There are no black people in Argentina

On this last day of Black History Month, I really couldn't think of a good U.S. topic I could write on that hasn't already been covered extensively. Instead, I'm going to point out a little-known international black history topic: what happened to black people in Argentina.

The title of my post is intentionally misleading, because there are definitely black people in Argentina! There just aren't that many of them. The Argentinian national identity is very European, and much more defined and crisp around the edges than is usual for an American country.

Like the U.S., the modern nation of Argentina established living room through ethnic cleansing and genocide of indigenous inhabitants, then combined different streams of immigrants to form a conglomerate identity. The difference is that there was a second wave of ethnic cleansing in the late 19th century that got rid of the large black population in the north of the country. Formerly, black people in Argentina had played a major economic and cultural role. The tango, for example, has roots in Africa.

From a review of the documentary "Afroargentinos"
Carlos Menem, whose ten-year tenure as Argentina's president ended in 1999 just before his macroeconomic policies led to the collapse of the economy, was asked, during a tour of the United States, about whether Argentina had any citizens of African descent. He responded, "No, we have no blacks. Brazil has that problem."

Something happened. No one is quite sure exactly what. The official version is that the black people just drifted off during a long war. This is wrong: there was a concerted effort to remove them, sponsored in large part by statesman Domingo Sarmiento. But exactly how they were removed is in doubt. Were they concentrated in quarantine areas without medicine and left to die during epidemics? Or simply taken from their homes, pushed over the border into Brazil and Uruguay and told never to come back?

Some of them remained. Here's part of an interview with Fidel Nadal, former frontman of the Argentinian rock band Todos Tus Muertos. I'm sure not all Afroargentinos have taken his path: the complete rejection of national identity in favor of a transnational one. But these are the very raw words of someone who refuses to accept the official story.

From a 1998 interview (my typical clunky translation)

It happened I was born in Argentina, but I'm black and my nationality is African. My ancestors came from Africa in an illegal way, kidnapped, robbed, into slavery. If I said that I am Argentinian I would be accepting that illegal fact. And I don't accept it. They kidnapped us, they mistreated us, and we still built their cities and gave them love in exchange for mistreatment. Also, when any person of the world sees me, they don't believe me when I say I'm Argentinian. Once, in Peru, someone wanted to beat me up. "You're Argentinean. I was in Argentina and there are no black people. Why are you lying to me?". There, you realize that no matter that I've been born in Argentina, my nationality always is going to be Africa, because any person that sees me on the street says: "That black man, where is he from?". In Africa, when they see a black man they don't ask where he's from, because that's his house. But if you went to Africa, they would ask you, "Where are you from, white man?" Black people aren't born from here, we come from Africa. It's natural. And it's natural for Europeans that a rasta speaks of rastafarianism. They're surprised when I tell them that I was born in Argentina. They ask me: "Where are you from?" And I say: "I'm of Africa, but I was born in Argentina. How?" And I explain this same thing that I'm saying to you now. And they have to accept it. I don't come from the family of the ambassador of the Congo in Argentina. No. My family went through five generations in slavery, making the streets, nursing children, fighting in the English invasions, forming what now is known as Argentina. If you don't know where you come from, how do you know who you are and where you're going? One thing is your original culture, and another one is imposed culture. You'll say: if you're of Africa and you think that it's that way, why don't you go there? I'll tell you something: I go to Africa, but who pays me for all of that? Imagine it, I go over there and they start off: "Ahg, ug" and I say "Hey, what's up". "But what: you don't know how to speak? What did you come here to do? What's your family, what's your last name? And me: "I don't know. Nadal". "But that's not an African name." "No, because it's the last name of the family that enslaved me and made me take their name." "But that makes you like a dog, not a human being, they’ll say to me... You don't know your name, your last name, your language. You have nothing, neither home, nor family. The richest part of a man is his culture. But you're a stranger in your own land. And neither are you from here. You're seen as different because you are different. You're black. Although you dye your hair blonde and put on contact lenses, they're always going to shout at you from a truck: "Hey, black man, what are you doing." I always knew that I was black; let's say, since I was a little boy. When you went to school, you didn't say: "Eh, I came there as white." But they say to you all of a sudden: "Black!" and, above all, it's to insult you. It's crazy. Just like when I was a boy my father spoke to me of Malcolm X, Lumumba, leaders of Africa. And I hooked up with reggae because I looked at the album covers and said: "How I look like this type; my hair grows like that." Sure, I lived in Almagro, but we were links on the same chain. And there was something familiar in that, as if I'd heard it before...

More links:

• OFFOFFOFF review of the documentary "Afroargentinos" (English)
  
• Argenpress: EL GENOCIDIO NEGRO EN LA ARGENTINA (Spanish) Article about socialist and democratic afroargentinians.
  
• AfroamericaXXI page on Argentina (Spanish)
  
• Clarín.com: Los afroargentinos: una historia de negación (Spanish)
  
• Todos Tus Muertos (English)
  
• Todos Tus Muertos (Spanish)
  
  
  
  

Transracial Adoption Article and Video

Time for something a bit more on topic. I read about this last week at the Harlow's Monkey blog. I thought it was fantastic coverage of the issue. It's a short 10-minute video with some very moving interviews: two transracial adoptees and one adoptive parent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekMZw_mP-Xc

Here's the linked magazine article:

http://www.colorsnw.com/index.html

White Rapper Show

Another disclaimer/excuse... I hardly ever watch reality TV, but I've been following the VH1 White Rapper competition show semi-religiously. I just saw the finale and local boy $hamrock won it! I just have one word:

DUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRTEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

Letters from Iwo Jima

We went to a Sunday matinee. Dad and I missed the first few minutes of the movie. I left after an hour, before characters started dying en masse, and ran some errands and came back just after it ended to pick up Dad. I really wanted to see the movie, but I didn't want a repeat performance of several weeks ago, when I cried through the last half hour of Pan's Labyrinth. People who know me never peg me as sentimental and are amazed when I tell them I often cry at movies.

