Mixed Race Studies

In Their Parents’ Voices: Reflections on Raising Transracial Adoptees

Columbia University Press
October 2007
240 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-14136-9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-14137-6

Rita J. Simon, University Professor Emerita
Department of Justice, Law and Society
American University, Washington, D.C.

Rhonda M. Roorda

Rita J. Simon and Rhonda M. Roorda’s In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories shared the experiences of twenty-four black and biracial children who had been adopted into white families in the late 1960s and 70s. The book has since become a standard resource for families and practitioners, and now, in this sequel, we hear from the parents of these remarkable families and learn what it was like for them to raise children across racial and cultural lines.

These candid interviews shed light on the issues these parents encountered, what part race played during thirty plus years of parenting, what they learned about themselves, and whether they would recommend transracial adoption to others. Combining trenchant historical and political data with absorbing firsthand accounts, Simon and Roorda once more bring an academic and human dimension to the literature on transracial adoption.

The Case for Transracial Adoption

American University Press
1994
150 pages
6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
Paperback ISBN-10: 1879383209; ISBN-13: 978-1879383203

Rita J. Simon, University Professor Emerita
Department of Justice, Law and Society
American University, Washington, D.C.

Howard Altstein, Professor of Social Work
University of Maryland, Baltimore

Marygold S. Melli, Professor of Law Emerita
University of Wisconsin Law School

This timely study analyzes the issue of adoptions that cross racial and national lines, and assesses their success and appropriateness. The book’s centerpiece is a comprehensive long-term study of the transracial adoption conducted by Rita Simon and Howard Altstein, the result of twenty years of research and analysis. The authors discuss the case often made against transracial adoption and explain the laws that govern these adoptions.

Multiethnic Children, Youth, and Families: Emerging Challenges to the Behavioral Sciences and Public Policy

Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Studies
Volume 62, Issue 1 (February 2013) (Special Issue on Multiethnic Families)
pages 1–4
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3729.2012.00760.x

Hamilton I. McCubbin
University of Hawaii, Manoa

Laurie “Lali” D. McCubbin, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Counseling Psychology
Washington State University

Gina Samuels, Associate Professor
School of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago

Wei Zhang, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Hawaii, Manoa

Jason Sievers, Academic Coordinator
Washington State University

The nation’s minority population is now over 100 million, so that about one in three U.S. residents is a person of color. In the period from 1980 to 2000, the European American population in the United States grew in size by 8%. In this same time period, the African American population increased by 30%, the Latino/Latina populations by 143%, and the American Indian/Alaskan Native populations by 46%. In striking contrast, in this time period the Asian American population in the United States increased by 190%. This transformation of the U.S. population configuration was facilitated by an increase in interracial marriages, resulting in a substantial increase in persons with multiethnic ancestries. The diversity within ethnic groups as reflected in the 2000 U.S. Census was fostered by a change in policy allowing the Census to record the multiethnic nature of the U.S. population.

This special Issue of Family Relations, with its 18 articles, acknowledges the emerging and distinct importance of understanding children, youth, and families of multiethnic ancestries. As a framework for understanding this special issue, we believe it is important to place multiethnicity in a historical and social context to foster an appreciation of the salience of this social change within the U.S. population, if not in the world. In 1989, the United States’ adoption of what is known as “the hypodescent rule” suppressed the identification of multiethnic individuals and children in particular by requiring children to be classified as belonging to the race of the non-White parent. Interracial marriage between Whites and Blacks was deemed illegal in most states through the 20th century. California and western U.S. laws prohibited White-Asian American marriages until the 1950s. Since the 1967 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that antimiscegenation laws were unconstitutional, there has been a predictable increase in or reporting of the number of interracial couples and mixed-race children. The increase over the past 30 years has been dramatic when we consider the proportions of children living in families with interracial couples. The proportion of children living in interracial families increased from 1.5% in 1970 to 2.4% in 1980, 3.6% in 1990, and 6.4% in 2000. In the state of Hawaii, the proportion of children living in multiethnic families grew to over 31% in 2000. In comparison to the 6.4% nationally, one in three children is being socialized in multiethnic family environments in the state of Hawaii (Lee, 2010).

