided loyalties". When it comes to families, loyalty, as long as the family holds together, is absent, or hidden and unspoken.

This helps me puzzle out the way my father thought of his adoption. He has so little connection with any family left. I don't talk about it much, but I miss that feeling of family. My only connection to Japan is through him. Because of a series of events that was triggered before I was born, I have a half-brother that I have never met, and a half-sister I haven't talked to in more than 15 years.

He calls his adoptive parents "stepparents", never talks of them, and has only told me a few bare details about his biological mother and father. But his loyalty lies near his adoptive home, in the mountains west of Tokyo. It's an attachment to place, to clan, to a name, to the spirits of the earth and water. It's not an attachment to people.

More than a hundred years ago, an order came down that everyone (even peasants!), must have a last name. This was part of a sweeping modernization movement. It made a lot of sense. My father's adoptive ancestor went to the records official, who asked him where he lived. When he told them, they wrote that down and it became his last name.

I get a headache thinking about this stuff. It's like I'm wearing a pair of glasses. In one lens, I look at a world where everyone is a separately formed individual moving around in search of love and belonging while trying to be rational. In the other lens, I see half-formed people sprouting from seemingly random webs, sometimes trying desperately to disentangle themselves, with the webs constantly being ripped apart by invisible forces and woven back together again.

I'm not a huge cultural relativist; I believe all humans are basically the same, but they tend to see their worlds in very different ways.

The Man with the Thing in his Pants

Ever since moving to Atlanta more than ten years ago, I have wondered about the strange man who stands at the corner of Ponce and Briarcliff with the thing in his bike shorts.

Everyone who lives in, works in or travels through eastern intown Atlanta has seen this man and has the same question: "Is that thing real?"

I just found a video about him. This is not a mockumentary. He is really one of our best-known local characters.

There's no nudity in the videos (and thank goodness for that). In terms of dialogue, Part I is PG-13 and Part II has a few R-rated bits.

Mr. Understood: The Willy Terry Story Part 1


Mr. Understood: The Willy Terry Story Part 2

The End of May

In an attempt to climb out of blogging doldrums, I'm posting two links here to commemorate the end of National Foster Care Month, and the end of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

Thought Leader Forum on Disproportionality: This is a very interesting link that someone just left in my comments. it's to a forum exploring issues in racial disproportionality in foster care. I will be going through it and listening to some of the sound clips soon. Here's one that I'm going to find especially interesting, as it touches on a local Atlanta issue: "Ray Torres, executive director of Casey Family Services, explores the impact of disproportionality on Hispanic foster children, as well as the urgent need for Hispanic foster parents to improve outcomes for these children".

Fallout Central: Along with the OCA, Fallout Central organized a swift, powerful and effective defense against recent racist attacks by DJs JV & Elvis. Their show was taken off the air. Yay for victory!

In personal news, things are moving pretty slowly. My husband and I have decided on a lifestyle change that is going to improve our home life while also preparing for the arrival of kids. We'd been getting into a habit of internet surfing at night. From now on once I get home from work, no more internet. We'll be doing more reading together on weekday nights. I know, it sounds like one solitary activity replacing the other, but we both think reading together is much more involving.

I finally finished Stephen Saylor's book, Roma, and I was not terribly impressed with it. I love, love, love his Gordianus the Finder mystery series, and this book was also all about Roman history, but organized as a James Michener-type multigenerational historic novel. Saylor is a great writer but this particular genre is not a good fit for him. Historical fiction and science fiction face exactly the same problem of how to impart background information to the reader. There are many potential solutions, and sometimes nakedly artificial ones are better than forced natural ones. In the detective format, background information comes along naturally as the detective follows the clues. But in Roma, there were way too many passages like this:

"Hello my friend Tortuous Prosus Historicus, what a coincidence running into you at this significant geographic location on the anniversary of an important event that happened fifty years ago to an ancestor of mine."

"Nice to see you too, Expositor Pompus Maximus. You know, a strange fit of amnesia came over me, and I seem to have forgotten all the important political and cultural events of the last fifty years, by Jupiter, so could you go ahead and give me a recap?"

Oh boy do I hate that stuff, but once I skimmed through those passages the rest of the book was not too bad. I do highly recommend his detective series, starting with Roman Blood.

He didn't make it

RIP.

