Our Homeland Is Each Other

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2018

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, we're handing the mic over to transracial adoptees. They told us what they think is missing from mainstream narratives about adoption, and how being an adoptee is an identity unto itself.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's good, Joel, real quick. So on Friday, November 16th, the code switch podcast is headed to
0:04.6	Harlem's world famous Apollo theater. It's part of the work at festival from WNYC studios.
0:09.7	We're going to have some dope special guests with us, the chef and restaurant tour, Marcus Samuelson,
0:14.0	as well as the percussionist and composer Bobby Sinabria, and more special guests to be announced.
0:19.0	You know that you want to come and kick it with me and Shereen. So you should do that. And here's how.
0:23.8	Go to workitadvents.com that's W-E-R-K-I-T events.com.
0:29.2	I head up. The following podcast contains language that some people may find offensive.
0:39.1	Matthew Everett grew up in a small town in Michigan. He's now 38 years old.
0:43.6	When I was old enough, I started realizing just via people calling me names at school that I was
0:55.0	different. Matthew asked his mom why kids at school kept calling him names and why they kept
1:00.9	telling him he didn't look anything like his parents. And that's when they told him he was adopted
1:06.4	from South Korea. And I had these fantasies in my head. Like maybe I was Korean royalty and
1:14.4	someday my birth parents would come and find me. You're listening to Code Switch. I'm Shereen
1:21.2	Maraji. And I'm Jean Tempe. How do you identify when you're a kid of color who was adopted into a
1:27.1	white family? Most adoptive parents in the US are white and a lot of them are adopting children
1:33.0	who aren't. That's according to the institute on family studies which found that in 2011, nearly
1:39.6	eight in ten adoptive parents of kindergartners were white. Six in ten adopted kindergartners
1:46.5	were kids of color. So if you're adopted and you're a child of color, you're likely being raised
1:52.1	in a transracial family here in the US. And transracial adoption overlaps a lot with transnational
1:57.6	adoption. In the past 18 years, more than 270,000 children have been adopted from other countries.
2:04.0	Usually Russia, China, Ethiopia, Ukraine, Guatemala, and South Korea. And just as an aside, more than
2:11.6	60% of those adoptees were girls. So we put out a call to those of you who've been adopted.
	...

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