This collection of original work on multiethnic children, youth, and families begins with the Census Bureau report on race data collected in the 2000 Census and the 2010 Census. Jones and Bullock provide the two decennial censuses on the distributions of people reporting multiple races in response to the census. In identifying the concentrations of multiethnic individuals and families at the national level and with geographic comparisons, the spotlight is placed on the changing and complex racial and ethnic diversity in the United States. Trask addresses the growing number of multiethnic immigrant and transnational families in the United States and abroad. The continuity in and dynamic relationships that emerge as a result of immigrations and transnational migrations increases our demand for more knowledge about the individual culture and history of the procreated multiethnic family units…

Read the entire article here.

Note by Steven F. Riley: For a limited time, all of the articles in this special issue can be downloaded for free.

• INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE ON MULTIETHNIC FAMILIES
  • Multiethnic Children, Youth, and Families: Emerging Challenges to the Behavioral Sciences and Public Policy / Hamilton I. McCubbin, Laurie “Lali” D. McCubbin, Gina Samuels, Wei Zhang and Jason Sievers
• MULTIETHNIC FAMILIES: CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS
  • Understanding Who Reported Multiple Races in the U.S. Decennial Census: Results From Census 2000 and the 2010 Census / Nicholas A. Jones and Jungmiwha J. Bullock
  • Locating Multiethnic Families in a Globalizing World / Bahira Sherif Trask
• MULTIETHNIC FAMILY FORMATION
  • International Marriages Between Eastern European-Born Women and U.S.-Born Men / Polina Levchenko and Catherine Solheim
  • Race-Conscious Adoption Choices, Multiraciality, and Color-blind Racial Ideology / Kathryn A. Sweeney
  • U.S. Families’ Adoption of Chinese Daughters: A Narrative Analysis of Family Themes in Children’s Books / Jacki Fitzpatrick and Erin Kostina-Ritchey
  • Racial Socialization in Transracial Adoptive Families: Does It Help Adolescents Deal With Discrimination Stress? / Leigh A. Leslie, Jocelyn R. Smith, Katie M. Hrapczynski and Debbie Riley
• RACE AND MULTIETHNIC IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
  • Racial Identity, Phenotype, and Self-Esteem Among Biracial Polynesian/White Individuals / G. E. Kawika Allen, Patton O. Garriott, Carla J. Reyes and Catherine Hsieh
  • An Application of Ecological Theory to Ethnic Identity Formation Among Biethnic Adolescents /Melinda A. Gonzales-Backen
• PARENTING AND MULTIETHIC FAMILIES
  • “All Colors and Hues”: An Autoethnography of a Multiethnic Family’s Strategies for Bilingualism and Multiculturalism / Kimberley D. Kennedy and Harriett D. Romo
  • Parenting, Family Processes, Relationships, and Parental Support in Multiracial and Multiethnic Families: An Exploratory Study of Youth Perceptions / Elma I. Lorenzo-Blanco, Cristina B. Bares and Jorge Delva
  • Racial Socialization of Biracial Youth: Maternal Messages and Approaches to Address Discrimination / Alethea Rollins and Andrea G. Hunter
  • The Importance of Family, Race, and Gender for Multiracial Adolescent Well-being / Sarah Schlabach
• RISK AND RESILIENCE IN MULTIETHNIC FAMILIES
  • Multiracial Children and Poverty: Evidence From the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study of Kindergartners / Jenifer Bratter and Rachel Tolbert Kimbro
  • Microaggressions Within Families: Experiences of Multiracial People / Kevin L. Nadal, Julie Sriken, Kristin C. Davidoff, Yinglee Wong and Kathryn McLean
  • Intimate Partner Violence in Interracial and Monoracial Couples / Brittny A. Martin, Ming Cui, Koji Ueno and Frank D. Fincham
  • Mixed Resilience: A Study of Multiethnic Mexican American Stress and Coping in Arizona / Kelly F. Jackson, Thera Wolven and Kimberly Aguilera
  • Ethnic Variations in Factors Contributing to the Life Satisfaction of Migrant Wives in South Korea / Miai Sung, Meejung Chin, Jaerim Lee and Soyoung Lee
  • Using the Multicultural Family Support Centers and Adjustment Among Interethnic and Interracial Families in South Korea / Grace H. Chung and Joan P. Yoo

