Mixed Race Studies

Genetic Counseling: For children of mixed racial ancestry

Biodemography and Social Biology
Volume 8, Issue 3, 1961
pages 157-163
DOI: 10.1080/19485565.1961.9987478

Sheldon C. Reed, Director
Dight Institute for Human Genetics
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Esther B. Nordlie
Dight Institute for Human Genetics
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

INTRODUCTION

The editors of this journal have been interested in genetic counseling because it is a major practical application of the results of research in human genetics. It is reasonable to assume that genetic counseling may also have some relationship to eugenics, though there is nothing known as to exactly what this relationship may be.

Genetic counseling should be helpful to those who ask for it. The understanding of any problem is the first step toward its solution. Understanding of the problem removes some of the attendant anxiety, even if the solution is unpleasant. There should be less anxiety after genetic counseling than before it has occurred, and the clients indicate in many ways that it is useful to them. The relationship between genetic counseling and eugenics is certainly ambiguous. It is my impression that the relief of anxiety concerning the likelihood of a repetition of an abnormality results in increased reproduction of the parents of the affected children. If this is true, the frequency of any genes responsible for the abnormality would be increased, though slightly, in the population, which would be a dysgenic process. The increased reproduction of the parents of the anomalous children should also increase the frequency of any genes related to the attributes of responsible parenthood which should have positive eugenic benefits. It is not clear to me whether the net result of these opposing tendencies is eugenic or dysgenic. The dysgenic effect is to increase slightly the pool of rare genes for abnormalities which are infrequent, while the slight increase in the supply of genes related to responsible parenthood would be less significant percentage-wise because such genes arc presumed to be more frequent in the population. If genes related to responsible parenthood do not exist, one can only conclude that genetic counseling may well be dysgenic Genetic counseling at present would seem to be liable to the suspicion that it is dysgenic. This effect may be too trivial to warrant consideration. Hopefully, the obvious benefits to the parents who come for counseling outweigh the possible dysgenic costs to society as a whole. The only alternative to genetic counseling is the refusal to impart whatever information research in human genetics has discovered; such a philosophy would be deplorable. Genetic counseling has a function and is here to stay. It is the intention of the editors to present articles by other genetic counselors from time to time. Presumably these articles will cover particular areas of counseling with which they have had extensive experience.

BACKGROUND OF STUDY

Wc have had considerable experience at the Dight Institute in working with adoption agencies in the placement of children of mixed racial ancestry. Mrs. Esther Nordlie (1961) and I have just completed a follow-up of the results of the placement of such children and will summarize the results here, as this is the first study of its kind. It is probable that genetic counselors will be increasingly occupied with this topic as interracial unions are likely to continue in the United States. The casual unions often result in children who become available for adoption. . . .

The problem of placing “pure” Negro, Indian or Mexican children is difficult only because few families of these minority groups request children for adoption. Ordinarily, no attempt would be made to place these babies in Caucasian families as the child or the adoptive parents would probably find social adjustment too difficult. However, children of mixed racial origin may “pass for white” or resemble the Caucasian adoptive parents sufficiently so that placement in a white family is feasible. Such placement is desirable for the child as the socioeconomic environment is assumed to be more favorable there. This would be true only if the racial appearance of the child would permit acceptance in the white community. Many white couples are desperately anxious to adopt children. Some are sufficiently free from racial prejudices to be able to adopt children of mixed racial ancestry, if a reasonable “match” between child and adoptive parents can be made. The critical prediction rests with the geneticist (or anthropologist) who must project the appearance of a small baby ahead to the child of five or six when entering school…

One would suppose that predicting the chances for a child to “pass for white” would be quite simple. Such, however, is not the case. The main difficulty is that these traits, when present in the racial hybrid, may not be apparent in an infant but develop over the years. Hair texture and skin color are the most important traits and at the same time the most difficult to predict. The baby may have no hair; it is well known that babies with considerable Negro ancestry may look quite light at birth and darken considerably during childhood. The geneticist is thus vulnerable to mistakes in his predictions as to the future appearance of the baby. One could take the attitude that unless the geneticist can make his prediction with certainty he should not enter the picture at all. Such reasoning is absurd. The baby is in the custody of the adoption agency and the agency must make some provision for this child.

