Join me on Sunday, April 7th with Families With Children from Asia Midwest and Land of Gazillion Adoptees Coffee and Conversation series. I’ll be discussing the landscape of post-adoption needs and services for families. To register, click here.
The interview with MPR about the contested adoption case and the MN Supreme Court’s ruling is now available on the MPR site. It was a real honor to be asked to provide some context to the case and although I was very nervous, I hope that I was able to add some additional context and understanding to this very sad case. In the end, two sets of parents had oodles of love and ability to raise these girls;and both of them would be able to meet these girls’ needs. My biggest concern is that family connections will no longer be considered as important as material goods, even though the research has shown that children adopted by relatives fare the best. I am unaware if any research has been done on contested adoptions by foster parents and relatives – what I would want to know is how often race factors in to where children end up. If the grandparents were white and of the same socioeconomic status would the same decision have been made?
For a very thorough and in-depth examination of the case and the response by the grandmother, I recommend reading the articles by City Pages journalist Olivia LaVecchia.
Tomorrow morning I am scheduled to be a guest on Minnesota Public Radio to discuss the Supreme Court’s ruling in a contested adoption case. The conflict, which was profiled by reporter Olivia LaVecchia for the City Pages in January, centers around the adoption of two little girls. The lower court had ruled in favor of the foster parents that had cared for both of the girls since their births and the grandmother in Missouri who had been trying to adopt them for nearly the same amount of time.
The show is scheduled to air at about 11 am. I’ll post a de-brief after the show.
I have reached that stage in my doctoral program where I am finally embarking on my research project. I am seeking participants for my study on the placement stability of internationally adopted children with disabilities.
Are you an adoptive parent of an internationally adopted child with a disability?
Since the finalization of your child’s adoption, has the child been placed – either temporarily or permanently – in a group home, residential treatment center, foster care or another adoptive family?
If so, I am interested in speaking with you.
Who: Minnesota adoptive parents whose internationally adopted child:
What is involved: I am asking adoptive parents for about 60 to 90 minutes of their time to interview them about their experiences. Participation is voluntary and your information will be protected and confidential. Your participation in this study will never be disclosed.
Why: Adopting a child with disabilities can be both challenging and rewarding. Parents who have adopted children from outside the United States with mental health and intellectual/developmental disabilities sometimes struggle to find appropriate pre- adoption education and/or post-adoption support to help them manage the challenges of parenting a child with a disability. The purpose of this study is to inform adoption practices and improve adoption supports for families that adopted children with disabilities.
How: To participate in this study, or to find out more information about this study, please contact JaeRan Kim at jaerankim@gmail.com or 612-626-3831. You may download the FLYER Placement stability for intercountry adoptees and distribute to others who may be interested in participating in this study.
For up to date information on this research project, please visit my research site – at JaeRan Kim Research. Thank you for your consideration!
This study has been approved by the University of Minnesota Institutional Review Board #1301P26761
I just wanted to publicly thank Relando Thompkins, one of my favorite bloggers, for including me in his 13 Compelling Social Work Blogs post. Relando’s blog, Notes from an Aspiring Humanitarian is a lovely blog full of inspirational and thoughtful posts about social work, society, culture, working for social justice and peace. Relando and I share a passion for improving the experience of students of color in higher education. Always thoughtful and thought-provoking, please add N.A.H. to your blog roll!
I recently had a chat with Keren Riley, blogger at Riley’s in Uganda. Go check it out!
America is in mourning.
On Friday morning, I first saw the news on my facebook page. Shooter at an elementary school in Connecticut. Soon after, more posts on social media sites and online news outlets. The facts of the event continued to become more and more terrifying. For most of the weekend, I, like so many others, shed many tears and continued to ask, “why?”
People are hurting and outraged and angry and are looking for answers as to why anyone would commit such an atrocious crime. So in watching and reading the news, and in online discussions, people are sending petitions to strengthen gun control laws, calling for a ban assault weapons, saying this horrible event was because we “took God out of the schools,” and writing blog posts about the serious lack of services for those with mental illness.
But this post is not about any of those things. I will save my critiques about how the news and media outlets responded in the early hours of the aftermath of the event for another day. I will discuss the issue how difficult it is to get quality mental health services on another post. But I do want to talk about violence.
From the time the shooter was named* people have begun to attempt to put together a profile that might explain the person that committed this heinous act:
We will never know if individually, or in combination, any of these factors may have contributed toward making this person into the kind of person that would kill so many people. In attempting de-facto to put together the elements we believe must provide us with the answers to our question, we are missing a much larger conversation about violence – who commits it, what it looks like, why it happens, and how we as a society handle it.