A week later, victim of L5P shooting dies of injuries

Living with Gun Crime

I have some more depressing local news to report. A friend of my husband's was shot in the head late last night and is currently in critical condition. Here is the news brief.

It was a failed mugging. These happen a lot. A friend of mine was shot in the chest near that same corner (he's fine now).

I hate this kind of bullshit, I hate loser thugs who think a gun makes them big men, and I hate guns!

My husband is terribly upset, and we're really hoping his friend makes it through.

I have never experienced gun violence directly, thank goodness, but living in this kind of society means that it's a constant low-grade presence. I feel safe, but I have to make a lot of concessions to feel safe. It would be nice to live somewhere like Japan where you can walk down the street late at night without worrying that some random person will randomly murder you.

Personal Update

I'm still working up to that foster care in Japan post.

In adoption news, our homestudy has officially been state approved. We're now sending off inquiries at the rate of two a day. Some of them we have to take off the list pretty quickly. For example, there was a sibling group legal risk placement that we had to back out on because it turns out we're only licensed for legal risk placements in our own state. So far our caseworker has been very responsive and the process is slightly less painful than I thought it would be.

In local news, right now the whole city of Atlanta is like a giant nasty smoke-filled bar. Visibility is very low. I blame anti-environmentalist peckerheads.

The State of Georgia's own policies—or lack of policies—may be partially to blame for the past month's destruction of a quarter-million acres by wildfires in the southeastern part of the state. At least one prominent naturalist has suggested that the state has historically failed to properly manage the area's vast tracts of timberland.

[...]

Absolutely Horrifying Foster Abuse in South Dakota

I've been putting together a positive post about a Japanese organization promoting foster care. I happened to stumble across this abuse story in the meanwhile. I think it might pick up a lot of notoriety soon.

I have never heard of such cold and cerebral violation. I hope the abuser goes to jail for the rest of his disgusting life.

How can we give good foster parents the support they need, keep them from burning out, and keep the bad ones from being foster parents in the first place? It would make sense, if we aligned our national budget with better priorities, to pay foster parents a $30,000 base salary with frequent raises for experience, additional training and degrees in child development and special education. Then raise the bar like crazy. Perhaps an extended pre-licensing-approval period including a psychological exam?

Someone like Klaudt who becomes a foster parent so they can violate the most vulnerable children... this should never, ever be allowed to happen.

05/18/2007
Former SD Legislator Arrested On Sex Charges

A former South Dakota lawmaker is accused of molesting his own foster children and legislative pages.

Ted Klaudt, 49, a Republican rancher from Walker, faces a long list of charges: eight counts of rape, two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, two counts of witness tampering, sexual contact with a person under 16, and stalking.

Court documents mention five possible victims. Three were foster children between the ages of 15 and 19 who lived with Klaudt's family. One is a cousin of one of those girls, and the fifth is a friend of Klaudt's daughter.

In the most disturbing accusation, the girls say Klaudt had them convinced they could earn up to $20,000 by donating their eggs to a fertility clinic. And even though he has no medical training, the girls say Klaudt did all the supposed "exams" and "procedures" himself.

Former State Representative Ted Klaudt is accused of manipulating, molesting, intimidating and threatening teenage girls who the state of South Dakota paid him to raise.

[...]

Another complaint, this time against Lou Dobbs

Left at CNN.com via this form:

I am writing regarding your news personality Lou Dobbs to complain about his racist insults against Latinos. I received an email from the Southern Poverty Law Center with some shocking information which I am quoting below:

"Despite being confronted with undisputed evidence to the contrary, Mr. Dobbs says he stands '100 percent behind' the claim that there have been 7,000 new cases of leprosy in the U.S. in recent years. What's more, he has attributed part of the increase to 'unscreened illegal immigrants.'

The truth, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is that new leprosy cases peaked in 1985 at 361 and have declined since, even as the number of undocumented immigrants has increased. The source for Dobbs' outrageous leprosy claim is an anti-immigration zealot who once publicly stated that 'most' Latino immigrant men 'molest girls under 12, although some specialize in boys, and some in nuns."

This email was quite alarming to me, because here I was thinking I lived in the 21st century. What's next? Will Dobbs accuse Latinos of spreading the bubonic plague and poisoning our water supply? Stealing babies and mutilating cattle? Perhaps his next plan is to for America to gather them up and burn them at the stake! I cannot believe a modern news channel is supporting this superstitious claptrap.