Dad liked the movie. His only complaint was that anachronistic language was sometimes used to describe the military equipment. He blamed this on both "Japanese-Americans" and "Japanese who are too young and don't know anything".

I'll see the movie later when it comes out on DVD. The first hour looked very good.

Mexico's Migrant Mountain

I just read this article from the BBC.

My only reaction: one of the distinctive hallmarks of Mexican culture is the sophistication, sheer biting force and prevalence of black humor. Irish and Russian are other cultures known for black humor, but as far as I know, Mexicans take the prize.

From the BBC

Millions of migrants have crossed illegally from Mexico into the United States. Their experience could hardly be more real. But now at a controversial theme park in Mexico, tourists can pretend to be an illegal migrant.

Weekend Update

We've been going over to my mother and stepfather's house every few days to have dinner. They have a much bigger house to the east of Atlanta that they bought just last year. They moved out to Atlanta from the Seattle area to be closer to us, which is awesome.

The problem with their house is that it's not very handicapped-friendly. To get to the living area, you have to climb some fairly steep wooden stairs. In back, there's enough of a grade to the ground that there are only a few feet of stairs to climb. We've been helping my dad to use crutches to walk around back and then up the short stairs, then transfering to his knee roller.

On Thursday night, we were leaving from a dinner. My dad made it almost all the way to the car on his crutches, but a two-inch rise to the concrete driveway caught him. His face had a short and unhappy encounter with the driveway. It was horrible and I felt bad for not walking closer and catching him in time. He got overconfident and was just moving too fast. Thankfully there's no major damage at all. He has a black eye, a fat lip and a few scrapes on his knuckles. This is our first accident and I hope the last one. He has started referring to my mom's house as "the death trap". Crutches are just no damn good.

Today I spent most of the day with my husband, my mom, my stepdad and a Mexican family doing massive topsoil stuff in mom's garden. The house they bought has awful plastic landscaping sheets in the front yard that need to be removed.

Tomorrow I'll be going to church with my mom, then we'll all go see Letters From Iwo Jima, which my dad expressed an interest in.

Yes, my life does revolve totally around my family. It can be a little bit oppressive at times, but they're all interesting people, on the whole their support is great and I think I'm incredibly lucky for having them. I'm also looking forward to having children so I can leave them with the relatives and run off every once in a while!

My Reaction to the Anna Mae He Case

I'm not going to sum up this case here, because readers will probably be familiar with it already. Here's a link to the Wikipedia entry for Anna Mae He just in case. Here's another recent link that goes more into legal detail.

I've resisted commenting on it because I don't really have anything new to say, plus the more I learn about it, the more depressed I get. It was so obvious that Anna Mae should have been returned to her parents. I'm glad it's finally happened; sad it took eight years because of a racist judge in the beginning stages. The Bakers are no better than baby thieves. There are many children out there that truly need homes; instead, the Bakers decided to trick some desperate people out of their child. They tried to wash the Chinese out of her. Eight years later, and they're still acting like bandits. Here are some quotes from news stories that illustrate their disgusting nature:

laborlawtalk.com:
Mrs. He said her daughter had shown her the picture during a court-ordered visit last fall, and that she had later found it in her purse and shown it to a television reporter. She was concerned that while in the Bakers' home, her daughter's hair had been dyed and her ears pierced, contrary to Chinese custom.

Why on earth would you dye a toddler's hair? Especially Asian hair, which is very hard to dye and always has to be bleached first? Because they wanted her to look more white, I presume.

commercialappeal.com:
Anna's seen the Hes twice that she can remember, once at Wal-Mart and most recently at the park. Anna didn't want to talk to them, didn't want to know them.

She doesn't want to learn to speak Chinese. She wants to learn Spanish.

Louise had a piece of art made with Anna's name in Chinese letters.

Anna told her to take it down.

"She doesn't want any part of it," said Jerry. "We haven't made her listen. Now we have to."

commercialappeal.com :
Person expressed his displeasure with stories, photos and video of Anna Mae at the Bakers' home published and aired Wednesday by USA Today and ABC-TV's "Good Morning America."

In the newspaper article, Jerry Baker asks her where she wants to grow up, the United States or China. Anna replies, "United States." In the "Good Morning America" video report, Anna Mae is shown wearing a sombrero and declaring she is Mexican, not Chinese.

Person did not ban attorneys and their clients from talking with the media, but the judge did not rule out issuing a gag order if such reports continue, said Larry Scroggs, chief counsel for Juvenile Court.

The Bakers lost their case. They should be working together with the Hes to make Anna Mae's transition to her parents as smooth as possible. Instead, they're putting her on the media stage like a trained monkey. The Bakers really think videos where she denies being Chinese is really going to help their cause? Imagine the shame when she sees those later when she's older. This is what really tipped me over the edge, because I hate to take emotional sides on high-profile custody cases. I resist because I know I probably don't know the full story. But this one is so easy to call.

The Bakers were given Anna Mae to be temporary guardians to her, by a desperate couple that trusted them as fellow Christians. They abused that trust. They harmed a few people very intensely, but have also caused harmful embarassment to other large groups: white people, Christians, foster parents, adoptive parents. I hope someday they'll realize how badly they acted, and start trying to make up for it. I have at least that much faith in their humanity.

Race, Demographics and Decatur: Part I

Since most of my blog readers are not from the ATL, in this post I'll try to outline some of the demographic and racial factors of my surrounding neighborhood. This is such a huge topic I'm going to focus very narrowly on Decatur, and not even on all of Decatur.

Think of Atlanta as a circle divided into four quadrants. Decatur is in the lower part of the northeast quadrant. It's a confusing area, because it's officially an incorporated city but unoffically extends much further south into unincorporated Dekalb County.

