Drinking Games for Adoptees at LGA

Thanks to Land of Gazillion Adoptees for sharing my Summer Drinking Games. 

I am thrilled to be a regular contributor to the LGA online magazine! Watch for us at the end of this summer.

UNFAIR Professional Development

What is UNFAIR?

United For Agents of Institutional Racism is a nationwide collaborative among well-meaning White professionals and self-appointed allies who absolve themselves from guilt and responsibility for systemic racism. UNFAIR advocates against individual acts of meanness targeting people of color and promotes interracial friendship for the benefit of White people. United For Agents of Institutional Racism is especially troubled by the cost of racism to White people and seeks to build coalitions with communities of color that perpetuate traditions of racism by celebrating diversity and educating about otherness.

What does United For Agents of Institutional Racism offer people of color?

Absolutely nothing. However, people of color are encouraged to participate in UNFAIR opportunities because it makes White people in positions of power feel more useful and less guilty. The UNFAIR White professionals are not targeted by the crushing impact of institutional racism, and therefore eager to provide the following opportunities that distinguish them as good White allies.

People of color will learn the following competencies with UNFAIR professional development:

• Smile at the White people. White people are socialized to believe that everything is about them and need constant validation in order to maintain this serious delusion.
• Do not gather with people of color in public or private. People of color, when in solidarity with one another in an oppressive environment, are viewed with suspicion due to White guilt.
• Don't say the R-word. White people do not distinguish between racism as a complex system of power that traps and dehumanizes both agents and targets, and being called a bad racist. Substitute more playful and less specific words like: tricky, gooey, squishy, and stinky.

If you are a highly skilled and competent professional of color who is passionate about your career, these UNFAIR experiences are central to your professional development. With UNFAIR professional development, you will develop the skills essential to tolerating additional expectations, accountability measures that disproportionately target you, and underpayment. Ultimately, UNFAIR professional development will ensure more harmonious working relationships with anti-racist intentioned White colleagues who are lighter skinned, higher paid, and more difficult to terminate than you.

UNFAIR Skill Building Workshop
The UNFAIR skill building workshop aims to empower people of color to take sole responsibility for institutional racism. United For Agents of Institutional Racism understands that racial violence is a painful experience for people of color and seeks to alleviate White guilt by changing how targets of racism feel about their reality. The UNFAIR skill building workshop is open to all people of color who have no access to power and are trapped by systemic oppression.

"The UNFAIR skill building workshop helped me keep my job and my White friends. As a Korean American Adoptee who grew up in a small town in Minnesota, I was frequently harassed by my peers for the color of my skin. Surprisingly, even the vitriol of hate speech didn't prepare me for the soul-sucking, slow death of institutional racism. Thanks to UNFAIR opportunities, I learned how to take all my righteous anger and turn it inwards towards myself. I now take antidepressant medication and do yoga in order to manage my self-hatred. Since fixing institutional racism is thankless and unpaid work for me, I am grateful that I can get treated for the symptoms of institutional racism without burdening my White colleagues and draining limited resources on my special interests." 

-Kim Kim, UNFAIR skill building workshop participant 2013

White Mentor Program
People of color are encouraged to apply for the UNFAIR White mentor program where a select few of the least scary historically disenfranchised professionals of color will be allowed access to an over privileged, less experienced, and higher paid White mentor. The UNFAIR White mentor program provides White professionals with the illusion of supporting targets of racism in meaningful ways.

"As a person of color working at a predominately White institution, I used to feel isolated at work. However, my UNFAIR White mentor allowed me to vent about racism, while encouraging me to see that incidents of racism could also be dismissed as perfectly logical misunderstandings. My UNFAIR White mentor helped me accept that White people can't change institutional racism if they don't know it exists. Thanks White mentor!" 

-Lee, Model Minority 2013

If you would like to learn more about UNFAIR professional development for people of color, please join United For Agents of Institutional Racism at the annual UNFAIR summer potluck. Bring something ethnic and get a free t-shirt made by your people!

F*ck. Marry. Kill.

In the first weeks of returning to the United States, I was relentless in subjecting my extraordinarily gentle, feminist partner to the game F*ck, Marry, Kill. I would identify three people he adores, and then eagerly watch his anguish unfold as he was forced to reduce each person's worth into three horrific categories. He hates this game and never wanted to play. I also hate this game and never wanted to play. Nevertheless, I was born of poor people and got thrown into the lottery that put me at odds with my first mother and all the others who are f*cked and left for dead.

I was adopted. This means that I was perceived as marriable. I was just a baby; I was innocent and worthy of salvation. My White adopter, in her call to preserve my goodness for marriage, dressed me in a beautiful white gown and baptized me in the name of White Jesus. Her efforts were in vain.

I aged, a devastating error for children who are adopted under the pretense of fantasy. As I grew up, effortlessly claiming my space as a human being who is shaped by time, my worth deteriorated to f*ckable and forgettable. Against my will, my aging process stole my honorary innocence and re-positioned me as an exotic alien. My adopters hated me for disrupting the fantasy they had purchased, so I learned to hate myself for being irreversibly human. 

I confronted my 29th birthday last week. After all these years, I am still debilitated by the truths of this enduring human body that has absorbed the pain of adoption, abuse, and assault, and continues to live under duress from the White American dream that thrives on the consumption and disregard of bodies like mine. Two years ago, I traveled through space and time in order to locate my home and family. I learned that I was a baby born of loving parents, rather than a fantasy manufactured for possession.

In this twenty-ninth year of my life, it is time that I return to the origins of my monsters. When the time comes for me to vanquish my demons, I must remind myself that these monsters created from hatred and violence are no match my human spirit that was stewarded into the world through love and hope. If I may be granted one wish for my birthday, I am asking for the courage to not back down from the quest for personal liberation from these horrors. 