Until the hate-spewing Mr. Dobbs is taken off your channel, I will not watch it anymore, and will let others know the news contained therein is simply not trustworthy.

Study on Racial Disproportionality in Foster Care

Although there isn't a lot of actual news in this article, it's a great introduction to a very complicated subject. It's going to be interesting to see what the upcoming study says.

I believe there is a lot of systemic racism feeding into this issue. This doesn't mean that white social workers are all running around grabbing black babies. In fact, almost all the social workers I meet are black, but I'd be willing to bet that there is still major disproportionality in Atlanta counties. It's a systemic problem, and the solution is going to take a huge amount of collective work.

Report on Reasons Behind Disproportionate Number of Blacks in Foster Care Due Next Month
Date: Wednesday, May 16, 2007
By: Jackie Jones, BlackAmericaWeb.com

A long awaited investigation into the causes behind the disproportionate representation of blacks and other children of color in the foster care system is scheduled to be released in late June, according to the Government Accountability Office, which is conducting the probe.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) asked the GAO in September 2005 to investigate the causes of disproportionate placement and to recommend solutions following a report from the Congressional Research Office, which showed that black and American Indian children were about twice as likely to be among the children entering the foster care system than their overall presence in the general population.

According to that report, theories about racial disproportion in the child welfare system suggest that children of color are more likely to be poor or from single parent homes, which are considered risk factors for maltreatment; that they come into contact more often with social services officials who are likely to report such mistreatment; that biased assumptions likely spur social service employees to report children of color to child protective services, and that children of color have less access to preventive services or conditions that promote permanent placement.

However, the National Incidence Survey, which collects data to measure the mistreatment of children, including incidents not reported to Child Protective Services, have consistently found no link between race and the incident of maltreatment in the general population. National studies show there is no significant difference across racial lines for the number of children who are subjected to abuse and neglect.

[...]

Asian-Pacific Heritage Month PSA

Here's a PSA to get this blog back into a good mood. Go Beau Sia!

No More Entourage (it sucks now, anyways)

I sent a message via this form in response to an episode of Entourage I saw last night after the Sopranos.

Do the writers of the show realize that May is Asian-American heritage month? The last thing I want to see is another example of Asians treated as sex objects servicing their white masters.

I used to enjoy watching Entourage but I have grown increasingly disgusted with the treatment of Asians on the show. Lance's character seemed promising, but the only show on which his character really mattered was one where he was a prostituted sex object. And now the massage parlor episode...

I will not watch this show anymore.

NY Times article on a special needs adoption from China

There was an account in the New York Times today about a mother adopting from China. The child, presumed healthy, was in fact very ill, and after their first meeting, the diagnosis was made that the child would probably be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of her life. The response is a heartwarming counterpoint to the depressing case I wrote about a few weeks ago.

My First Lesson in Motherhood

[...]

“In cases like these, we can make a rematch with another baby,” the one in charge said. The rest of the process would be expedited, and we would go home on schedule. We would simply leave with a different girl.

Months before, we had been presented with forms asking which disabilities would be acceptable in a prospective adoptee — what, in other words, did we think we could handle: H.I.V., hepatitis, blindness? We checked off a few mild problems that we knew could be swiftly corrected with proper medical care. As Matt had written on our application: “This will be our first child, and we feel we would need more experience to handle anything more serious.”

Now we faced surgeries, wheelchairs, colostomy bags. I envisioned our home in San Diego with ramps leading to the doors. I saw our lives as being utterly devoted to her care. How would we ever manage?

Yet how could we leave her? Had I given birth to a child with these conditions, I wouldn’t have left her in the hospital. Though a friend would later say, “Well, that’s different,” it wasn’t to me.

I pictured myself boarding the plane with some faceless replacement child and then explaining to friends and family that she wasn’t Natalie, that we had left Natalie in China because she was too damaged, that the deal had been a healthy baby and she wasn’t.

How would I face myself? How would I ever forget? I would always wonder what happened to Natalie.

I knew this was my test, my life’s worth distilled into a moment. I was shaking my head “No” before they finished explaining. We didn’t want another baby, I told them. We wanted our baby, the one sleeping right over there. “She’s our daughter,” I said. “We love her.”

Matt, who had been sitting on the bed, lifted his glasses, and, wiping the tears from his eyes, nodded in agreement.

