African American Adoptions and Expanding Visions of Family

Why do transnational adoption accounts depict adopters as white? Kori Graves delves into this question in A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War. Centering on the obscured history of African American participation in practices of domestic, transracial, and transnational adoptions, Graves tells the story of Korean black children, the African American families that tried to adopt them, and the welfare professionals and nonprofessionals involved in this process of family making. Graves demonstrates that the relatively small number and sporadic nature of Korean black placements in the 1950s and 1960s reflect the impact of segregation and racial inequality upon adoption practices. This history is anchored in the politics of the Cold War and civil rights. After the Korean War, Cold War imperatives shaped narratives around the adoption of Korean children as acts that saved them from communism and disproved U.S. racism, while the ongoing efforts of the Civil Rights Movement brought many African American adoptive families to draw the connections between their struggles to adopt and the broader struggles for civil rights. Building upon the work of historians Brenda Gayle Plummer and Heide Fehrenbach, who examine the adoption of “brown babies” of Germany after World War II, and in conversation with existing studies on Korean transnational adoptions, A War Born Family takes its place as a seminal text on Korean black adoptions after the Korean War. Written in clear and accessible prose, this book will appeal to scholars and non-scholars alike, and will be of particular interest to students of U.S. history and the Cold War, race and civil rights, critical adoption studies, and family and childhood studies.

Political science · Politics · Racism · Refugee · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Vision · White (mutation) · Child Welfare and Adoption · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law