Here's the racial breakdown on the city of Decatur from city-data.com:

• White Non-Hispanic (64.7%)
• Black (30.5%)
• Hispanic (1.7%)
• Two or more races (1.4%)
• American Indian (0.7%)
• Other race (0.6%)
  

The city of Decatur is within the Atlanta perimeter, so it counts as intown Atlanta. It's not really a "city" except in an administrative sense: it's a small downtown area with a couple square miles of shops, restaurants and apartment buildings, surrounded by a mostly residential area of small houses with yards. The downtown area is quite expensive. In the southernmost part there's a few blocks of low-income apartment housing which is almost all African-American. Otherwise, the area is sort of diverse but mostly white. There's a lot of diversity in other dimensions. Decatur is known as a lesbian hotspot. Property values are very high, and the Decatur city school district has some of the best schools in Atlanta.

South of downtown Decatur, property values start going down. Below the major thoroughfare of Memorial Drive, the neighborhoods are almost entirely African-American. For reference, see the corresponding data for Belvedere Park:

• Black (82.4%)
• White Non-Hispanic (12.1%)
• Hispanic (3.5%)
• Other race (1.7%)
• Two or more races (1.6%)
• American Indian (0.6%)

And then a little further south, Candler-McAfee:

• Black (95.2%)
• White Non-Hispanic (3.1%)
• Hispanic (0.9%)
• Two or more races (0.8%)
• American Indian (0.5%)

This is a low-income neighborhood and on the whole it's not very attractive. It's got the typical urban blight look: lots of cheap, shoddy buildings, mouldering strip malls, liquor stores and check cashing places everywhere on the main streets. This is the area that gets name-dropped in rap songs like this 2001 Ludacris hit:

With a mac, with a glock I'm a make 'em say please
In the back, on block so the cops they freeze
And I'm so high, I think I got a nose bleed, you gotta nose bleed?
Don't it smell so sweet?
In DECATUR, where they pack that heat
And ROB neighbors in the night creep, creep
I'll see you LATER we'll be in them streets...

Rappers tend to exaggerate, of course! The Candler-McAfee neighborhood is not inhabited solely by glock-flourishing, nose-bleeding home invaders. It's mostly working-class black families. It's not a nice neighborhood, or a pretty one, but the really, really bad neighborhoods are something else. For example, Vine City, to the west of the Atlanta center, and its legendary open-air drug market known as the Bluff. If you happen to be in that area without a good reason (which means either buying or selling drugs) you will get severely beaten or shot. That's where the police broke into the 88-year-old grandmother's house and she winged a few with her pistol but they shot her dead and then tried to plant drugs on her to cover up their mistake. That story made national news last year.

Leaving the larger Decatur area and moving to the east, outside the Atlanta perimeter, the middle- and upper-class black neighborhoods are found. Higher-income families moved there from the inner city, joined by massive numbers of African-Americans who sold their houses back in California and the North to buy ones twice as big for half the price in Atlanta. Atlanta is often called a "black mecca" and attracts many black artists of all mediums. Right now I doubt its overall national cultural influence approaches New York, but it's definitely climbing higher.

So Decatur as whole is very diverse, but also fairly segregated. In this respect it's kind of a microcosm of diverse, segregated Atlanta. New York, another city I've lived in, was much more integrated. On the other hand, I think Miami is even more diverse and more segregated than Atlanta.

The Decatur neighborhood where I live is majority white. The family to our left is a working-class black family renting their house, which is really too small for them. They had more space at their old apartment building about five blocks away, but said they didn't like the atmosphere: there were too many knuckleheads who did drugs in front of their kids. They are extremely moral people who belong to a confusing syncretic religion. The family to the right is an elderly white couple who have owned their house since time immemorial and have probably been through a ton of demographic shifts.

It's amazing how much repressed fear and guilt is involved in real estate decisions. A lot of times I hear people say things like "I could never live anywhere except the north of Atlanta" in a way that I know for sure is racially motivated. And not being white, I don't hear the worst of it.

Some white people, who are very racist and used to a binary race system, don't socially process me that well. I don't hang around these kinds of people, but I do come into contact with them a couple times a year when I leave the Atlanta perimeter. On several occasions I have heard words used like "nihcolored person" and "nihblack dude". I can see a switch go off in their head. She's not black? Switch turns on. Use N-word. Uh-oh. Not white either. Switch turns back off. Change word! Then cough, break eye contact, look towards the corner. Ugh, I hate being in those conversations, wondering whether to start the confrontation over only one syllable that I definitely would have started over the full two.

My mother, who is white and recently moved into an upper-middle class, majority (60-70%) African-American neighborhood to the east of Atlanta, gets some weird demographic questions from racist older white people in the neighborhood. One of them asked her if she'd noticed the neighborhood was getting "cloudy". It took her a while to figure that one out, because who associates black people with clouds? There are other white people who are just fine the way things are, and are staying around or even buying into the neighborhood, but the majority of new incomers are African-Americans from California, semi-retired (especially military) and professional.

The situation of schools in this area is another important topic. I'm calling this post Part I because I'm going to write a little bit about racial diversity and schools in Decatur when I get more time.

It seems like half the U.S. is moving to Atlanta! Readers, let me know if you have any more specific questions. This is not the absolute most wonderful place in the world or anything like that, but I have a lot of pride in it just because it's more tolerable than some other places I've lived. People are friendly and the weather is usually nice. I'll close with some words of wisdom from the Korea Times:

I might add that Atlanta is not an attractive town in terms of natural beauty or cultural quality. Atlanta, however, is one of the most important transportation hubs in the nation. There is a saying that even the dead will have to go through Atlanta before they reach heaven.

Doraemon and Keyword Searches

I have a free statcounter.com account and occasionally check what kind of keywords people use to find or stumble across my blog.

This isn't going to be one of those posts where I list all the weirdest and grossest keywords and phrases. I see these kinds of posts pop up regularly on the some of the more political blogs I like to read. Yes, there are definitely some really sick people on the internet. On the other hand, I have a feeling that the most disgusting keyword searches are often done by young kids. When kids are four years old, they think "what's going to happen if I yell PEEPEE POOPOO CACA?" But when they're 14, they wonder, "what's going to happen if I type *&^%THE %#!& IN THE *$*% AND @#^$ into Google and hit enter?"