Read or purchase the article here.

Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir

Serpent’s Tail
2011-07-14
320 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781846687907

Pauline Black

Powerful autobiography from the front woman of influential ska band, The Selecter

Lead singer for platinum-selling 2-tone band The Selecter, Pauline Black has been in the music business for over thirty years. The only woman in a movement dominated by men, she was very much the Queen of British Ska. She saw The Specials, Madness, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and all the other top bands of that generation at their very best… and worst. Black was born in 1953 of Anglo-Jewish/Nigerian parents. Adopted by a white, working class family in Romford in the fifties, Pauline was always made to feel different, both by the local community and members of her extended family, who saw her at best as a curiosity, at worst as an embarrassing inconvenience. Weaving her rise to fame and recollections of the 2-tone phenomenon with her moving search for her birth parents, Black By Design is a funny and enlightening memoir of music and roots.

Born in Romford, Pauline Black is a singer and actress who gained fame as the lead singer of seminal 2-tone band The Selecter. After the band split in 1982, Black developed an acting career in television and theatre, appearing in dramas such as The Vice, The Bill, Hearts and Minds and 2000 Acres of Sky. She won the 1991 Time Out award for Best Actress, for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in the play All or Nothing At All.

“Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’ Must Be Helped! Will You?”: U.S. Adoption Plans for Afro-German Children, 1950-1955

Callaloo
Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2003)
pages 342-362
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2003.0052
E-ISSN: 1080-6512 Print ISSN: 0161-2492

Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria

This essay explores the debate that arose around the adoption of Black German children by African American parents and the subsequent immigration of these children to the United States. Using a comparative approach, the article probes the underlying internal social and political controversies in postwar Germany and the United States that led to and accompanied these events, concluding that both the plans for and practical implementation of the adoption of these Black German children abroad was an complex and contradictory attempt to solve the “problem” a German-born Black population was seen to pose.

Scattered throughout Europe today there are thousands of “war orphans”—children of European girls and American soldiers who loved and left. Hundreds of these homeless children are the offspring of Negro soldiers and their mulatto status makes adoption by European families extremely unlikely. But in America there are hundreds of childless Negro couples who wish to adopt these “war babies” and bring them to the U.S. Up to now government red tape has prevented all but a trickle from being adopted. (“German War Babies”)

In January 1951, an article was published in the African-American magazine Ebony with the above-cited headline. The article chronicled the story of an African-American teacher, Margaret Ethel Butler, who since 1947 had been attempting to adopt two Afro-German children and arrange their immigration to the United States. On 4 October 1951, nine months after the article appeared, Margaret E. Butler fas finally able to welcome her much longed-for adopted children at the Chicago airport. These two German children, born of African-American occupation soldiers and German women, are considered the first such children to be adopted and arrive in the U.S. after the war.

The adoption of these two Afro-German children (a boy and a girl of five and six years of age) who, until their departure for the U.S., had lived in a Rheingau orphanage was the result of a bureaucratic battle waged by Margaret E. Butler over a period of many years. It was in 1947 that she first learned of the discrimination facing many Afro-German children in Germany through an article in the Chicago Tribune, at which point she decided to adopt two of these children. Her initial inquiries, including a journey to the children’s orphanage in Germany, were followed by countless requests and petitions, as well as further visits to Germany. Soon Margaret E. Butler became known as the Butler Case, a phenomenon widely documented in both the West German and the African-American press.

