Disability and Transnational Adoption
Joeita Gupta:
I am Joeita Gupta and this is The Pulse. Living as a disabled person is a political act. Moving through an inaccessible world as a person with a disability is a radical act asking, no, demanding that the inaccessible world change. To be more disability inclusive is a revolutionary act. Disability activism comes in many forms from small daily encounters to the takeover of entire buildings. People with disabilities have always been there and will always be there. And we are here to demand more inclusive and a barrier-free society. Disability activism may not always be easy, but it's always worth it. Today we discuss disability advocacy. It's time to put your finger on The Pulse.
Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI Audio. I'm Joeita Gupta, joining you from the Accessible Media Studios in Toronto. I'm wearing my hair back in a ponytail. I have a set of black headphones, they're over the ear, and I'm wearing a shirt with three and four-quarter-length sleeves and a square neck. I think I wore it earlier on in the summer too, and it's red and black with stripes. My guest today is someone I've wanted to have on the show for a really long time disability activist, Lydia XZ Brown. Welcome and hello. Thanks so much for speaking to me today.
Lydia XZ Brown:
Hi, Joeita. Thank you so much for having me.
Joeita Gupta:
They do this on podcast all the time, so I'm going to be a bit lazy about the introduction and I'm going to say, Hey Lydia, why don't you tell me a little more about yourself and some of the work that you're involved with?
Lydia XZ Brown:
Oh, so just putting it back on me. My background for about 15 years has been in advocacy and community organizing as well as in disability policy work. My work spans a wide range of areas and I teach in disability studies. I currently work in disability policy in the United States. I focus on economic and finance policy issues. I've previously worked on a range of issues related to healthcare, employment, the criminal legal system, and abuse issues impacting disabled people. And my work has always focused on issues that impact disabled people who live at the margins of the margins, that is disabled, people who experience the compounded impact of multiple forms of structural and systemic oppression and domination, particularly disabled people who are queer and trans and disabled people who are negatively racialized.
Joeita Gupta:
What do you mean by negatively racialized?
Lydia XZ Brown:
I mean that people who are impacted by the brunt of racism and white supremacy.
Joeita Gupta:
When we think about a lot of disability activism, at least traditionally it was the white man in a wheelchair. What is it in your life that got you thinking about disability as a multi-layered identity and as an intersection with other forms of oppression?
Lydia XZ Brown:
It is impossible to do work accountably addressing disability if we presume that disabled people are monolithic and homogenous because disabled people belong to literally every other community and group that exists on the face of this planet. Disabled people live everywhere, we belong to every community and to attempt to address disability as if we are all identical and experience the same issues, the same concerns, and have the same priorities, is to do a great disservice to those of us who are multiply marginalized. And it ignores in fact what the global majority of disabled people actually is. Disabled people of color are a global majority, not disabled white people. Right? And so when we think about disability as part of the human experience, whether as natural divergence and difference or as aspects of difference that are imputed or are ascribed to people, then we have to understand that disability does not exist outside of context.
It does not exist somehow in a vacuum or we're at a remove from other conversations of and analysis of power, power differentials, power relations, structures of power, structures of domination and of oppression. And so I think that the framing of the question needs to be changed altogether, that for those of us especially who live as multiply marginalized, disabled people, there is no moment of, oh, I'm a disabled person and I am also this other thing. We were always disabled and queer, disabled and people of color, disabled and. And in some cases, depending on particular circumstances or situation, different aspects of our identity or experience may be more salient in a particular interaction. But it is more often the case that the particular combination of disability and other aspects of marginality produce and contribute to the ways in which we experience ableist harm because ableism impacts disabled people differentially as well.
And that's something that a very single issue, narrow focus attempt to think about disability fundamentally does not understand. Ableism does not affect us the same way. Disabled people who are heterosexual, cisgender, wealth-privileged white Christians do not face the same ableism as disabled people who are impoverished, especially generationally impoverished. Those who are not white, those who come from religious traditions that are not Christianity, especially in the global north, those who are queer or trans, right? For so many reasons, the ways in which we experience race, racism, white supremacy, classism, anti queerness misogyny are deeply wrapped up with and inform the ways in which we experience ableism and simultaneously experiencing ableism shapes and informs and alters the ways in which we experience the brunt of other forms of oppression as well.
Joeita Gupta:
In your bio, you talk about being a transracial, transnational adoptee. Now when I think about transracial, I actually think about these really, if you'll allow me to say, very disturbing cases of white people claiming to be either indigenous or black in a way as a way to try of move in on some of the opportunities for those communities. But that's not what you are saying when you say that you're transracial. What has your experience been?