On adoption, race does matter

The Guardian
2012-12-21

Oona King

Like Michael Gove, I used to believe a loving family was all. But I’ve heard from too many black adoptees who are struggling with their identity

“My social worker is racist,” said a softly-spoken 10-year-old white boy. “She says I shouldn’t stay with my foster carer because my carer is black.” This child was one of 20 in the care system who told the Lords select committee on adoption legislation about their experiences, during a review of proposed changes to the Adoption and Children Act 2002.

The government, spurred on by the education secretary, Michael Gove (himself adopted as a baby), is determined to ensure “race doesn’t matter” when it comes to finding families for children in care. While Gove’s motives are understandable, the Lords committee, on which I sit, decided this week that his main proposal – the end to the obligation on social workers to give “due consideration” to race, religion and ethnicity when assessing adoptions – should be scrapped.

We would all agree with Gove in principle that race shouldn’t matter – and certainly in the specific case of the young boy in foster care it should not. But for many black and mixed-race children, ethnicity shapes their experience. To imagine it doesn’t is to imagine the earth is flat. I’ve lived that experience and I know it’s real…

…The fact that we were – on the surface – separated by race, nagged me as a child. It fed into other vague feelings around being different and “not belonging”. I was the only mixed race child in my class, both in primary and secondary school, although in those days I was often called, at best, half-caste, at worst, mongrel. But it still wasn’t such a terrible thing. After all, I had a loving, capable parent. And that’s what I want for all Britain’s kids languishing in our care system…

Read the entire article here.

Josephine Baker: A Chanteuse and a Fighter

The Journal of Transnational American Studies
Volume 2, Number 1 (2010)
18 pages

Konomi Ara
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

This excerpt is from her newly-published biography of Josephine Baker, “A Fighting Diva.” It tells the intriguing story of Baker’s travels to Japan, her close friendship with the Japanese humanitarian Miki Sawada, and her adoption of a pair of Japanese orphans. Even after she achieved celebrity in France, Baker’s experience as a Black American led her to develop an antiracist philosophy at a worldwide level, and she combined political militancy in the public sphere with a personal commitment through the formation of an international multiracial household of children, the “Rainbow Tribe.”

Introduction: The Adoption of an Occupation Baby

Over half a century ago, in 1954, an African-American known as ‘The Amber Queen’ visited Japan. She was Josephine Baker (1906–1975), the dancer and singer who had
leaped to fame in Paris in the 1920s. The newspaper Asahi Shinbun described the feverish welcome she received on her first visit to the country:

“The amber-skinned singer Josephine Baker arrived from Paris on an Air France flight into Tokyo Haneda Airport at 9.40pm on the 13th. She has come to give fundraising performances for the abandoned mixed-race children of the Elizabeth Sanders Home in Oiso in Kanagawa Prefecture. The airport was thronged with many fans, including young women and black American soldiers, who had flocked in spite of the fine rain. Dressed in a black suit and a blue overcoat, Mrs Baker was greeted in the lobby by the director of the Sanders Home, Mrs Miki Sawada, the First Secretary of the French Embassy Monsieur Travis and the Daiei Studio actress Noboru Kiritachi among others. When two children from the Sanders Home, seven-year-olds Toshikazu Sato and Misao Kageyama, presented her with a bouquet, she gave the half-black boy and girl affectionate kisses on the cheeks. When she greeted all who had gathered, her voice was unexpectedly youthful for a 47 year old: ‘This is my first visit to Japan. Nothing could make me happier.’ She then headed for the Imperial Hotel with her pianist Milos Bartek and two others.” (14th April 1954)