By focusing on the individual elements of this person we accomplish two things. First, we further stigmatize everyone that has any of those traits because now we are establishing a correlation between factor and violence, even if we can’t truly establish a cause and effect relationship.But stigmatizing people does the opposite of helping prevent violence from happening because it makes it more unlikely people will ask for help given the increased negative perception. Secondly, we further look for individual reasons that violence is committed rather than looking at larger cultural values around violence that are not being addressed. We tell ourselves that if we, or our loved ones, don’t have any of these stigmatizing factors then we can be absolved from violence prevention because we are not the cause.
In talking about these events with family and friends this weekend, I was struck by the way our society tends to deal with these incidents of mass shootings – at schools, at the Aurora, CO theater, and recently at the mall in Oregon – by looking at the individual profiles of the perpetrators; yet violence occurs on a daily basis in our neighborhoods, on national level and on a global level every day, and we seem to be inured to it. Are we conditioned to only respond to one kind of violence – the kind in which a lone perpetrator sprays bullets into a mass of unknown victims – but not care as much about intimate partner violence, violence against children, wars, and other forms of violence that happen on a daily, if not hourly basis?
On Saturday while watching the news (for a full 10 minutes before I had to shut it off because I was so disturbed by the reporting), I said to my partner, “this must be what it feels like for both the Israelis and Palestinians – this kind of assault, this kind of violence, this mass murder of its citizens. Imagine if we had a Sandy Hook every few weeks, what would we be like as a nation?”
As a parent, I tell my children that bullying and violence is about control and power; and that those who commit violence do so because they want to have control over someone or something and exert their power. I believe that violence is about getting what you want when you can’t get it through other means. It’s about having a sense of entitlement, that someone took something away that was supposed to be yours, whether it’s something tangible and material or whether it’s an ideal or behavior. It’s the fist in the partner’s face because they don’t respect you; it’s the assault of a child because you can; it’s the war over land because you want it and you don’t want them to have it.
What’s missing is an honest dialogue about violence – about the kind we individually and collectively condone or promote. And what else is missing is how we handle our feelings of anger, entitlement, desire to control and disempower others, jealousy. And also, why we are not talking more about how we teach compassion and reconciliation?
I am devastated by Friday’s events. As a parent, I can’t begin to fathom the grief and loss that the parents, siblings, friends and community of the victims are feeling. That such an act of violence happened is overwhelming. The acts of kindness – in particular the story of the therapy dogs comforting grief-stricken children and parents, and the news that out-of-town volunteers helped fill in at local businesses so employees could attend the funerals for the first two victims – were especially touching.
Violence is about making someone else feel disempowered, out of control and powerless. It’s about the perpetrator establishing their dominance. And so it’s not about the size of the weapon (fist, knife, gun, tank), it’s about the underlying motive to disempower someone else, to take it out on someone less powerful than you. The choice of weapon merely allows someone with the intent to harm the tools to harm more people, more cruelly.
*I’m not linking or naming the shooter because I want to avoid search engines, etc.
Photo by Jeff Riedel for the New York Times
This past week in the New York Times Magazine I came across this article, The Hazzards of Growing Up Painlessly, about a teenager who has a genetic condition that makes her unable to feel pain. Coincidentally on the same day I read this blog post by a Korean Adoptee, Joy Lieberthal. Joy writes, “It is so bittersweet to realize that without the pain, there can be little in the way of true joy and I struggle to make sense of the idea that oftentimes in adoption, this paradox exists time and time again.”
I’ve been thinking about this concept a lot in the past few years. I’ve talked about it in terms of something I’ve noticed frequently with adoptive parents who tend to over-compensate for the pain and trauma their child has experienced by attempting to eliminate pain in their children’s lives. One of the things I found most interesting about the story of people who do not feel pain is that some question whether or not these folks that can’t feel pain can also feel empathy or emotional pain.
The idea that empathy is driven from being able to relate to someone else’s pain based on one’s own knowledge of pain is fascinating. Roland Staud, the doctor who treated the teenager profiled in the NYT article, wondered if the connection between feeling physical pain and emotional pain would affect the teen. Author Justin Heckert writes, “[w]e sometimes experience emotional pain physically — Staud used the tried-and-true example of heartbreak, how the end of a romance can cause a physical pain — and he wondered if the relationship between the body and emotions also goes the other way; if a person lacks the ability to feel physical pain, is her emotional development somehow stunted?”
As it turns out, Ashlyn Blocker, the teenager at the center of this article, does cry and does react to others’ pain, even if she can’t describe hurt or pain. Is it true that to experience joy once must feel pain? Is it imperative to have a physical understanding how pain and suffering feels in order to be able to develop empathy? This study on folks with Congenital Insensitivity to Pain (CIP) and empathy found that those with CIP relied on their (what I imagine must have been learned) empathetic skills to imagine others’ pain.