Lydia XZ Brown:
This is honestly an angering topic to discuss because the word transracial was originally coined by adoptees to describe our experience and particular positionality politically and geospatially within our lives, our communities, and our families, both of origin and adoptive families. The term transracial only came to be associated with certain white people cosplaying as people of colour because of Rachel Dolezal who used this word intentionally and knowing what it meant because her white family had also adopted black children. She has transracially adopted black siblings.
She knew what that word meant, what it signified, the origins of that term, its political positionality. And yet she chose to steal and co-opt it and erase the history of it so thoroughly with the power and influence of whiteness that even some people of colour do not know the origins of that word now and associated only with those kinds of white people pretending to be Black or Native or Asian, just for fun, for the appearance of fleeting social capital that disappears because they will never know what it is like to actually live in a negatively racialized body. They won't. And yet it is the peak irony of whiteness that white people have even stolen the language that transracial adoptees of color have used for literal decades to describe our experiences.
Joeita Gupta:
Tell me a little bit about your experience as an adoptee. Obviously, you were adopted as an infant, so you didn't get a say in your choice to move to the United States. How has your identity as an adoptee shaped your activism, especially your disability activism?
Lydia XZ Brown:
Many adoptees are taken from their country, their home of origin as children, and frankly, transracial, transnational adoption while presented as a global good is in reality legalized and publicly sanctioned child trafficking, just that it's allegedly for the purpose of saving or rescuing a child. And there are many, many conversations to be had about the coloniality embedded in what is frankly a global industry of taking children, largely children of colour from global south contexts and placing them largely with white families in global north contexts. There is also a history and a legacy of ableism in this transnational and often transracial adoption industry too, and that families that are seeking to adopt are often in the market for what they will describe as a healthy baby and that there can be incentives provided for seeking to adopt a child that is known to have a disability or chronic illness of some kind.
And simultaneously, I've heard stories of adoptive families feeling deceived or lied to when not informed of a potential adoptive child's disabilities or illnesses. And the reality is that nearly all adoptees experience some form of trauma which is itself a disability. And so adoption itself like all forms of family separation, but in particular when it's coupled with the severing of cultural ties and of ties to ancestral knowledge and community connection that comes with transracial and transnational adoption, there is an added layer of trauma that will be with an adoptee for the rest of their life no matter what the intentions of the adoptive family are.
Joeita Gupta:
Do you think, is there a layer of, we often talk about white saviorism, right? But do you think there's also a degree of, look how charitable we are. We decided to adopt a child with a disability when really what we had wanted all along was a healthy child. Do you think that adopted children with disabilities have to live with that fear or that stigma or that undercurrent that maybe adoptive families are acting out of a charitable impulse for want of a better phrase?
Lydia XZ Brown:
Well, often that is the case. The typical adoption narrative, especially in transracial and transnational adoption, is that the family wanted to help, save, nurture an unfortunate child wrecked by circumstance and give them a loving home that they wouldn't have otherwise had. That's the saviorist narrative, and it reeks of a pity charity narrative, which is common in the ways in which ableism and racism and classism seek to take on a purportedly or superficially at least benign face. And at the same time, those of us who are on the receiving end of it know how patronizing and deceitful and really self-deceiving it often is.
Joeita Gupta:
There is a big industry around adoption. As you said, it's sold to people as the opportunity to do a good thing. And there are parents who want to adopt are told that this is a chance for you to complete your family while providing a child who has quote unquote been abandoned, a loving home, there's a big industry around adoption. It's not just goodwill and good feelings all around, how-
Lydia XZ Brown:
I mean, you can look into investigative reporting that's been done, uncovering that many so-called orphanages, the children who are living there don't necessarily have zero living parents. In many cases, children living in orphanages have at least one living parent. And so if someone, especially, I don't know, a rich, white, global north volunteer is thinking, I want to spend a summer or I want to spend a semester volunteering in this orphanage, helping children who've lost their parents, you're probably not around children that have lost all of their parents.
And simultaneously there's been reporting done over the last couple of decades, including by some adoptees who've done investigative reporting on this, who uncovered stories that are not just isolated incidents of adoptees having had paperwork that's been outright forged or altered in some way to indicate that a child had no living parents and had been abandoned. But in reality that was not the case and that the child may have been knowingly surrendered by a family, but the family might have been induced with false promises or through coercion to give up their child. Or in other cases, the child was functionally taken from the family without the family's consent at all for the child to be removed permanently from the home, they may have thought that the child was going to be sent to school for a time and then brought home.