As the article states, the purpose of Josephine’s visit to Japan was to give charity performances in support of abandoned mixed-race children. She had been invited by her friend Miki Sawada, the director of the Sanders Home, who was caring for the children known as ‘Occupation Babies’. The proceeds from Josephine’s performances around Japan would fund the construction of a boys’ dormitory at the Elizabeth Sanders Home, Baker Hall, and it still stands today although its use has changed. Josephine’s name and her words are carved at the bottom of a pillar on one of the corners of the building.

However, Josephine had a more important personal reason for her visit: she was going to adopt a child from the Home. Indeed, upon her arrival at the airport she asked Miki: “Where is my child?” and she was keen to meet the boy whom it was already agreed she would adopt. So Miki changed their plan, which was for Josephine to meet the child, Akio Yamamoto, three days later at the Elizabeth Sanders Home in Oiso, and instead took him to the Imperial Hotel the very next day. In the evening edition of Asahi Shinbun on the 14th, there is a photograph of a smiling Josephine holding Akio alongside an article headlined: “The First Meeting with Little Akio”.

Josephine subsequently visited the Elizabeth Sanders Home and adopted one more boy on the spur of the moment. Thus, the first two of Josephine’s 12 adopted children from different parts of the world and different cultural, religious and racial backgrounds, who would become known as The Rainbow Tribe, were from Japan. The youngsters would spend their childhoods at Josephine’s chateau, Les Milandes, in the Dordogne region of southwest France…

…This home for infants was founded in February 1948. The institution, which became well known as a home for mixed-race children, was a major project started by Miki Sawada. This eldest daughter of the Iwasaki family of the former Mitsubishi conglomerate, who had a privileged upbringing and who married the diplomat Renzo Sawada to become Miki Sawada, was moved by the problem of mixed‐race children in the wake of the War and decided to provide for such abandoned youngsters herself.

At its inception, Miki could not have imagined that the Home would turn into such a large-scale project with such longevity; but well over 1000 children subsequently arrived at and left this nest. Even today, the Home, a little altered, at any one time is home to almost 100 children whose birth parents have not been able to take care of them. Although the Home is no longer caring for ‘Occupation Babies’, the humanitarian spirit that forms the basis of its nurturing philosophy has not changed. One of the most powerful connections Miki formed was with the internationally famous African American performer Josephine Baker. Baker, who visited Japan for the first time in 1954, adopted two boys, Akio Yamamoto and Teruya Kimura, from among the mixed-race children known as ‘Occupation Babies’…

Read the entire article here.

Social workers ‘at rock bottom’ over issue of race and adoption

The Guardian
2012-11-06

Hugh Muir, Diary Editor

Professional body to tell Lords committee that political stereotyping has hampered efforts to rehome vulnerable children

Morale among social workers has been driven to rock bottom by cuts, targets and ministers making the issue of race and adoption a “political football”, according to the biggest professional association.

A Lords committee will hear claims that politicians fuelled stereotypes for political gain, hampering the efforts of social workers to assist vulnerable children.

Nushra Mansuri, of the British Association of Social Workers, is expected to criticise the education secretary Michael Gove, who accused social workers of condemning black and Asian children to a life in care rather than see them adopted by white couples…

…Baffour, who sits on adoption panels, said trans-racial adoptions are hard to get right. “Race and heritage and culture are important, but ministers seem totally dismissive. A lot of people think the repercussions are going to be very damaging.”…

…Marlene Ellis, a black Londoner raised for 18 years by white foster parents in the home counties, said the complexities should not be underestimated. “It is impossible to come out really clear and comfortable about who you are in a society that still has very clear classifications for race and culture,” she said. “My parents did the best they could do but there are subtle things that happen that erode your confidence. My real memory is loneliness; of not knowing.”But minsters can say, with justification, that some social work professionals and trans-racial adoptees fully back the government’s stance on race and adoption. Jo Bonnett, a black police officer raised in rural Leicestershire and east London by white English adoptive parents, is one of them. “I didn’t find it a negative experience,” she says “I think I was very lucky. I had an older brother who was their birth son; a brilliant childhood and fantastic friends. My challenges came at 17, but when you get to that age, and have been brought up in a loving household, you are strong enough to deal with racism or any issues you might have.”She said the benefits greatly outweigh the drawbacks. “I don’t think race matters in adoption as long as you have loving parents and have all the things a child needs.”

