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.