Racialized Choices: Chinese Adoption and the `White Noise' of Blackness

Abstract

The transnational, transracial adoption of children provides the opportunity to explore how race binds and differentiates kinship and national belonging, especially when considered in relation to options for adopting both at home and abroad. More specifically, the reasons white parents give for choosing to adopt from China reveal how the normative white, American family is constructed through discourses of foreign and domestic, Asian and black. I explore three themes that contribute to the relative desirability of adopting Chinese children: they are seemingly unfettered by attachments, racially “flexible,” and readily constructed as rescuable. In these discourses that bring Chinese children home, blackness serves as a mediating backdrop — a domestic “white noise.” But China — US adoption unsettles as much as it reproduces racial stratifications; ongoing encounters with intimate relations of difference push at the boundaries of white privilege and weak multiculturalism.

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