White Supremacy, Christian Americanism, and Adoption

abstract:This essay reflects on adoption’s connections to longer histories of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and other forms of white supremacist violence that disrupt Indigenous families and families of color. Child welfare practices discipline the bodies of children of color and Indigenous children as well as their parents, resulting in forcible separations (e.g., slavery, the Indian Boarding School Project) as well as coercive fostering and adoption practices. Christian Americanism operates as a tool of white supremacy in so far as it is deployed to lay judgement on who is worthy to parent and whose families are worth preserving. Addressing the broad histories of child removal in the United States, this essay calls attention to how the separation of migrant children at the US-Mexico border from 2017 onward is just another example of violent dekinning in an attempt to control and surveil nonwhite families. The past informs the present and futures of both the formation and dissolution of kinship ties.