In the following pages, will explore several aspects of the public response to this group of German occupation children in Germany and the U.S. I begin with an examination of the motives which led German and American organizations and individuals in both countries to perceive Afro-German children as potential adoptees for the U.S. The first section looks at the crucial role of the Black press and the NAACP…

Read or purchase the article here.
Also read, “Reflections on the ‘Brown Babies’ in Germany: the Black Press and the NAACP,” in The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GIs, and Germany.

Into the Arms of America: The Korean Roots of International Adoption

The University of Chicago
August 2008
248 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3322621
ISBN: 9780549742289

Arissa Hyun Jung Oh

A Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the division of Social Sciences in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of History

This dissertation locates the origins of the phenomenon of international adoption in Korea in the 1950s, when Americans began adopting mixed-race ‘GI babies’ produced through liasions between Korean women and foreign military personnel during the Korean War. Seeing no other solution to the existence of these children than their mass emigration abroad, the Korean government cooperated with allies in Korea and in the United States to establish an intercountry adoption system.

Americans had adopted children from Europe and Japan prior to the Korean War, but there are a number of reasons why intercountry took off from Korea. First, the supply of unwanted mixed-race GI babies in South Korea converged with a demand for them in the United States. The newly established Republic of South Korea sought to to redefine itself through a nationalism centered in large part on its sense of itself as an racially homogeneous nation and was therefore eager to send its mixed-race children overseas. At the same time, Americans expressed interest in adopting Korean GI babies for a number of reasons: humanitarianism, a shortage of adoptable children in the U.S., or because they wished to avoid the doctrinal investigations of social workers required under state adoption laws.

Second, a ‘culture religion’ or ‘civic religion’ that I call Christian Americanism emerged in the 1950s to power the early movement to adopt Korean GI babies. Christian Americanism combined patriotism with vaguely Christian principles to form a powerful ideology that promoted U.S. responsibility in the new world of the Cold War. The adoption of Korean GI babies became a Christian Americanist missionary project, and although not all adoptive parents of children from Korea were Christian Americanists, the language of Christian Americanism became the language of the Korean adoption movement. Christian Americanist adopters saw adopting a Korean GI baby as a way to participate in their country’s new Cold War project of proving its racial liberalism and winning the hearts and minds of newly independent countries around the world. Third, Harry Holt, a farmer from Oregon, emerged as a leader of the Christian Americanist Korean adoption movement. Holt founded the Holt Adoption Program in 1956, made Korean adoption available to the masses, and was a crucial catalyst in the establishment and development of international adoption.

In the early 1960s, the composition of the Korean homeless-child population changed such that mixed-race children no longer represented the majority of the Korean children being adopted internationally. The institutions, procedures and laws that had been erected to facilitate the removal of mixed-race children became a convenient system through which to send full-blooded children abroad.

Korean adoption has been a dynamic and ever-changing phenomenon reflecting some of the major trends in Cold War politics as well as shifting ideas about race, family and nation in both Korea and the United States. What began as a race-based evacuation evolved into a Cold War missionary project, and has now become an increasingly common way for Americans to build their families.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• VOLUME ONE
  • LIST OF TABLES
  • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  • ABSTRACT
  • INTRODUCTION
  • CHAPTER 1. Soldiers, Missionaries and the Kids of Korea
  • CHAPTER 2. Creating Intercountry Adoption
  • CHAPTER 3. A New Kind of Missionary Work: Christian Americanism and the Adoption of Korean GI Babies
• VOLUME TWO
  • CHAPTER 4. Making Orphans, Making Families
  • CHAPTER 5. Harry Holt Versus ‘The Welfare’: The Fight Over Proxy Adoption
  • CHAPTER 6. The Turn In the Road
  • APPENDIX U. S. Immigration Laws Pertaining to Korean Adoption
  • BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIST OF TABLES

Purchase the dissertation here.