Bonnett, 40, said she and her husband, who is white, tried themselves to adopt a black child. “But we were told the child must be mixed race. Ridiculous!”…

Read the entire article here. Watch the video here.

Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship

Temple University Press
May 2012
230 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-1-43990-184-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-43990-183-0
eBook ISBN: 978-1-43990-185-4

Kristi Brian, Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies and Anthropology and Director of Diversity Education and Training
College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina

Until the late twentieth century, the majority of foreign-born children adopted in the United States came from Korea. In the absorbing book Reframing Transracial Adoption, Kristi Brian investigates the power dynamics at work between the white families, the Korean adoptees, and the unknown birth mothers. Brian conducts interviews with adult adopted Koreans, adoptive parents, and adoption agency facilitators in the United States to explore the conflicting interpretations of race, culture, multiculturalism, and family.

Brian argues for broad changes as she critiques the so-called “colorblind” adoption policy in the United States. Analyzing the process of kinship formation, the racial aspects of these adoptions, and the experience of adoptees, she reveals the stifling impact of dominant nuclear-family ideologies and the crowded intersections of competing racial discourses.

Brian finds a resolution in the efforts of adult adoptees to form coherent identities and launch powerful adoption reform movements.

Contents

• Preface: The Personal and the Political
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Adoption Matters: Beyond Catastrophe and Spectacle
• 2. Adoption Facilitators and the Marketing of Family Building: “Expert” Systems Meet Spurious Culture
• 3. Navigating Racism: Avoiding and Confronting “Difference” in Families
• 4. Navigating Kinship: Searching for Family beyond and within “the Doctrine of Genealogical Unity”
• 5. Strategic Interruptions versus Possessive Investment: Transnational Adoption in the Era of New Racism
• Notes
• References
• Index

The Anatomy of Grey: A Theory of Interracial Convergence

College of Law Faculty Scholarship
Paper 74
January 2008
56 pages

Kevin Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Janis L. McDonald, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

This article offers a theory of racial identity divorced from biological considerations. Law fails to recognize the complexity of racial performance and identity, thus categorically simplifying a perceived polarity of black and white. Ground-breaking scholarship addressing racial boundaries, as written by Randall Kennedy, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig, generally focuses on the enduring legacy of race discrimination. We approach these boundaries from a different angle—whites who become “less white.” We bring together the challenges of passing and adoption to offer a theory of fluid racial boundaries.

Transracial adoption provides one viable channel to discuss the possibilities of white-to-black racial identity transformation. By confronting the meaning of white identity in relation to their black surroundings, adoptive parents may engage along a continuum of what we term “interracial convergence.” Parents who adopt transracially potentially face some of the pressures of being black in the United States. The Interethnic Placement Act forbids the consideration of race in adoption placements, but white adoptive parents nevertheless receive sharp criticism from black social workers for lacking the ability to teach “survival skills” necessary for the child’s racial identity development. We argue, alternatively, that it creates a grey space where racial convergers—adoptive parents and racial passers—can challenge the stability of racial boundaries.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• I. Introduction
• II. Invisible Racial Connections
  • A. Racial Defection
  • B. Racial Intentions And Performance
  • C. The Performativity Of Passing
• III. White Racial Identity Development
  • A. Colorblindness
  • B. Willful Racial Ignorance
• IV. White Parents: Black Children: Racial Performativity
• V. Transformative White Identity: Interracial Convergence
  • A. The Pre-Encounter Stage
  • B. Encounter and Disorientation
    • a) Initial Racial Disorientation
    • b) Awareness of Repetitive Racial Incidents
    • c) Reckoning with Privilege
  • C. Augmenting a White Racial Identity
• VI. Conclusion: Interracial Convergence

