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From The Asian Reporter, V17, #50 (December 11, 2007), page 7.
About Baby Gabe
There’s a kind of futility, I know, about entering this furious shoving match. About Baby Gabriel. About a two-year-old son of a Mexican man and an American woman. And our current debate, carried big by Oregon media, over whether Gabriel should stay with his white foster family or live with his brown grandma.
It’s not, mind you, that this little boy isn’t important. He is a precious soul. And of course this debate matters a lot; America spends enormous emotional energy on it. We can’t seem to move beyond it.
My exhaustion is on account of 22 years of talking and talking then walking over this tired terrain. My fatigue, and I assure you it’s not mine alone, is with our mainstream’s inability to move off of an essential and often unacknowledged factor in these ferocious brawls. Please let me put off naming it until setting the stage a bit better.
Calling the debate over Baby Gabriel furious or ferocious is no exaggeration. According to Oregonian Associate Editor David Reinhard, Oregon Department of Human Services administrators "have a chance to save a real in-the-flesh child today." Some paragraphs later in his December 2, 2007 editorial, Mr. Reinhard worries about dire consequences "if (Gov.) Kulongoski and his appointees don’t step in and stop this child from being shipped off to Mexico."
Mr. Reinhard’s vocabulary: save a child about to be shipped off to Mexico, is unfortunate. But his rhetoric is instructive.
One more time
Twenty-two years ago, a team of American-born Asians and Southeast Asian immigrants managed to pass the Oregon Refugee Child Act. We did it over the opposition of mainstream child welfare experts, concerned churches, earnest civil libertarians, a veritable list of Oregon’s good and decent. We modelled our state legislation after 30-year-old federal law, the Indian Child Welfare Act.
Oregon’s ORCA and the federal ICWA, not to mention subsequent agency regulations and case worker manuals, said and say the very same thing over and over again: if you have a mistreated brown or red baby boy or girl — ask his or her family first. Ask familia fast. This is good social work. Do not sit on your hands, knowing how damagingly slow, how certainly awful our juvenile justice system is. If you love this child and his attachment needs more than your attachment to our systemic status quo — move him or her to family. Do it now.
But I digress, this is not the important point promised earlier, this is indeed not where many believe we stumble then turn shrill again and again by situations like Baby Gabriel’s.
Yanks are stuck on race. Race in America is like a barnacle on a boat, on a whale, on a pier post. Hard to unstick.
So stuck. Take Dr. Rita J. Simon’s article, a companion piece to Mr. Reinhard’s December 2 opinion on permanency trumping removal to (gasp) Mexico. We are told that Professor Simon is a sociologist, an author of 50 books, and an expert on transracial adoption.
In her learned article, Dr. Simon assures us that Korean, African-American, and America-Indian adoptees do well. Over 35 years of research, including a 20-year study of 366 kids of color raised in white families, provides no evidence of harm. "Parents and siblings report very positive relationships and strong family attachments."
In response to our burning question about where and how to raise Baby Gabe, Sociologist Rita Simon writes: "On the basis of these facts [reported by The Oregonian], and what I have learned from my 30-plus years of research on various forms of adoption, I strongly recommend and urge the governor to allow the Brandts (the foster family) to adopt Gabriel with the proviso that if she wishes, his grandmother would have visitation rights, and that the Brandts would stay in touch with the grandmother, by sending pictures of Gabriel and by describing his experiences growing up."
Wow.
Re-framing our shoving match
When I finished Professor Simon’s opinion piece that Sunday morning I felt a lot like the way I did last Saturday night, right after an argument with my younger brother’s wife’s older sister’s husband’s eldest brother. A Lao guy. It was about a movie he and me both believed we’d seen. He said it was dumb; I thought it was terrific parody. He thought I was an over-educated idiot; I said he was a drunk. It turns out he was all worked up over The Great Escape, a 1963 film about Steve McQueen digging a tunnel out of a Nazi POW camp; I was hot on Escapade, a 1955 movie about a kid named Icky stealing an airplane from behind a school yard.
Likewise, Oregonian Editor David Reinhard and Prof. Rita Simon seem to have seen a very different movie, in a wholly alien language, from the one I just watched.
Side A is worrying about reactive attachment disorder and transracial adoption, Side B is thinking about this kid’s culture. Side A has spent considerable resources studying the developmental impacts of childhood discontinuities and the outcomes of white folks adopting colored ones. Side B doesn’t talk about culture, just lives it. Side A, the one with the power and the politics, has defined the goals and methods, indeed the language of those tidy theories supporting its positions in contests like Baby Gabe’s. Side B only knows what it means to be Mexican or to be Hmong or to be Modoc.
And this is precisely what Indian tribes in the U.S. Congress and Asian activists in the Oregon legislature, what developing world family advocates in a variety of U.N. venues have argued and argued. There is intrinsic value, irreducible humanity, in culture. In a child’s culture of nurture. More to the point: many families living their traditional ethos and aesthetic are not envious of the contemporary urban American family. Not at all.
Yanks, born and schooled in a racialized context, spend tremendous energy on race issues. It’s important to believe that a black kid can be well-adjusted in a white family. Research backs the proposition. But while social scientists pronounce the benefits of colorblindedness, we duck the question of culture.
America does not deal with culture. We’re supposed to leave it at the door. Get white. Our well-worn racial paradigm — informed by African slavery, white guilt, and an ocean of resentment between these two populations — is inadequate for understanding and negotiating our current complex cultural landscape.
Let me make it plain: if my grandson is mistreated by my son, I expect to be the first one told. That is my culture. I will clobber my son and take my grandson home. That is our culture. I will raise him exactly as my father raised me. That is Culture.
If none of these three happen for you, that’s because these norms’re not your culture. If you have the power to shove me aside and do it your way, we have a problem.
If you fail to see this problem, our problem — oh ampun’illah. Lord have mercy on us all, because Mother Mexico’s 100 million ambitious children are one kind of problem, our wobbly world’s 1.3 billion energetic Chinese and 1.6 billion edgy Muslims are problems of a whole other magnitude.
We need to talk.
In response to public uproar, Gov. Kulongoski brought Bryan Johnston, head of the state’s Children, Adults, and Families Division into the brawl. As mediator, Mr. Johnston suggested bringing Baby Gabe’s grandma from Mexico. To talk. The idea caused more outcry. "This is about Gabriel and his best interests," said foster mom Angela Brandt, who wants to adopt Gabriel. "It’s not about whose house is nicer." (The Oregonian, December 1, 2007.)
Mr. Johnston is right about bringing in grandma. So right. Ms. Brandt is right about this boy’s best interests, but it is, ultimately, all about whose home is better. More to the point: who has the power to define then decide what better is.