I don't use any curse words or full forms of racial slurs on this blog, not because I'm totally against them in any context... I'd just rather not end up getting some unwelcome visitors. Otherwise I enjoy reading a lot of antiracist and feminist blogs where the language goes all over the place.

So my keyword searches aren't very shocking to me. Most of them are fairly predictable. I'm amazed that my pressure cooker collard green recipe still gets a fair amount of hits.

The only one that really freaked me out was a search for "racist Doraemon". It must have pulled up a page that had my one Doraemon post together with a different post about racism.

Doraemon is a wise, helpful and very sensitive cat. A friend to all.

How could he be a racist?!?!

Don't make Doraemon cry.

Weekend Update

Valentine's day was very nice. We double-dated with my mother and stepfather. Earlier, I broke the news to my husband that I'm thinking of moving back up to two children. He's worried because it could be a lot to handle at the same time, plus if we get a placement of siblings and then I happened to get pregnant, we'd be dealing with three.

Our house is just not big enough. Right now we have one small extra bedroom, the one my dad is staying in now. We're planning an addition, but it could take years.

I told him that we really have to look beyond the short-term into the long-term future.

Let's see how it goes. There are many factors in favor of siblings as well. He's going to think on it for a while.

On Thursday my husband had five hours of dental work. Then he went back on Friday and got another five hours. He has bad teeth from a combination of genetics, country living (unfluoridated well water) and a horrific motorcycle accident when he was 13. I don't trust the dentist and we're going to switch to another one as soon as he gets his bridge. I'm so happy my parents paid for all my orthodontics and dental work when I was a kid and I don't have to deal with the nightmare he's going through. At the end of it all, he should actually be able to smile with his mouth open.

He had a stomach problem on top of that, as did my mother... there's some kind of nasty stomach bug that's all over Atlanta, even all over the blogs I read! I think I've escaped, although I've had a few twinges today.

My father had his two-week checkup. The doctors took off his cast, removed a bunch of metal staples from his leg and put on a new cast. He's healing very well. There'll be another four weeks of non-load-bearing. I'm worried he's going to start getting restless soon, but so far it's gone much better than I expected.

This Sunday, my mother and finished our class for new Unitarian Universalists. We're eligible to officially join now! Joining doesn't really give you any kind of special status other than voting power in elections and getting hit up for pledges more often, but I think it will be a good step for us.

I'll close with the seven principles we studied today.

We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote

* The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
* Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
* Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
* A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
* The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
* The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all;
* Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

The living tradition which we share draws from many sources:

* Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;
* Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love;
* Wisdom from the world's religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;
* Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
* Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit;
* Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.

Grateful for the religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith, we are inspired to deepen our understanding and expand our vision. As free congregations we enter into this covenant, promising to one another our mutual trust and support.

Unitarian Universalist Association Principles and Purposes

Praise, Asian-American Parenting, Self-Esteem, Behavior Change

This will be a rambling post that touches on Asian-American approaches to education, then takes a turn into foster care adoption world.

Following a link from the Process blog, I read this article about the negative effects of too much praise of innate ability. This excerpt sums up the argument:

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.

The article doesn't make any mention of Asian-American parents. I know this isn't true of all Asian parents, but the general tendency, especially among first-generation immigrant parents, is to give little to no praise. In fact, insults are common.

I think my dad was extreme even for a Japanese father. The best compliment he's ever given me is "I guess you're not hopelessly stupid". My mother was the complete opposite. She also maintained high standards, but gave me unconditional support and constant praise.

The effective part of the general Asian approach to parenting is the focus on effort. The idea is that children start off stupid by default... but if they work really, really, hard, they might become a little less stupid. If you get a 99% on a test, it's because you didn't work hard enough to get 100%. That's the amazingly simple secret to why Asians tend to score higher on tests than other American ethnicities. There's no biological component whatsoever. It's just hard work from the parents and hard work from the kids. And if Asian families lack resources to do this hard work because of extreme poverty or family breakdown, then the model falls apart.

In adulthood, someone raised by this method doesn't need a lot of praise to stay motivated. I notice this a little bit in myself. When other people praise me it often feels weird and insincere. I'll expect it after I accomplish something really major, but otherwise, I'm thinking to myself, "I'm not two years old, I was just doing my job because it's my job, I'm not looking for a freaking cookie and a pat on the head." I have to remind myself that other people often expect this kind of praise and find it much more meaningful than I do.

The dark side is obvious: issues with self-esteem and identity. Someone raised by a hardcore version of this method often doesn't know why they're do so well in school, they just have to. It's like someone reached inside them and wound a spring very tightly then released it. Work, work, work. If they deviate from the course of hard work and excellence, they'll start to break down. They don't know what they really want to do in life or what they really enjoy.

Thank goodness my mother ameliorated most of the aftershocks of my dad's approach to education. Otherwise I'd probably be completely nuts by now. I don't want to go into any details, but I've accomplished a lot of things in my education and done very well in some competitive efforts, especially when I was in my teens. I've also been through some fairly spectacular failures. No one really taught me how to deal with failure when was a kid (my mother just minimized it, then redirected) and I consider that lesson the most important one I taught myself.

Getting to adoption, the article mirrors a lot of things we've been reading about in older child and foster care adoption. Some of our classes touched on it as well. The goal is not to create excellence, but to try and compensate for earlier trauma by building self-esteem. We might be adopting children who blame themselves for being taken into foster care; children who've been through years of emotional abuse and neglect.

From everything we've read, you cannot build self-esteem just by telling the child "you're good". Like "you're smart", it relies too much on innate qualities. It doesn't encourage the child to take action or change behavior. When the child does something they know is not good, the failure is all the worse. The child may even stop believing "you're good" statements.

Instead, we're supposed to concentrate on more sophisticated behavior change techniques. At Baggage's blog she has some great examples of those at work. Of course they're not magic, but I totally trust in the logic behind this kind of advice. I just hope I can follow through on it when we get a placement.