Mixed ethnicity, identity and adoption: research, policy and practice

Child & Family Social Work
Volume 14, Issue 4 (November 2009)
pages 431–439
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2206.2009.00614.x

Marsha Wood, Research Associate
Centre for Family Policy and Child Welfare at the School for Policy Studies
University of Bristol, United Kingdom

Mixed ethnicity children are over-represented in the care system and constitute a significant group of those seeking adoption placements. Social workers are presented with a specific set of concerns in seeking to find adoption placements for mixed ethnicity children as they come from two or more cultural backgrounds. Practitioners face uncertain principles concerning how to respond to these issues, especially in light of social and political pressures, and within the realm of existing debates around ‘transracial’ adoption. There is a danger that among these uncertainties the individuality of the child will be lost as his or her identity needs become viewed narrowly. Social workers may seek to simplify and classify the identities of mixed ethnicity children in the adoption process through pressures that they feel to find ‘matched’ placements. This paper explores how theories concerning identity can provide some insight into the difficulties practitioners face and may help to inform social work practice in this area.

Read or purchae the article here.

Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging

Duke University Press
November 2010
320 pages
15 photographs, 4 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4683-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4695-1

Eleana J. Kim, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Rochester

Since the end of the Korean War, an estimated 200,000 children from South Korea have been adopted into white families in North America, Europe, and Australia. While these transnational adoptions were initiated as an emergency measure to find homes for mixed-race children born in the aftermath of the war, the practice grew exponentially from the 1960s through the 1980s. At the height of South Korea’s “economic miracle,” adoption became an institutionalized way of dealing with poor and illegitimate children. Most of the adoptees were raised with little exposure to Koreans or other Korean adoptees, but as adults, through global flows of communication, media, and travel, they came into increasing contact with each other, Korean culture, and the South Korean state. Since the 1990s, as infants continue to leave Korea for adoption to the West, a growing number of adult adoptees have been returning to seek their cultural and biological origins. In this fascinating ethnography, Eleana J. Kim examines the history of Korean adoption, the emergence of a distinctive adoptee collective identity, and adoptee returns to Korea in relation to South Korean modernity and globalization. Kim draws on interviews with adult adoptees, social workers, NGO volunteers, adoptee activists, scholars, and journalists in the U.S., Europe, and South Korea, as well as on observations at international adoptee conferences, regional organization meetings, and government-sponsored motherland tours.

Source: Ebony Magazine, 1955

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Transliteration, Terminology, and Pseudonyms
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Understanding Transnational Korean Adoption
• Part I
  • 1. “Waifs” and “Orphans”: The Origins of Korean Adoption
  • 2. Adoptee Kinship
  • 3. Adoptee Cultural Citizenship
  • 4. Public Intimacies and Private Politics
• Part II
  • 5. Our Adoptee, Our Alien: Adoptees as Specters of Family and Foreignness in Global Korea
  • 6. Made in Korea: Adopted Koreans and Native Koreans in the Motherland
  • 7. Beyond Good and Evil: The Moral Economies of Children and their Best Interests in a Global Age
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Thinking and living in, out, and beyond the box: Exploring Racial and Cultural Complexity in Identity among Adoptive Multiracial Families and Persons

Racial Identity and Cultural Factors in Treatment, Research, and Policy
The Ninth Annual Diversity Challenge
Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture
Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
2009-10-23 through 2009-10-24

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

Under the direction of Dr. Janet E. Helms, the Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture (ISPRC) sponsored its 9th annual Diversity Challenge at Boston College October 23-24, 2009. This year’s focus was the integration of principles of racial identity and cultural theories in treatment, research, education, and policy. The conference drew over 300 participants and hosted more than 80 different sessions allowing scholars, practitioners, educators, community activists and policy makers a forum to extend the dialogue to address some of the unanswered questions from very different perspectives.

Read Dr. Samuel’s presentation here.