Joeita Gupta:
That's right. And this is a very genuine fear because in a lot of countries there is widespread corruption and I think people don't often factor that in. If you live in the United States or even Canada, people don't really have a sense of how deep-rooted and widespread corruption can be and how much money can be made through illegal child trafficking practices. But I want to say there are families in Canada and United States and other places that are well-intentioned and may genuinely want to adopt a child, say there might be people who want to go back to their countries of origin and adopt a child from there. Do you think there's a way we could could handle transnational adoption in a more inclusive, in a more disability-inclusive way and in a less exploitative fashion?
Lydia XZ Brown:
I don't think that there's any way to look at the current state of transnational adoption that isn't exploitative on some level. And I would also hesitate to ever use the framing of it being inclusive because I don't know what's inclusive about a system that is about exploiting and severing ties culturally and communally for children. And I don't know that I want to be included in that system as a person who could potentially be a parent as well as somebody who is a survivor of adoption myself. I don't know that that's a system that I want to be included into. But I will say a few things that you spoke about call to mind a few different issues.
One, corruption is also widespread in the United States, we don't like to talk about it. It's not, corruption looks different in different national, social, and cultural contexts, but there is widespread corruption here. There is widespread corruption, I am sure in Canada as well, right in the United States, that includes the ways in which adoptive and foster families often treat their children. There have been exposes published about the whole child rehoming industry, literally called rehoming, where a family that has adopted a child potentially even in a domestic adoption where there is no transnational border crossing at all occurring, decided they no longer want their child and they rehome their child the way that people talk about rehoming an animal.
Joeita Gupta:
A pet.
Lydia XZ Brown:
A non-human animal.
Joeita Gupta:
Yeah.
Lydia XZ Brown:
And that's happening within the United States today, and that's just within the context of adoption. Talk about corruption in other ways, but another thing that you raise is the question of can adoption ever be done in ways that are ethical? And I would argue that to be accountable and ethical, adoption really requires connection to the community where the child is from.
And that's not to say that I think that it could be impossible for a potential adoptive family or some members of an adoptive family to come from a different community than the child that they're adopting, but I think it's extraordinarily difficult to navigate that, especially when there's a power dynamic, for example, a racial power dynamic, which is very common. But I think that when adoption occurs within a community, that's just following a tradition that's been around in many communities for thousands of years, where someone's family needs help taking care of a child or the birthing parent really is not capable of parenting the child that they've given birth to, that their community takes care of the child. The child may grow up in an aunt's home, whether that aunt is literally a blood relative or called an aunt because of the closeness of the relation without there being a direct blood connection.
Joeita Gupta:
Yes.
Lydia XZ Brown:
The way in which we think about families now, especially living in a Western context as being, it's so influenced by white colonial ways of thinking about kinship structures, about who should raise a child, about who a child's parent should be and about what is quote-unquote best for a child, that I think we've really gotten away from practices that have always existed, that continue to exist and that are about the opposite of inculcating or imposing trauma on a child. But adoption as it exists now, especially when the state is involved, especially when borders are involved and particularly transracial adoption, is just a way of inflicting deep and irreversible trauma.
Joeita Gupta:
And pain on someone.
Lydia XZ Brown:
And on a whole community.
Joeita Gupta:
Yeah, absolutely. Do you think, in the time that we have left, do you think as we sort of navigate the murky waters of disability activism in particular, very early in our conversation you had talked about doing some work around financial policies for people with disabilities. I want to take maybe the next little bit of this interview to talk to you about some of your work dealing with the financial security and the economic insecurity that's faced by many people with disabilities. What sort of work have you been involved with?
Lydia XZ Brown:
Currently, I work in policy at a national nonprofit organization in Washington DC. I am the director of public policy at the National Disability Institute, and our mission is to promote financial inclusion and economic opportunities for people with disabilities ranging from ensuring access to economic security for the most impoverished people of disabilities, to guaranteeing that disabled people have an opportunity to be able to prosper and to be able to have the full range of choices that non-disabled people do or what is often described as financial freedom. And there is a wide body of research, much of which NDI itself has conducted and published, demonstrating not only continued economic disparities between disabled people and non-disabled people, as well as those disparities growing exponentially based upon combinations of disability and gender and race, but also just the enormous bur burdens that disabled people actually face in attempting to secure any measure of economic security.