We're also supposed to make sure children don't associate love and belonging 100% with good behavior. Love should be unconditional, and we need to reinforce that even if they behave badly, we still love them, we just don't like the behavior and we believe they have the power and responsibility to improve that behavior.

The goal is wildly optimistic. Children build back damaged self-esteem if we can encourage them to work hard enough? I've always hated the saying "failure is not an option" but in this case, it might be appropriate.

Two Asian-Americans That Totally Suck

I'm in an irritated kind of mood right now, so I'm not going to post anything thoughtful or remotely uplifting. Instead, here's my opinion on two Asian-Americans who I wish would just shut up and go away.

Anchor-baby-hating anchor baby Michelle Malkin. Not only is she an embarassment to Asian-Americans, and Americans, and women, she is also an embarassment to the human species, to mammals, to vertebrates... I could go on. Her most evil act of many evil acts was her book that attempted to justify the internment of Japanese-Americans. She hangs out with white supremacists at vdare.com and serves as a kind of Asian smokescreen for racist-nativist people who think Mexicans are ganging up with Muslims and gays to poison their water supply. She's a hatemonger, a racist, a liar and a fascist.

Financial guru Robert Kiyosaki. This money-grubbing slimeball peddles financial advice that is either horribly wrong, or else ripped off from other basic sources. For example, in one of his recent columns on Yahoo! Finance he encourages people with credit card problems to "fight bad debt with good debt" and start speculating on real estate! Oh, and they need to drop out of college because valuing education is for suckers. According to the ungrateful Kiyosaki, his own father, "Poor Dad", was just a big fat loser for getting degrees from Stanford, Chicago, and Northwestern Universities, on full scholarship, including a PhD... because he didn't become obscenely rich through dishonest and cultish schemes like his son.

Miami Gay Couple Lose Custody of Foster Child

This is a sad story. I've read over it several times and have really mixed reactions. They are so mixed I'm running them in two side-by-side columns below the news article.

Gay Couple Claims Discrimination; Loses HIV-Infected Baby

POSTED: 3:59 pm EST February 13, 2007
UPDATED: 6:09 am EST February 14, 2007

MIAMI -- An 8-month-old boy is stuck in the middle of a controversial custody battle between his paternal grandmother and the foster parents who nursed him back to health.

Ricky Morales' foster parents, Roger Carrillo and his partner Hiram Perez, learned Monday that they're losing custody of the child who they nursed back to health from a drug addiction at birth.

They believe they are being discriminated against because they're gay.

Just moments before noon Tuesday, representatives of the state agency Children's Home Society removed Ricky from his foster parents' home. The issue of taking the child away had become so large in south Florida that three police officers and three squad cars were involved in the extraction, leaving both Carillo and Perez distraught.

"Where is the paper? Where is the paper?" said a distraught Carrillo, asking for a notice explaining why Ricky was being taken away.

Ricky, now a healthy 20-pound bundle of joy to his foster parents, sat in the back seat of a squad car to be taken to his paternal grandmother's home after a Juvenile Court hearing Monday awarded custody to her.

"As far as we are concerned, nobody wanted him before. No one wanted him because of his condition. Why, all of a sudden, because he looks so wonderful and healthy and suddenly they want him," Carrillo said.

Carillo and Perez, an employee of the Children's Home Society, are licensed foster care parents and said they took Ricky in when he was just a newborn 4 1/2-pound baby.

At the time he had been exposed to HIV and was born addicted to heroin and crack cocaine, Carrillo said, but pictures in his foster parent's home indicate that Ricky enjoyed the nurturing environment he had been in for eight months.

Carrillo said that his and Perez's emotions ran high when the state officials called him Monday saying that a Juvenile Court judge, after a DCF investigation, had deemed the grandmother fit to raise the child.

Ricky's mother and her boyfriend are both in rehab, so officials said the grandmother should be granted custody

"Where was she eight months ago all along? She has only seen the baby twice," Carrillo said.

Despite the attachment and bond Carrillo and Perez have built with Ricky, state officials said that they have no legal standing, but that they did fulfill their role as foster parents.

One Side Perez worked for the agency. He knew what they were getting into. Even if they had not been a gay couple, there was no guarantee, until TPR and maybe even after, that the child would stay with them permanently. Maybe the grandmother had other children to take care of as well, and wanted the baby but lacked the resources to handle such a severe medical need. But now she's in a better place to care for the child. Being in the custody of relatives will also allow him to grow up with more contact with his mother and father. Hopefully the mother will turn her life around in rehab and they can all get along with each other and be something like a real family. It's hard for Perez and Carrillo, but drawing the media into it is not going to help them. They have to accept their loss and celebrate the eight months they contributed. Many, many foster parents have to deal with unexpected custody loss, or even worse, the medically fragile child dying in their custody.

Another Side Perez and Carrillo nursed the child through a nightmarish period. Florida is one of the most regressive states in the country when it comes to gay adoption; unlike a straight couple or single, they would not be able to adopt the child and the best they could hope for was permanent foster parent status. They went through so much hoping for so little, so no wonder they're mad with grief. Maybe the grandmother didn't want to handle a cocaine-addicted, HIV-exposed baby. But now that the baby is safe and healthy, she wants him back from his "eight-month babysitting" stay. How deep is her commitment to this child? What if the mother never cleans up and in a few months something else happens in the grandmother's life -- loses her job, gets a new boyfriend, stubs her toe -- and she sends him right back into foster care, where he ends up with a completely different set of parents, and he starts yo-yoing back and forth between foster and biological, as is so common, until he gets a serious attachment disorder...

Here are a few more links about the story:

Miami Foster Care Gay Couple Loses Foster Child

Foster Child Removed Because Couple Is Gay Men Say

Intraracial (Same-Race) Adoption

The media loves to talk about transracial adoption. But what about intraracial adoption?

I'm going to sketch a framework for ways of thinking about intraracial adoption, both by white parents and parents of color. Some of this is just pure speculation on my part, but some is based on news and academic reading, and also on conversations on the internet and in real life during my licensing classes.

