Article: Selling Mixed Race Babies: The Koreas Example

This article LINK from the Asia Times from July 17, 2002 by Aidan Foster-Carter entitled:  Adopting, Adapting: Korean Orphans is an excellent beginning overview of how mixed-race bodies are used, especially in the context of orphanages. 

Orphans are a part of the world economy.  Korea has an unprecedented amount of orphan transfers and buying and selling of them.  But around the globe, transracial trafficking and the selling of orphaned children, especially the discarded “mixed race” ones, reign intensely ongoing.  Why?

In my own background, it was also a huge phenomenon in Japan as well, although after World War II and the US Occupation of Japan, along with the Korean War and its postwar US presence, presented an intense international field in which the “poor Asian orphans of mixed race” could be marketed as needing help.  African-American families were appealed to tremendously, to adopt mixed-black babies.  The argument then (and still is), is that Asian nations are prejudiced and un-changing, therefore to prevent trauma for these children, they must be adopted out.  This is the case of tremendous staying power of dominant self-images (as a nation and people) of unswerving racism and caste systems of color that have held fairly steady in many places such as Japan, Korea, Okinawa, Thailand, Vietnam, etc.

It must be noted that this thinking was not necessarily dominant until made dominant by powerful community forces who believed in their nations as monoracial. No nation on this earth, is monoracial.  But it is now dreamed and practiced as “true.”  Perhaps to combat European colonization in the earlier centuries, ethnic “one-ness” was necessary.  But there is another perception that does not contradict this, but feeds it: ethnic cleansing.

These self-images of “our nation” and “our people” and “we . . . whatever nation or people” feeds the excuse to ethnically cleanse and continue to in the name of “nation.”  Nation is a European idea.  Imperialism and massacres are precursors.

This article provides a tiny glimpse into just a couple of aspects when we are talking about present-day effects of miscegenation, anti-miscegenation laws and secrecy, desperation, isolation and the throw-away mentality that has seemed to be applied more and more to people in the world–especially women, children and the elderly.

To Read the Asia Times article, CLICK ON THIS TEXT.