[...]

The ending lines could have been written directly to me. Nothing is ever sure. We have to hope for strength.

We would not have chosen the burdens we anticipated, and in fact we declared upfront our inability to handle such burdens. But we are stronger than we thought.

Mother's Day Post

I had originally thought of a long post for the occasion but I just don't have the time. I'm installing a content management system for my mother's website. Not the most sentimental present, but I think it will be much appreciated.

I don't talk about my mother very much on this blog, probably because I have very little to complain about. I mean, I love my dad, but he's nuts. My mother is just an all-around superwoman and her accomplishments are amazing. I'm fortunate to have had a very close relationship with her for 100% of my life.

I'm also giving a donation on her behalf to a great organization called MADRE that advocates for women and families all over the world.

Fugees Soccer in Clarkston

As I mentioned in a post a while back, my mother has done some work tutoring refugee children. She got my husband to start doing it as well. He's been assigned to a boy in the 6th grade who also happens to be on the famous Fugees soccer team!

Here's an interview with their coach.

Here's their website.

These kids are doing great, but they still face a lot of hardship. Life is not suddenly all sunshine and roses now that they're in the US. Many of their families are dealing with PTSD on top of poverty.

I'm proud of my husband. He loves tutoring and has really gotten worked up about the positive male parenting stuff he learned at the conference last month. The volunteer manager is so happy to get a rare male tutor into the program.

Matching Meeting

Our matching meeting was reassuring. A lot of the stuff I knew already, but having our worker repeat it to us in a calm voice made a huge difference.

I now have a list of 30 children from photolistings, and some of them are two-brother and two-sister groups. Our worker explained that she'll send of inquiries and phone messages on all of them. Maybe a third of the caseworkers will get back to her. Often, the listings are out of date. She reminded us that diagnoses and need levels can be unreliable. An unscrupulous foster parent might be exaggerating the need level in order to get a higher state subsidy. Yikes! Conversely, a caseworker or foster parent may be downplaying the significance of certain issues for various reasons. She encouraged us to have her inquire on any child that fit our parameters even remotely.

I've heard stories of people sending off inquiries for hundreds of photolistings before getting back one response that the child's caseworker might be interested in them as a possible placement.

Age: 0-7. Almost all the children on our list are 4-7. Because we're not a medically qualified home, no serious physical disabilities. It's so sad how many of the kids are in wheelchairs or need to be fed through tubes. We don't know sign language or have any experience with severe visual impairment. No mental retardation, or other conditions that would mean the child would only be able to live independently with great difficulty. No FAS or full-blown RAD, or severe psychiatric disorders. Mild to moderate needs for pretty much everything else is fine. We feel especially confident about speech disorders and learning disabilities. We understand many children will have ADHD or ADHD-like behavior (this is a whole other topic I want to write a lot about later, because we have some pretty intense ADHD genes in one branch of our family), attachment issues, grief and loss, massive emotional trauma, tantrumming, etc., and we're doing as much training as possible on the issues we think we can handle. Many of our parameters have an easy justification: children with higher level needs usually need a full-time stay-at-home parent and will say that in their listings.

Applying these parameters still gives me a nasty feeling, like I'm cherry-picking... arggh. That's all I can say. I used to work with mentally handicapped children a long time ago and I especially feel bad about passing over them. They are wonderful. If I had a biological child like some of those children I worked with, I would be fully committed from the beginning... but I feel like I just couldn't dive into the middle.

The ten-year-old is back on our list, though. Our worker encouraged us to put him back in, and my husband and I leaped at the chance.

We had dinner with my parents tonight, and my stepfather asked me when I was going to bring home his fishing buddy! I tried to explain the intricacies of the coming matching stage. Damn, it's going to be tough.

Next week, we're going to another training seminar on transracial adoption. I can't wait to see what the audience demographic is going to be.

Weekend Update

I've been down in the dumps lately. A lot of little projects and long-term goals I have just don't seem to be going well... or going at all.

One major trigger is that I'm not doing ESL this semester. I'd dropped out of the teacher pool in advance in order to be around more for my father. Now that he's long since returned to independence and Japan, I really need to get back into it, or else pick up another volunteer teaching position. That would improve my mood enormously.