A. Intraracial Adoption is a Privilege?
White adoptive parents are often criticized for feeling "entitled" to a white baby. The premium placed on healthy white infants means that private agencies often charge much higher fees. White children are often adopted from the foster care system more quickly than black children of the same age.

Looking at it from a psychology viewpoint, it's quite a natural or kneejerk response to desire children that look like us. Most of us look very much like our parents. We're used to a world in which families have strong physical resemblances. We associate physical resemblance with emotional connectedness. But is it right to carry this association into the world of adoption?

Agencies used to match children and parents based on physical resemblance, so families could "pass". Today the public has started to realize this is unhealthy, that adoptees have a right to their true histories, and that kind of matching is going out of style.

I don't think it's fair to place extra blame on white parents for desiring to adopt a white child. It's a selfish desire, true, but it's the same selfish desire that parents of all colors have! I've met black adoptive parents who expressed a lot of pride that their child looks so much like them and that no one ever asks if their children are adopted (this didn't mean they weren't very open to talking about the fact that their child was adopted).

Some white parents build on this simple desire for a privilege and turn it into something more sinister: a sense of entitlement. Even if it means blindly supporting corrupt institutions, they've just got to have that white baby. Other white parents think about the topic more deeply and try to proceed in an ethical way.

Adopting within the same race also carries social privileges that are going to vary depending on the situation. But there's always some kind of privilege, I believe. Number one is that you will receive less attention, judgment and criticism. The adoptive mother doesn't get mistaken for the nanny, as I've heard sometimes happens in transracial adoptions. People don't ask stupid questions in the grocery line. You don't have to cut off members of your family who say uncomfortably racist things at the dinner table. You don't have to worry that you might not be equipped to give your child a positive racial self-image.

The privilege for African-American parents is especially important if they live in an African-American community. If they don't adopt a black child, they have to be ready to field plenty of criticism. "Why can't we take care of our own first -- they have so much more need!" Besides peer pressure, there are other kinds of social and economic incentives for parents of color to adopt intraracially. For example, Chinese-Americans who fit certain criteria can get expedited adoptions from China.

B. Intraracial Adoption is an Obligation?
This one doesn't really apply as much to white parents. I don't think there's really any powerful trend of thought that says white parents have a moral obligation to adopt within their race. But I believe this feeling of obligation certainly exists, either in the foreground or background, for parents of color. It's especially strong for African-Americans, I believe. Two things contribute to it: the disparate numbers of African-American children in the foster care system and the strong cultural tradition of informal adoption. I have often heard of the term "stepping up" when African-Americans talk about adoption. The positive connotation of course is to fulfill an obligation or responsibility to a community.

In the case of Asian-Americans, cultural and racial obligation is separate and distinct. There's not much media or data on us as adoptive parents. As a whole though, Asian-Americans don't feel racial solidarity in the way that African-Americans feel; our histories and cultural traditions are too divergent. I feel a strong connection to Japanese-Americans and nikkei in general, but zero sense of racial duty to adopt an Asian child from another country, say China or Vietnam. I imagine that cultural obligation could be an important factor, though. On the other hand, I know at least in both Japan and Korea there is an evolving but very mixed view of adoption in which negative attitudes ("adopted children will never fit in/might be treated like servants/are less than biological" etc.) are still very prevalent. How much have these attitudes carried over into Japanese-American and Korean-American families? In my case, not at all... my father's experience is so unique that my view of adoption was always "upside down".

When it comes to obligation in Hispanic adoption, this is a tough one and even harder to generalize. Hispanic group boundaries are kind of the opposite of Asians: one language and many races as opposed to one race and many languages. On one hand, I've heard anecdotally that it can be very difficult for Hispanic parents to get a Hispanic child through private adoption. The cultural pressure is stronger than in white families to keep children, not relinquish them. On the other hand, according to an article I translated last month from Mundo Hispánico, there is a huge unmet demand for Hispanic foster parents in Georgia. The article tries to create a sense of obligation in order to recruit Hispanic foster parents to meet the cultural needs of Hispanic children. I'd also like to add that I think the white parents in the article are doing a great thing. They're being painfully honest about their own shortcomings, like lack of knowledge of Spanish, and basically saying "we try hard but we know we're not the best, and if you can do better then please, please sign on and do it!" Plus, they're keeping a young mother and her baby together in the same family.

C. Intraracial Adoption is a Restriction?
There are views of adoption that says transracial adoption is always wrong, black people can only adopt black, white people can only adopt white, Asian can only adopt Asian and so on. I believe absolutist intraracial restrictions are a bad idea for a whole host of reasons. Just a few: race and culture are fluid, interracial couples mess up the rules, multiracial parents and children mess up the rules.

The other extreme is the idea that transracial adoption is a good thing in and of itself. An example is a well-meaning white parent who believes that adopting a black child will help solve racism. They send their child to an all-white school, don't keep them connected to African-American culture and as a result the child has lots of problems and anger about their racial identity. Children should be allowed to be just children, not little 24-hour-a-day rainbow envoys. White celebrity parents are the usual culprits but I wouldn't exempt other parents. For example, Josephine Baker: in so many respects an incredibly admirable human being, her belief that her multiracial adoptions were a kind of mission to the world strikes me as disturbing.

Critiques of transracial adoption are important. Some parents adopt transracially for terrible, terrible reasons. Adopting outside your race and/or culture can carry extra problems for your family and the self-esteem of your child, and you need to be prepared to handle those problems.