I. INTRODUCTION

In 1998, Boston city authorities terminated the eleven-year employment of two firefighters who had falsified their employment applications. Twin brothers, Philip and Paul Malone, transformed themselves from white to black on their applications in order to benefit from a federal diversity program. Although their family had identified as white for three successive generations, the brothers claimed their black ancestry from their maternal great-grandmother. They relied on the traditional, although controversial rule in law and social practice of hypo-descent, or the “one-drop” rule, to justify their status. A hearing officer held that the twin brothers, who had lived most of their lives as white, “willfully and falsely identified themselves as black in order to receive appointments to the department.” The officer based her determination of their racial identity on three criteria: visual observation of facial features, documentary evidence, and social reputation of the families. Under this test, the Malones failed to qualify as “black.” In a different case, a Pennsylvania social service agency failed to approve a potential adoption placement for Dante, a biracial black/white child, with his white foster parents, Victor and Mary Jane DeWees. Before the family accepted Dante as a foster child Mrs. DeWees expressed to a social worker that she preferred a white child because she “did not want people to think that [she] or her daughter were sleeping with a black man.” The social service agency based their denial on the DeWees’ negative racial attitudes, which they believed conflicted with Dante’s best interests. In return, the foster parents argued that their views had changed in the two years that they fostered Dante and they were ready to “accept [him] as any other child.” Nevertheless they did not view race as important to Dante’s upbringing: they informed the social worker that race had “no impact” on the self-esteem and identity of minority children, and refused “to manufacture black friends.” Challenging the relevance of the child’s racial identity, Mr. and Mrs. DeWees brought suit against the agency in federal court.

Both Malone and DeWees demonstrate the inherent difficulties of rigid racial categorization. The two forms of racial subversion we examine here, passing and transracial adoption, effectively question the rigidity of racial boundaries. While passing facilitates the secret transference of racial membership, adoption across the color line compels an open form of interracial kinship. Both require a journey into unfamiliar racial territory which reorients racial identity from a biological status to a performative measurement based on the choices made by the individuals involved…

…Both cases present potential situations where transracial adoption and racial passing intersect in some ways. Passing, for those persons born as white, means confronting unearned racial privilege inherited at birth. This article seeks to expand on traditional discussions of passing by offering a theory of racial identity divorced from biological considerations. Law fails to recognize the complexity of racial performance and identity, thus categorically simplifying a perceived polarity of black and white. While the majority of passing scholarship focuses on the enduring legacy of white supremacy, much less work focuses on whites relinquishing the trappings of race privilege—whites who become “less white.” This discourse, as it stands, lacks a rigorous examination of the ways that whites might join this destabilization of racial boundaries…

…This Article proceeds in four parts. Section One addresses traditional racial “passing,” where necessary subterfuge and identity performance undermined socially identified and controlled racial divisions. In this cautious challenge to the biological essence of white identity, passers expose the different ways that white identities could be performed. Section Two introduces the continuum of white identity development, beginning with a “pre-encounter,” stage of racial awareness. The section examines the contributing role of colorblindness and racial recklessness in supporting the existence of a pre-encounter stage. Section Three introduces the application of interracial convergence into the transracial adoption debate as it relates to considerations of the child’s need to develop a healthy black racial identity. Recent changes in federal adoption law require a colorblind placement process, which eliminates scrutiny of the racial attitudes of the adoptive parents. The DeWees parents, despite their deliberate ignorance of their foster child’s racial needs, might have been approved under these new interpretations of the law. Section Four identifies the potential stages of a transformative white identity for adoptive parents. Our model identifies stages that progress from a colorblind, preencounter stage, followed by a disorienting racial encounter stage, to various stages that recognize the role of white privilege, progressing toward a stage of interracial convergence and, perhaps, a new, transformative white identity…

Read the entire paper here.