We published research, for instance, calculating what we in the community often call the disability tax or the crypt tax, which is the added costs of living for being disabled that are disability specific that would not exist but for a person being disabled. And we calculated that on average, a disabled person needs to earn 28 to 29% higher in income just to have the same standard of living as a non-disabled person comparatively. And yet disabled people on average have an unemployment rate and a poverty rate that are both about double that of non-disabled people, and that's before disaggregating by race and gender.
Joeita Gupta:
Yeah, that's really shocking. What other than dealing with the employment rate needs to happen to address this gap, that 28 to 29% more that people with disabilities have to earn to enjoy the same standard of living as a non-disabled person. I mean, I think an obvious solution is close the employment gap, but what else do you think needs to happen?
Lydia XZ Brown:
We need to have a robust social safety net, which in the United States we do not have. We need to ensure that all people have guaranteed access to safe, affordable, accessible housing and to healthcare and to support necessary to be able to live at home and in communities where they choose to do so. And that means public funding, it means robust public funding. It means training and paying fairly the labour workforce necessary to support people with disabilities, including supporting disabled people in entering that relevant workforce as we are the experts on our own lives and the types of services that we need and what we need in terms of circumstance just to be able to survive and to thrive.
And so you're looking at policy mechanisms around access to income and supplemental income and access to healthcare and reducing administrative burden on disabled people and ensuring that disabled people have access to savings and asset and wealth building instruments in the same way that non-disabled people do. But we're also looking at societally guaranteeing that robust social safety net for every single one of us so that the worst case scenario is that someone simply is not wealthy rather than that somebody is living in destitution.
Joeita Gupta:
Lydia, I've just got time for one last question. I know at some points in our conversation it got a little heated, but anger is a good thing. I have nothing against anger, but how does someone do decades of activism, especially disability activism, which can be heart-wrenching, without getting burnt out?
Lydia XZ Brown:
I wouldn't characterize any of our conversation as being particularly heated or marked by anger. And I think that that's also, unfortunately, a very common way in which the rightful trauma of marginalized people is mischaracterized as being expressed as anger. And anger is certainly a common and rational reaction and feeling, but it is not necessarily present simply when we are discussing angering and traumatizing issues because that's lived reality for most of us. We live our entire lives experiencing a constant onslaught of trauma and dismissal and invalidation and being told over and over again that our perspectives are irrelevant or impossibly compromised instead of actually being looked to as experts on our own lived experience and of that of our communities.
But for those who are thinking, what do I do to be able to support and sustain myself? I would also argue that that's a misframing and building on work that's been done by so many disabled and mad and ill thinkers and scholars and activists and organizers, everybody from Mimi Cook and Mia Mingus and [inaudible 00:24:20] and Shayda Kafai and Talila Lewis and so many other people is that sustainability and care, which are core and essential to the practice of disability justice itself, created by disabled people of colour and queer and trans folks, those are practices that can only come about in community, and that doesn't have to be necessarily, and it shouldn't be based on how many friends do you have, how well known are you, what is your platform?
But if we are not working to ensure that everybody has access to support in community and through structures to again guarantee that we all have the basic fundamentals that we need to be able to live decent, comfortable lives with dignity and with choice, then we will all burn out. We are all burned out. There is nobody I know in my life who is not at or past their capacity, who is not struggling, who is not burned out now, has been burned out or is about to burn out. There is nobody I know who can truthfully say that they are doing well if asked. And so that to me is not an indictment on individual people not knowing what tools they need to be able to do activism sustainably. It is an indictment on our society and our culture for actively depriving us of the resources and the support and the care that we need to thrive and punishing us for daring to suggest that we deserve
Joeita Gupta:
Lydia, that was really powerful, but we have to leave it there. Thank you so much for speaking to me today.
Lydia XZ Brown:
Thank you so much for having me.
Joeita Gupta:
Lydia XZ Brown is a disability activist and has a number of amazing initiatives that you can check out online. We'll put the links in the description down below. As I said, we've got to run today, and that was all the time we had for the program. If you have any feedback, write to feedback @aami.ca. You can also give us a call at 1-866-509-4545. That's 1-866-509-4545. You can also leave your permission to play the audio on the program. Find us on Twitter at AMI Audio. Use the hashtag pulseAMI and you can find me on Twitter at Joeita Gupta. Matthew McGurk has been our videographer today. Mark Afalo is technical producer of the show. Ryan Delehanty is coordinator for podcast at AMI Audio, and Andy Frank is the manager of AMI Audio. I've been your host, Joeita Gupta. Thanks for listening.