Help

“embracing one's wholeness makes life more demanding--because once you do that, you must live your whole life. One of the most painful discoveries I made in the midst of the dark woods of depression was that a part of me wanted to stay depressed. As long as I clung to this living death, life became easier; little was expected of me, certainly not serving others.”

-Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation    

 

I hate to admit it, but I need help. It has been nearly two months since returning to the United States, and I am still struggling to accept living here. Last week was my birthday. I am one year older, yet I still don't know how to ask for help when I desperately need it.

How can I ask for help when I feel unworthy of the love that is offered to me?

The week before I left Korea, I started crying and haven't found a way to stop since. I started hearing voices again. I'm worthless. I don't deserve help. I felt like I didn't belong in Korea because I couldn't communicate in Korean. I felt so ashamed of failing, and I couldn't bear the guilt bringing my friends and family down with me.

This is disordered thinking. I know this both intimately and professionally. Nevertheless, these thoughts spread throughout my body and started weighing me down.

While living in Korea, I learned the uncomfortable truth that I could go no further without accepting help. Much to my dismay, this also meant confronting my self-loathing and committing to loving myself in the quest to relinquish helplessness.

This is my life's work. It is necessary and urgent. At this time, I must remind myself that I am not selfish for committing to loving myself, nor am I weak for learning to hate myself. And most importantly, I must learn to accept help in order to be in solidarity with all peoples who have been taught to feel unworthy by a system of violence that thrives on isolation and helplessness. Therefore, I am both humbly and defiantly reaching out for help.

In solidarity.

Relinquishment

Dear Mom and Dad,

I cannot understand why I am leaving, when I swore on my life that I would return. Please remember me, and forgive me for not reconciling our broken histories.

My greatest fear is that this second chance will be our last. I once hoped that we would have the rest of our lives to share with one another. I now realize the door to the past has been closed. Life is no longer ours to simply enter into together. 

I wonder if I must relinquish you, as you once did to me. You are not mine to keep. We do not have that privilege. Still, no daughter should ever have to bury the memories of her parents. Yet no parents should have chosen as you once did. I will never accept this wretched fate.

I am still reaching for you, in hopes that you will meet me one day. Until then, I will cherish our meetings and seek peace in letting you go.

Yours truly.

For the A.S.S. Haters

Stop. Just stop with the ignorant comments and assumptions about me and other Adoptees who find resonance with Adopter Savior Syndrome. Coloring Out Lori Jane is my personal blog where I seek to expose systemic oppression while reaching for justice and liberation with those who are willing to meet me here. For my process, I needed to reveal Adopter Savior Syndrome as a painful reality in the transnational and transracial adoption community. For those who are tempted to reduce my writings to mere polemics, I want to assert that I am doing nothing short of writing for my lives.

Dear White Adopters who seek to delegitimize my voice as hateful spewing:

In case you forgot, I am an adult Adoptee who was once an adopted child who may not be any different from your daughters whom you love. This is our truth that we are inviting you to hear. As a target of this system of domination, I do not have the privilege to ignore you. Though you can easily dismiss, distort, and even adopt me.

I must beg this question: If you cannot hear me now, how could you parent me then?

Dear victim of reverse racism:

My first name is 똘똘이 (Smarty). I was born at 8 AM in Seoul, South Korea to my married Korean parents. I am now living in Korea and working alongside Adoptees and single mothers who are resisting a system of power that devastates first families and coerces parents into relinquishing their children. I was not an orphan until the system made me an orphan. When I write from this trauma, I am revealing our collective adoption community wounds.

Additionally, let me remind the haters that there is nothing you can do to me that you have not already done. You have taken my identity, my family, my home, and my culture of origin. You have subjected me to abuse and neglect, isolation, and the threat of violence and institutionalization as a pathological queer woman of color. You have taught me to see myself as fat, ugly, and stupid every time I look to see myself in the White adoptive family and community that was forced upon me. You did all of this to me before I learned your words, and before I knew my strength to resist this assault.

Do you still want to pick a fight with this community of grown Adoptees who started fighting these systems of domination as children and now are organizing globally to resist generations of violence?

I dare you. Bring us your ignorance, fears, and anger so that we can all blow up this love story into an issue that demands the attention of every person who believes in the sanctity of family in order to sustain our precious world.

And dare I threaten: The more children you adopt, the more adults we will have for our resistance movement. We know where you live. We are your family.

Understanding A.S.S.

I do want to write a response to this creepy comment:

And this one that aligns itself with the creepy comment:

And maybe even this one, that uses k-10094 to censor me:

I also want to continue to make A.S.S. jokes about Adopter Savior Syndrome as an urgent health epidemic that should be interrogated and probed by an entire task force of scholars, healthcare professionals, policy makers, and concerned citizens. I also want to call White adoptive parents to join Adoptees in resisting systemic oppression by organizing groups such as Adopter Network United for Solidarity (A.N.U.S) or Families Embracing Collective Active Love (F.E.C.A.L). However, I am guessing this will only inflame, so I shall instead share some context to the importance of A.S.S. awareness.

As a member of the adoption community who is committed to loving and sustainable multiracial families, I am deeply troubled by the current trend of Adopters and incompetent healthcare professionals diagnosing adopted children with attachment disorders that further diminish the Adoptee's agency, while re-directing attention from systemic oppression to an individual pathology. Therefore, both for my personal liberation and in solidarity with my fellow Adoptees, I constructed Adopter Savior Syndrome. A.S.S. is actually an acute diagnosis of a larger societal power dynamic that positions White adoptive parents as agents of racial violence against their adopted children of color. 

Adopter Savior Syndrome is not intended to be an accusation against individual adoptive parents. Thus, I invite you to put down your defenses. I am not calling you an A.S.S.