CHILDREN BEING TAKEN FROM THEIR MOMS, STORIES OF LAKOTA CHILDREN, IMMIGRANT CHILDREN AND THOSE OF TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION
This video highlights the American government taking away Native American children, who usually end up in the foster care system in which they are raised or adopted by white couples. I hope that people start to educate themselves about adoption and how a lot of kids end up there. If you listen to other people of color who are poor, they speak about how they were targeted by Child Protective Services and their kids were taken away, and that they know a lot of other parents from their area who had that happen despite that there was no evidence of abuse.
The reason this happens is because a lot of people make a lot of money off of foster care and these other government agencies. If you are going to target a group of people you are going to go after those who have the least visibility and therefore don't have as many chances of fighting back. The Native American population in our country has been completely silenced and is probably one of the easiest cultural groups to target. As the video states "South Dakota receives $70,000 annually in federal fund s for each child placed in foster care."
If you would like to learn more about this project you can visit:
www.lakotalaw.org/action
This next story talks about children who end up in the system, when their parents or parent is deported due to not having legal documents to be in this country. What people don't know is that they will often times deport the mother of the children, but put the children into the foster care system to be adopted, all the while the mother is denied the chance to take her children back with her to her home country. I remember reading about this woman from Guatemala who was deported and the system took her daughter, deported her and wouldn't let her take her child back with her. So now she is stuck in Guatemala, while her baby is stuck in the U.S. and there are no plans by our government to reunite the two. Most likely the child will end up being adopted by a white couple.
"Mother and daughter call the episode "the stupidest thing," but stupid became serious when immigration status became part of the equation. For Luz, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, that day triggered an interlocking set of immigration policies adopted over the last 18 years that resulted in her deportation and put her at risk of losing her children permanently. After a month in jail, she went through deportation proceedings and her three children went into foster care, joining an estimated 5,000 children of deported parents. Two months later, an aunt took them in....
Mothers, a relatively small cohort (14 percent of deportations), are an often overlooked segment of the deported population. They don't fit the image of a the single immigrant laborer or the young student brought to the U.S. as a child. However, their migration and deportation experience illuminates the many ways an immigrant parent can lose a child."
http://america.aljazeera.com/features/2014/3/mothers-whose-tiesarecutattheborder.html
Lastly I wanted to include an article which talks about transracial adoption from children who experienced it. Taking a child away from it's mother is already the most abusive traumatizing thing you could put a child through, and then on top of that having their culture taken away, as if their culture isn't good enough is just incredibly insulting.
"The second are the new voices joining the debate - black and mixed-race children who were adopted by white families in the Sixties and Seventies are now adults and are becoming increasingly vocal about their experiences of lifelong identity issues, mental health problems and deep feelings of isolation that came with even the most loving of homes. Their mantra is that 'love is not enough.'
David, now a 45-year-old academic, of dual heritage - white and Arab - was adopted by a white couple in 1962. "Love is not enough,' he said 'and there's a living community struggling with the consequences. Where do these children (placed in white families) get their linguistic, religious and cultural knowledge from? The main problem is the under-theorisation of the issues."
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/jul/06/children.communities1