Intimate encounters, Racial Frontiers: Stateless GI babies in South Korea and the United States, 1953-1965

University of Minnesota
June 2010
239 pages

Bongsoo Park

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation explores the policy implications of statelessness by examining G.I. babies, born of non-marital sexual relations between U.S. soldiers in South Korea and Korean women between 1953 and 1965. Using English and Korean language documents about adoption and immigration of stateless GI babies, my work shows that statelessness reveals a racially exclusionary vision of national belonging that shaped citizenship policies of both nations. The GI babies’ presence challenged the myth of racial purity and confounded racial categories in both nations. The dissertation seeks to elucidate some limits of Cold War racial liberalism informed by humanitarian concerns for abandoned Korean war orphans but helped maintain racially exclusionary strategies on citizenship conferral that made the children stateless.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Ties That Bind: Making of the Origin of Korean Race
• 2. Technologies of Imperial Rule: The Nationality Act of 1940 in the Age of American Expansionism
• 3. Pitied But Not Entitled: Redemptive Adoption and Limits of Cold War Liberalism
• 4. Making of a National Hero: Alchemy of Race, Blood, and Memory
• Epilogue
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

“A new American comes ‘home’”: Race, nation, and the immigration of Korean War adoptees, “GI babies,” and brides

Yale University
May 2010
355 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3395980
ISBN: 9781109588873

Susie Woo

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University
in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Between 1950 and 1965, an estimated 2000 Korean children, 3500 mixed-race “GI babies,” and 7700 military brides entered the United States as the sons, daughters and wives of predominantly white, middle-class families. Together, they signaled the corporeal return of U.S. neocolonial endeavors in South Korea stateside, and embodied the possibilities and limits of Cold War liberalism. Through analysis of U.S. and South Korean government records, archival documents, mainstream and minority press, and interviews with Korean wartime orphanage employees, this dissertation focuses on the living legacies of a “forgotten war.” It traces the roots and routes of Korean and mixed-race adoptee and war bride immigration that were intimately shaped by ordinary Americans at work in South Korea between 1950 and 1965, and the complex political, social, and legal effects that this gendered and raced immigrant group had upon both countries.

This dissertation argues that the U.S. servicemen, missionaries, social workers, and voluntary aid workers, the latter three that flooded South Korea to spearhead the postwar recovery campaign, advocated for the legal and binding formation of mixed Korean/American families and brought empire home. Ironically, by adhering to its government’s cultural policy of integration intended to bolster U.S. expansionist and Cold War efforts, enthusiastic internationalist citizens tethered Americans at home to South Koreans in sentimental, material, and, eventually, familial ways that unraveled the government’s ability to contain its neocolonial objectives “over there.” Thus, by being American, U.S. citizens profoundly affected both sides of the Pacific—they forever changed the lives of thousands of Korean women and children, permanently shaped South Korea’s child welfare system, and unexpectedly forced openings in U.S. national and familial borders subsequently challenging Americans at home to broaden their conceptions of race, kinship, gender, sexuality, and national belonging during the tumultuous Cold War/civil rights era.

Table of Contents

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: On Being American
• CHAPTER ONE: Wartime Sentiment: American GI’s and the Militarization of Korean Women and Children
• CHAPTER TWO: Picturing the Korean “Waif: American Campaigns of Rescue
• CHAPTER THREE: Private Matters of Public Concern: U.S. Social and Legal Management of Korean Adoptee Immigrants
• CHAPTER FOUR: A “Pre”-History of Korean War Adoptions: Racial and Institutional Legacies of Neocolonial Care in South Korea
• CHAPTER FIVE: Model Minority or Miscegenation Threat?: The Cultural Domestication of Korean War Immigrants
• CONCLUSION: Mixed Kin: U.S. Neocolonial Legacies at Home and Abroad
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Purchase the dissertation here.