On Monday, we're having a matching meeting. We'll get to read through our homestudy and discuss the matching process. Our homestudy approval has been delayed for two annoying reasons: my husband's fingerprints were smudged on the criminal background check paperwork and had to be redone, and my drug test results weren't entered correctly by the lab company. Both of these got fixed quickly and we're now on the record as Mrs. Fresh and Mr. Clean. Amazingly, my husband's teenage mushroom enterprise failed to materialize in the background check. It must have been too old and too trifling. We still have a statement about it in the application, though.

I've sent our caseworker some photolistings I've been looking at. I ran them past my husband and we had to drop one off, which was very sad. I am sure we'll have many such difficult decisions in this coming stage. The boy was above our age range, at 10 years old. There was something about him that we would have been uniquely qualified for, but he also had a serious diagnosis of something that we're not very qualified for.

My husband pointed out that when the boy hit the difficult age of 12-13 he would have been with us for only a couple years, and the situation might get out of our control. That was something I'd never thought about, but it makes sense to me. I realized I might feel more secure parenting a kid on the other side of puberty, say 15 to 17.

It's terrifying jumping into this kind of stuff as new parents, knowing so little about the children who'll be coming to you.

I've heard that the first three years are crucial in childhood development. I've also heard conflicting ideas. "Raising a little kid is easy, just keep them warm and fed and hug them. The hard part is when they get older and start asking tough questions and going through identity crises."

My mother just tells me I was a perfect kid and being a mom was always like a walk in the park. It's nice to hear, but not especially helpful when it comes to triage and thinking of all the stuff that could go wrong.

I think we'll stick with the range of 0-7. In realistic terms this will probably translate to a 4-7 range, unless a foster-to-adopt situation comes up.

Housing Aid for Parents Adopting from the Foster Care System

I was recently made aware of this program because an adoptive mother on another forum recently bought her house this way. It's too bad that only New Jersey and a few other states have programs like this.

There are very strict rules about the pre-adoptive period when adopting from foster care. I've written about this before, but in Georgia, siblings are not allowed to share a bedroom past the age of three if they are of opposite sexes.

I can only imagine the hardship this causes in very high-density urban places. Let's say you have adopted a boy from the foster care system. The boy has two sisters, and a year later they also end up in the foster care system. The parent really wants to keep the family together, but they don't happen to have an extra bedroom in their small apartment. If they don't adopt the sisters, they could end up in an adoptive home several states away, or even a group home if they're older.

The parent could make do for a while. Perhaps they could screen off part of the living room and set up a sofabed. They'll work hard and in a year they'll be able to get a bigger place. Families make do like this all the time. It's not ideal but it's not terrible. However, pre-adoptive rules may disallow this kind of arrangement.

It would be almost impossible for a moderate income person living in an urban area to adopt some of the available sibling groups. Groups of five, six, seven kids... they deserve to stay together, but how? They get split up, or else stay together, but shuttled back and forth among the few foster families who have a really big house.

There's a great need for these kinds of programs.

Commissioner Levin Relaunches Program to Benefit At-Risk Youth

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The expanded Home Ownership for Permanency Project (HOPP) was created by DCA and HMFA to help children placed in foster care due to the loss of one or both parents, abandonment, abuse or neglect. The program benefits children who are available for adoption but are unable to be placed due to a prospective family’s lack of adequate and affordable housing.

"HOPP gives families with poor credit the ability to make needed home improvements that will allow them to adopt or become legal guardians through the Division of Youth and Family Services or a state-licensed adoption agency," Commissioner Levin added. "Through the program, we can encourage adoption that would otherwise not be possible, allowing families to remain together and creating permanent homes for at-risk and special needs children."

HOPP is available to individuals and families who have made a commitment to adopt a child or children, and grandparents or relative caregivers who have legal guardianship. Eligible participants receive services such as below market-rate first mortgages, second mortgages for home improvements to accommodate the needs of adoptive children, and refinancing of first mortgages.

HOPP was created through a partnership with DCA, HMFA, the New Jersey Department of Human Services, the Division of Youth and Family Services, and the Catastrophic Illness in Children Relief Fund Commission.

"Together, we are lending a helping hand to adoptive or foster families by offering them financing to provide good homes for children in need," Commissioner Levin said. "This not only ensures the affordability of housing and rehabilitates homes for the state’s hardworking families – it rehabilitates the lives of children who are desperately in need of families that can love and care for them."