 Mixed Dreams: A Symposium on Multiracial Identities in the United States

2010-10-15 through 2010-10-20
Oberlin College
Oberlin, Ohio

At its root, Mixed Dreams: A Symposium on Multiracial Identities in the U.S. aims to create a space to discuss and interrogate historical and contemporary perspectives on multiraciality and the “multiracial experiences” of people identifying as bi-racial, mixed, and/or transracial/transnational adoptees in the United States. Through public lectures and panels it will explore current trends and dilemmas in understanding multiraciality historically, socially and politically as well as the growing narratives and spaces being created to express these “mixed” subjectivities. Featured guests will be Paul Spickard, Eric Hamako, Debra Yepa-Pappan, Alicia Arrizón and a video conference discussion with G.Reginald Daniel.

For more information, click here.

Multiethnic Multiracial Experience (Ethnic Studies 199)

University of Oregon
Winter 2010

Anselmo Villanueva, Ph.D.

This course will focus on the multiracial multiethnic experience in the United States, with particular emphasis on the Northwest. This course will provide students with a framework to understand this experience. The course will cover the history and background of the mixed race experience, anti-miscegenation laws and practices, research, identity models, resources, and case studies. The topic of trans-racial adoption will also be included in this course.

Traditionally, the multiracial experience has been defined as literally “Black” and “White” – people, relationships, and marriages that have been between White and African American people. This course will also include the experiences of multiple relationships and people, such as Asian and Latino, Black and Asian, and so on. Multiethnic relationships will also be included, such as Chinese and Korean.

Students will develop a broad understanding of the multiracial multiethnic experience. In the process, students will also have the opportunity to examine their own culture, ethnic identity, and background. Students will also examine attitudes and beliefs related to the mixed race experience.

For more information, click here.

Soul Search

The Post
Cork, Ireland
2010-09-05

Nadine O’Regan

When poet and novelist Jackie Kay started the search for her birth parents, she didn’t realise how traumatic a journey it would be, though she doesn’t regret doing it.

Jackie Kay met her birth father for the first time in a hotel room in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2003. Then in her early 40s,Kay was expectant, excited and nervous. She had brought him a present, an expensive watch.

However, before they could talk, her father, a born-again Christian, said there was something he had to do. For more than an hour, he prayed, frantically whirling, wild-eyed, like a dervish around the room, asking the Lord to cleanse the sin before him.

In her new memoir, Red Dust Road, which paints a vivid portrait of her search for her birth parents, Kay, an atheist, describes how her tears began to flood down her face as she understood that the sin being referred to was herself. ‘‘I realise with a fresh horror that Jonathan is seeing me as the sin, me as impure, me the bastard, illegitimate.”…

…Assembled in a kind of jigsaw manner – with events nipping back and forth across the years – Red Dust Road combines a compelling search story with a vivid portrait of struggling to deal with issues of race and roots. Long-term fans of Kay’s work will spy occasional references to her break-up with her lover of 15 years, British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and get a sense of her current life: living in a terraced house in Chorlton, Manchester, teaching part time at the University of Newcastle and bringing up a university-age son…

…Born in 1961 to a Scottish nurse and a Nigerian student, Kay was adopted at the age of five months, and grew up as the daughter of two colourful, outspoken, lifelong socialists: her adoptive father was a member of the Communist Party and her mother was the Scottish secretary of CND…

…Absorbing the fact of her adoption wasn’t the only issue Kay had to face during her childhood. She was also mixed race in 1970s Glasgow – ‘‘Being black in a white country makes you a stranger to yourself’’ – and gay at a time when nobody was allowed to be.

‘‘We live in a society where people have civil partnerships and people understand what the word ‘homophobia’ means and gay people have children openly,” she says. ‘‘But when I told my mum, that was really unusual, and she was really quite shocked.”

Kay began writing poetry at the age of 12, as a response to the racist names she was called and the beatings she received. ‘‘I found writing to be a sanctuary. I’d write a little poem as revenge.”…

Read the entire article here.