Here's an outline of some approaches to intraracial restrictions:

1) extremist white racist: white should only adopt white. Nothing else matters.
2) traditionalist white racist: The races should stay apart. White should only adopt white.
Other races should probably stick to their own. Multiracial/Interracial is suspicious.
3) white entitlement: white parents should have a choice to adopt intraracially or not. Children of color need to be saved. Parents of color are not important but should probably adopt intraracially.
4) white conformist: Hold diverse attitudes towards race; adopt intraracially for the sake of social conformity.
5) white self-aware: would willingly restrict themselves to intraracial if they thought they would not be an effective transracial parent; consider adoption critically but do not jump into judgment on parents of color.
6) extremist transracial critique: white entitlement is too engrained in the adoption system. White people should only be allowed to adopt intraracially. Other races and cultures should not adopt transracially. Adoption in all forms should be radically curtailed and international eliminated.
7) centrist transracial critique: white entitlement is engrained in the adoption system. Serious reform needs to be carried out in many directions at once. More intraracial adoption by people of color should be encouraged.
8) African-American ethnocentric: If AA parents adopt, they should adopt from the foster care system or take in needy relatives. "Take care of our own first" above all. Highly suspicious of any form of adoption requiring large sums of money, even including African international.
9) African-American diverse: Uses "family-building" as a primary model for adoption, not "obligation". Open (but not uncritically) to all forms of adoption. Highly focused on intraracial adoption by AA parents and suspicious but somewhat open to transracial by AA parents, especially those in interracial relationships.

There is one huge missing piece of the puzzle when talking about intraracial adoption: Native American/First Nations. This is the only group where intraracial adoption has privileged legal status under the ICWA. I honestly don't know enough about the present-day situation and attitudes towards adoption to make even the vaguest generalization.

So what do you think? If you're a parent who might be adopting intraracially, do you consider it a privilege, obligation, restriction, none or some or all of the above, or do you think my outline is dead wrong, or even insulting? Or any thoughts in general? I'll leave this post up for a while before I answer the question for myself (although I seriously doubt I'll be adopting intraracially).

The Day I Learned All My Grandparents' Names

(For another post on this same topic, see Clan Loyalty, Genetics, and Fear of Heights)

This is very exciting for me. I knew a few of my paternal grandparents' when I was 10, when I was given a family tree assignment in school. But dad only wrote down his adoptive parents, and besides that he wrote them in Japanese so I didn't how they were pronounced. I lost that tree a long time ago.

This morning we had a large breakfast of the typical style I described a few days ago. My mother came by as well, then left after breakfast to meet my stepfather and so some gardening.

Dad seemed very relaxed, sitting back and reading the Sunday New York Times.

I asked him if he could do a favor for me and he gave me a suspicious look.

"I'm putting together a scrapbook. Could you write down your family tree?"

"My family tree is too withered."

"Just anything you can remember. You don't have to write it in English." I gave him a sketchpad and walked off and did something else for a while.

He wrote down his adoptive mother and father, in English.

"Could you add in your adoptive sister? And your biological parents?"

"Too many names! I don't remember."

"I know you know your biological father's name."

I walked off again.

He drew a dotted line to "biological FA". He gave his biological father's real name and pen name. I know he was a left-leaning intellectual in the early 20th century. The pen name is a major, major, major piece of information. With a bit of quiet help from someone living in Japan, I could find some kind of biography. Over his adoptive parents' names he put "stepfather" and "stepmother".

"You know your biological mother's name, don't you?" I walked off again.

He put his mother's name, "biological MO" and a notation that she was not married to his father.

"THAT IS IT! NO MORE!"

I took the hint and removed the family tree. "Thanks Dad!" It's now scanned and uploaded to my private Flickr account. Whew. This was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

Encounter with a Transracial Adoptee

My first encounter with a "TRA" was at the age of 15. I was in an all-girls academic boarding program in a small town in the mountains of a certain Southern state. Our program had regular mandatory mixers with a neighboring military boarding school. Things like "mandatory mixers" didn't sit well with me, so I left the program after one year, thank goodness. After my experience there, I turned totally anti-single-sex education.

In our program, there were plenty of outrageous rumors about the military school. One girl had it, on good authority, that the boys were regularly having sex with each other in the locker room and that one guy had traded his virginity for a Rolex! Nevertheless, we sometimes had phone calls and highly supervised group dates with them. There wasn't much else to do.

After one mixer, I started phone calling with one of the boys. I'll call him C. C immediately stuck out from the rest because he was Asian. He was good-looking, a little bit shorter than me, muscular, quiet, with a slightly nervous way of carrying himself. He told me he was a Korean adoptee in a military family. He liked his parents but his dad was very, very strict.

We got to meet in person again, briefly, and we held hands and he gave me a homemade brownie. I wanted to get to know him better. I was a bit dubious that anything actually romantic would develop. We had so little in common, and our conversations often had a strained politeness to them. At 15, I felt like I already knew who I was and generally where I wanted to go, and if he tried to talk about that those kinds of topics, he came across as painfully confused and just... weird. I only had a tiny vocabulary to talk about Asian identity issues. Looking back, I really had no idea where he was coming from. "He's Asian, like me, I guess he had to face a lot of the same stuff..." and that's where my ability to understand hit a brick wall. Perhaps I could have understood if he'd communicated better, but I think he was still searching for any vocabulary at all.

C sent me a strange letter. I already knew he had a medical problem with alcohol; if he drank it at all, there was some kind of organ reaction that would happen and he'd have to go to the hospital. He started the letter saying that he drank some alcohol and had to go to the hospital, and then went further into the details of the night. His cousin was wearing a sexy dress and had started hitting on him and he sort of made out with her but not really. Then he felt funny so he drank some alcohol. What the hell was he trying to tell me? Why was he acting like an idiot? I felt insulted. I stopped taking his phone calls; I don't think he tried very hard to keep in contact, either. I wrote him off as another one of those messed-up military school boys. That was that. I hope he's in a better place now, more than 15 years later.

First Breakfast Duty - "Daily Routine" Post

This week I really need to be at work around 8:30, which means leaving around 7:45. I am not a morning person. Since my job has been so busy lately, I've foisted the breakfast cooking duties onto my husband. Today, I finally stepped up. This is great practice for when we have a child and start having regular family breakfasts!

6:30 AM: Wake up. Take a quick shower and get dressed.

6:45 AM: Start the rice (put in the cooker last night). Start miso soup boiling. Start taking stuff out of the fridge.

