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Slave Traders: Howie Blog Declares Transracial Adoption Racist Colonialism

Oops: Gordon Howie's media Potemkin village just alienated a good chunk of its Christian American exceptionalist audience. Howie mouthpiece Brad Ford* posts without critique an article declaring Americans who adopt foreign children racist colonialists:

The message of intercountry adoption ideology is clearly that life in the West is the best, and that the West has the right to adopt children from non-Western countries in the name of paternalistic humanism and materialistic superiority, something which reminds us of the pro-slavery arguments from the 19th century. By leaving war-stricken and impoverished West Africa the slaves were considered given a better life in the New World.

Contemporary intercountry adoption having flown in close to half a million Third World children to the West during a period of half a century has many parallels to the Atlantic slave trade which between 1440-1870 shipped 11 million Africans to America, and to indentured labor dispatching 12 million Indians and Chinese to the European empires between 1834-1922. However, a crucial difference is of course that slave trade and indentured labor belong to history and are today almost universally condemned, while intercountry adoption is still continuing, perfectly accepted by Western societies and legalized through various international conventions [Tobias Hübinette, quoted at length by Brad Ford, "Do Interracial Adoptions Based on Faith Selfishly Overlook Cultural Biases of Superiority?," News in Faith, 2011.11.30].

Did you catch that, adoptive moms and dads? Adopt an orphan from Ethiopia or China, and you're a 19th-century slave trader.

Good grief: is South Dakota's whole right-wing finally coming completely unhinged? Rep. Stace Nelson foments civil war in the GOP (not that that's a bad thing). Steve Sibson links third-party politics to the Second Coming. And now Gordon Howie lets his bloggers link his pious patriotic website to authors who refer to transracial adoptees as "abductees" (along with a lot of not-safe-for-work language).

If you care to click on that link and can wade past the vulgarity, you'll find more from Tobias Hübinette, which is the adopted Swedish name of Lee Sam-dol, a Korean "abductee" doing research on how adopting international kids makes all sorts of bad things happen.

I suppose that since I'm just a nice white American kid adopted by nice white American parents, I'm not qualified to comment on Hübinette/Lee's multicultural, anti-Western, anti-white critique (and the website to which Ford links makes clear that "abductors" are "white people, white governments, [and] the abduction indsutry"). But when I hear an adoptee floating between names and lashing out against the culture of his parents, I hear insecurity and immaturity dressed up as a perceived moral crusade. As an adopted son, I long ago reconciled myself quite comfortably with the fact that I am who I am. I was made who I am by my real parents, the ones who chose the hard work of raising me. Wallowing in wishes for the alternative timeline in which I was not adopted is not just pointless but destructive. Setting out to prove that your parents were slave traders is a sad path to a Ph.D.

I can only hope that Ford and Howie were simply being sloppy and forgot to append their condemnation to Hübinette/Lee's diatribe.

*Remember, Brad Ford is the same clueless tool who suggested Democrats should field Tea Party candidates. Yeah, sure, because Dems love Focus on the Family and Austrian economics.

7 Comments

  1. larry kurtz 2012.11.14

    Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, Van Jones, Eric Holder, Shirley Sherrod <--Obama staffers targeted by GOP. What do they have in common? RT @ZerlinaMaxwell

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