In the past I have used the analogy that when we experience “growing pains” both physically and emotionally that it is a time of development and growth; like Joy, I have always subscribed to the idea that to know happiness and to be empathetic, one must have known pain personally. I have told adoptive parents who describe the ways they try to take the pain involved in adoption away that they can only provide a “soft landing” for their child because you can’t take away or prevent pain, and that it’s a normal part of growing as a human being – and further that those who don’t experience “growing pains” don’t “grow.” But this article gave me pause; clearly there are those growing and developing without first-hand experiencing the “pain” associated with growth; however I am still left curious about how pain is defined; and if the brain still reacts to painful stimuli even if it doesn’t tell your nerves to react.
How much is empathy a learned concept that can be taught or modeled by parents and how much is it a factor of our own experiences? And in what ways does this impact social work? How schools of social work teach empathy for students who haven’t experienced much personal experience with pain or suffering? On the other hand, how do we help students that have experienced trauma, pain or suffering to be reflective of how their own experiences impact the way their empathy is triggered and/or applied?
Yesterday I attended a conference session titled “Facilitating Genuine Dialogue on Diversity While Instructors’ Own Marginalized Identities are Evoked” with Izumi Sakamoto (University of Toronto), Lorraine Gutierrez (University of Michigan) and Billie S. Allan (University of Toronto). I attended a panel by the same presenters a few years ago on “Decolonizing social work curriculum” (I can’t recall the exact title but it was something along these lines). These women are fantastic; Billie began by thanking the ancestors of the land that we were standing on for their gifts which immediately made me feel at home, and brought to mind my first nations colleagues and friends back home.
I attended this session based on the following description:
Although there is a plethora of literature on how to teach cultural competency to students, rarely covered is how instructors with multiple marginalized identities negotiate the classroom space and engage students in genuine dialogue on marginalization and privilege. Presenters will share their experiences in navigating through tension and vulnerabilities.
The shared experiences were, at times, overwhelming and painful and for the larger-than-expected audience for this session, often times quite emotional. I watched as several accomplished and tenured professors shed tears as they described very confrontational and emotionally violent actions that privileged white students had brought to their classrooms. It is experiences like this when I struggle with whether I want to, or have the energy to, continue to hold ground and/or push on within the institutional and social systems that oppress marginalized communities – and that includes schools of social work and social service agencies.
I am fortunate that I have some amazing women of color friends walking with me on our doctoral education journeys but I have to admit that I wish there were more of us in my field. I am concerned that there is a lot of talk about social justice and anti-oppression in social work but in the daily business of social work practice, education, and research there is a surprising silence about confronting the arc towards the status quo. I go to these conferences and have very different experiences that seem to be so dichotomous as to be splitting; on the one hand I can have amazing conversations with radical social workers who speak of decolonizing social work practice while only hours later I’m questioned about my race and ethnicity by a white social worker who thought it was her right to know where I was *really* from (and then proceeded to “guess” based on her ideas about my name).
A few weeks ago at the Adoption Initiative conference in New York, I had the luxury of spending several days with deeply thoughtful and intellectually and socially grounded professors, doctoral students, artists and practitioners with whom I could speak deeply and emotionally about the challenges of being in academia as someone who challenges the current operating paradigms. One of the themes that came up was how important it is to take care of ourselves so that we don’t burn out, self-destruct, or lose ourselves in this difficult work. One of my new friends suggested reading Sisters of the Yam by bell hooks. My copy arrived the day before I left for this conference and I had been sneaking in little moments to read over the past couple of days. So when the group presenter asked each of us to say something about how we move forward, I pulled out this book from my bag, and promised that I would finish reading Sisters of the Yam.
I mentioned on this blog the other day how privileged I am to be facing these choices; but attending this session also increased my sensitivity to the ways in which people of color or people from other marginalized communities make these choices with much greater stakes than those from more privileged backgrounds. This isn’t necessarily a matter of just making choices; rather if people don’t stay and fight hard to claim a space in the academy (or in the profession) it becomes more difficult for those coming up after to see themselves, as well as perpetuates the hierarchies and gatekeeping that exist. One of the participants of this session I attended mentioned that she carries with her the spirit of her mother, grandmother, aunts and all the other women in her family who came before her who never had the opportunities because they were denied access.
I left this session with more questions than answers and more sadness than hope. And this thought: we already know we are strong and capable because we made it this far, even with the many obstacles in our way; the question is, are our institutions, professions and colleagues with privilege strong enough to change the status quo? Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong people to shoulder the burden of inclusivity and social change.
Photo © Will Marlow
Last night after a full day of conference sessions and dinner with my colleagues, a friend and I decided to take an evening visit to the MLK memorial. This is my 6th visit to DC in the past few years and the last three times I’ve walked the MLK memorial at night. There is something quite profound about the starkness of the sculpture of MLK and the simple, clean lines of the walls of quotes.
My favorite quote from this memorial always makes me think about social work, because I believe what is expressed through these words exactly sums up what I think social work is all about.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.
- MLK, Alabama, 1963