6:50 AM: Float a few dried anchovies and bonito flakes in the boiling water. Prep veggies. Put mackerel in broiler. Dad rolls into kitchen and takes over because I'm not grating the daikon the right way. Asks me for a cutting board, gets impatient because I take more than 1.5 seconds to clear off the board for him, reaches for it, overextends and falls over. Yikes! Dad is righted and daikon eventually grated.

7:00 AM: Strain out anchovies and give to dog. Add miso paste and seaweed to the soup. Add veggies to soup.

7:05 AM: Turn over mackerel. Put tofu in soup. Turn soup down to simmer.

7:10-7:15 AM: Serve soup, rice, mackerel with sides of kimchi, grated daikon, natto and more seaweed (husband and dad help at this point).

7:15 AM - 7:35 AM: Family breakfast achieved!

This kind of breakfast is intense to prepare, but it really starts off the day with a nutrition explosion.

KFTA: Keeping Families Together Act

Let's say you have a 13-year-old daughter. She's started to hear strange voices and cut herself with knives. You take her to a therapist, but her problems don't get better. You have very basic health insurance, and your mental health benefits are about to run out. The therapist recommends intensive treatment and constant supervision. You're afraid to leave her alone for even a minute but your money is running out and your boss is getting impatient and you have to get back to your job...

What a nightmare scenario. The GAO report I'm quoting below estimates that there could be more than 12,000 children a year who are given up into state custody because their parents can't afford their mental health treatment. If they had access to treatment, their children could be cared for in the home or in their communities. Instead, the parents are forced to relinquish, I'm sure feeling great shame, and then cross their fingers that institutional custodians will take good care of their child, because they will have no more legal say, ever.

2003 GAO Report: Federal Agencies Could Play a Stronger Role in Helping States Reduce the Number of Children Placed Solely to Obtain Mental Health Services

From Page 25

The officials from state and county child-serving agencies and parents we interviewed in the 6 states that we visited said that children who were placed had severe mental illnesses, sometimes in combination with other disorders, and their parents believed they required intense treatment that could not be provided in their homes. Many of these children were violent and had tried to hurt themselves, their parents, or their siblings and often prevented their parents from meeting the needs of the other children in the family. For example, in Kansas, one parent reported that her three other children refused to remain in the home with her son who has bipolar disorder,17 is very aggressive, and has molested other children in the past. In Maryland, officials from both state and county child-serving agencies told us about a teenage boy who was mentally ill, developmentally disabled, autistic, and hospitalized. Because the boy was both violent and sexually aggressive, the county told his mother that if she brought him home from a stay in the hospital, they would remove her other children from the house. Caring for children who are seriously mentally ill can also prevent parents from obtaining full-time work or cause disruptions in their work lives. For example, an Arkansas parent now raising her grandchild does not work because of the time necessary to care for her mentally ill granddaughter. State and county officials from child-serving agencies in 5 of the 6 states that we visited told us that finding placements for children who were mentally ill and who also had other developmental disabilities was particularly difficult. One such child in Maryland was rejected by facilities that serve the developmentally disabled because he was mentally ill and rejected by facilities that serve the mentally ill because he was developmentally disabled.

The solution is to cover these cases using Medicaid. This is not an issue that particularly affects foster care system families, because the children already have Medicaid. It also doesn't affect people who are wealthy enough to afford the high cost of private psychiatric care. But it affects pretty much everyone else!

According to the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, KFTA "would provide $100 million in new family-support grants to states that will end the practice of child custody relinquishment. Parents would be able to obtain necessary mental health treatment for their children and access supportive services that help families stay together." The bill has been stalled before, but was recently reintroduced in the House and Senate by a combo of Democrats and moderate Republicans.

Please use this link to read more about the issue, and for a form you can use to send a message supporting KFTA to your Representative and Senators.

New SPLC Intelligence Report

A few days ago I got the Intelligence Report in the mail; it's a quarterly publication from the Southern Poverty Law Center. All the articles are also available free on their website. Here's the summary of the major articles:

Intelligence Report

As the black population of Los Angeles continues to drop, tension between blacks and Latinos is on the rise.

Also in this issue: The once-powerful Aryan Nations gather for a conference; extremist Catholics might form the largest group of anti-Semites; American Indians comprise 1% of the population, but face 2% of the hate crimes; and anti-immigration is becoming the divide in the Christian Right.

I can't say enough good things about the Intelligence Report. The writers cover racism and racial issues in an incredibly insightful, well-researched and balanced fashion. The subject matter is depressing, of course, but it's also empowering to read about the positive things that are being done to combat racism. And there's humor too... pretty much every issue has an exposé article with a famous white supremacist caught doing something extremely stupid, embarassing, scandalous or turning out not to be white.

Cultural Sensitivity...

... is something my dad doesn't have, at least when it comes to me. Two examples:

This weekend at the hospital I was making some small talk with him while waiting through the interminable paperwork processing. I mentioned I was thinking about joining a certain local Asian-American organization. He looked accusatory, as if I'd told him I was thinking of joining the Super Faker Poser League. "You're totally American culturally! There is nothing Japanese about you! So why do you say Asian-American?"

Then tonight I was watching the new episode of Heroes with my husband. There was a much-hyped but disappointing subplot involving Hiro Nakamura's father, played by George Takei from Star Trek. I was kind of looking forward to seeing George Takei. My father rolled into the room when he heard the Japanese dialogue. "Who is speaking in that strange accent!" He saw George Takei. "What terrible Japanese!" Then he shook his head and rolled off.

He's not ignorant on any level; he's incredibly well-read and curious about human cultural differences. He's not being malicious. He just doesn't care. He's one of those people who don't have a filter between what they think and what they say.

Part of it comes from his childhood. He went through a lot of trials and even suffered from malnutrition. I've usually managed to keep a balanced perspective on his limitations. It also helps that I've trained myself not to hold grudges, or expect anything from him in terms of emotional support.

I should add a new label, "Miscellaneous Complaining about Dad in Order to Keep Myself from Going Completely Nuts over the Next Two Months". I think I'll just leave these posts blank for now.