It is a complex issue. On one hand, nobody wants to see a culture eroded or an individual damaged by being placed in a family where he or she will not be understood or respected. On the other hand, children in need of adoption are often in vulnerable, critical conditions. Their needs must be assessed individually, and according to their best interests.
Just as children need adoptive families, would-be adoptive parents need and want children to love. Canadians, Americans, and others in developed countries continue to adopt many children internationally, and transracially.
Many people and organizations openly accept transracial adoption. The Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) notes that transracial adoptive families need to help children develop the skills they need to be emotionally healthy (an important approach for all parents). In a position paper, the CPS states that there is wide consensus that transracial adoptees, whether domestic or inter-country, need to create an identity that accepts their own physical appearance, their birth heritage, and their heritage of upbringing. And it acknowledges that transracial adoptees and their families do experience racist and stereotypical remarks and are likely to face “racial teasing.” Nonetheless, the CPS takes a more positive position on the issue, declaring that transracial adoption affords families an opportunity to experience another culture and to celebrate diversity.
Adoptions cannot be sanctioned if they involve cultural genocide, the theft or sale of children in the wake of social upheavals or natural disasters, or the removal of children against the will of their families. Insofar as international adoptions are concerned, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that inter-country adoption may be considered if it is not possible to place the child in foster care or adoption or to have the child cared for suitably in the country of origin; if the placement does not involve improper financial gain; and if the adoption has the consent of the parents, guardians, or others caring for the child.
If there is respect for the fundamental rights and desires of the child and those who have brought him or her into the world, and if we are not destroying the culture of a country or of a group of people, I would say that adoption — be it international, domestic, transracial, or in-race — does offer a unique opportunity. Love is never guaranteed in any family relationship, but adoption offers the potential to someone who has not received what many people take for granted — belonging, security, encouragement, and love in a family. It unites people who want to create family relationships, not because of birth relationships or shared DNA, but because of something that runs much deeper than blood: the need for togetherness and bonding in daily life. And it allows us to transcend traditional notions of blood when it comes to family.
There are many ways to parent successfully. And many ways to give a child security, self-esteem, and the means to function as an independent adult. Many biological parents do this beautifully. And so do many step-parents, same-gender parents, and adoptive parents — including those adopting across racial lines. Alternative arrangements give parents and children alike the potential to assert that, when it comes to developing supportive family units, love will trump blood every time. The cliché has it that blood is thicker than water. But it’s a ridiculous saying. Who has water in their veins, anyway? Speaking to my own stepdaughter or to my imaginary adoptive child, I would have to say that your blood is no different than mine.
LIKE ADOPTION AND STEP-PARENTING, other cultural traditions and rituals offer the potential to expand the way we imagine family ties. After graduating from university in Canada, my eldest daughter, Geneviève, moved to Ghana to work for a year or so with the World University Service of Canada. When she returned home for a vacation, she noted that in Ghana she would habitually use the term auntie in referring to or introducing any woman who was older than her, and sister to describe any female friend her age. When I asked if she found it strange to refer to her own boss as “auntie,” Geneviève replied that she enjoyed living in a society that did not necessarily share North American obsessions with narrow kinship structures. In Canada and the United States, she argued, people are constantly expected to define the precise biological or blood tie that they share with each other. In Ghana, she argued, the public definition of precise family units counts for much less, and people constantly use the language of family — “mother,” “auntie,” or “daughter” — to refer to each other, regardless of biological ties.
Just as Ghanaians seem to be telling us that family-like ties do not derive strictly from formal kinship, people of African heritage in the Americas have been calling each other “brother” and “sister” for hundreds of years. When I was a child, I was astounded to see that my father would greet total strangers in the street, if they happened to be black too. In our Toronto suburb in the 1960s, we rarely spotted other black families. “Look Larry,” he said to me once, “a black bus driver!” He was showing me, in his own way, that he felt a sense of kinship with them, because they were all part of the African Diaspora.
People can feel the ties of family through a nation or a diaspora, but we also have a long history of forging new familial ties out of thin air. For example, around the world, the notion of blood brothers — unrelated men who create the ties of family by intermingling blood and swearing loyalty to each other — has been yet another way to contemplate the meaning of family ties that reach beyond mere biology.
In one of the most famous medieval legends about blood brothers, the Norwegian warrior Örvar Odd and his Swedish rival Hjalmar convened to do battle. Hjalmar had more boats of war than Örvar Odd, so he set some aside to make it a fair fight. It turned out that they were evenly matched. Instead of continuing on to the death, they ceased their hostilities and formed a pact of blood brotherhood by bleeding jointly onto a patch of earth that was subsequently covered by sod. After creating this pact, Örvar Odd and Hjalmar went on to fight many battles side by side, until Hjalmar died in a duel with another man over the right to marry Princess Ingeborg.
In 1866, the Swedish artist Mårten Eskil Winge painted Parting from Örvar Odd after the Fight on Samsö, which shows Örvar Odd bidding farewell to the mortally wounded Hjalmar. Örvar Odd stands in his red cape and clasps the hand of Hjalmar, who lies on the ground with his sword, helmet, and shield strewn beside his body. In the background, a ship glides over the water, Hjalmar’s victims lie dead, and birds take flight. Örvar Odd and Hjalmar stare into each other’s eyes — brothers to the very end.
In another painting of the very same era by another Swedish artist — August Malmström — Örvar Odd continues to render service to his blood brother, even after Hjalmar’s death. The name of the painting — Örvar Odd Informs Ingeborg about Hjalmar’s Death — says almost everything we need to know. Örvar Odd delivers the body of his blood brother to the woman Hjalmar loved, but Princess Ingeborg cannot sustain the tragedy. She dies of grief in the arms of her father, the Swedish King Yngvi, while Örvar Odd remains strangely immobile, looking on and scratching his beard.
The mythical story of the blood brothers captured the Nordic imagination for centuries and has trickled into global culture so profoundly that the very term blood brothers is now part of our daily language. It reflects a global fascination with the idea that brotherhood forged from spilled blood sometimes counts for more than relations resting on a biological foundation.
JUST AS WE HAVE COMPLICATED family relationships, sometimes involving blood and other times moving beyond it, we have a similarly intricate relationship with regard to notions of citizenship. Citizenship is the ultimate expression of group belonging. Citizenship determines where you may live, and very often where you may not live or go without permission. The very notion of citizenship — a defined group of people living in or having access to a given nation, while either keeping others out or limiting their rights as visiting foreigners — divides the earth into arbitrary pieces. On this planet we have massive nations such as Russia and Canada, and tiny countries such
as Monaco and Seychelles, but they all have rules about who gets to belong and who does not.
Citizenship also comes with rights, responsibilities, and privileges. Few would dispute that a child born with Canadian, American, British, or French citizenship is likely to enjoy infinitely more privileges and opportunities than, say, a child born with citizenship in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, or Nepal. One current legal case that illustrates the disparity of opportunity revolves around a severely autistic seventeen-year-old girl named Sabreena Shabdeen, who was born in Canada and has Canadian citizenship, but whose parents were denied refugee status and later moved to the United States. In 2013, Sabreena’s parents were at risk of being deported from the United States to Sri Lanka. They expressed the desire to have their daughter moved back to Canada, where she would have better health-care opportunities than in Sri Lanka. At the time of writing this book, the Canadian government had refused to let the parents take their daughter back into Canada — the country of her citizenship — and had recommended that they move back to Sri Lanka. The parents were left with the choice of leaving their daughter alone in Canada (if they could get her to the country), or taking her back to Sri Lanka, where they did not feel she would receive proper care. This would not be an issue if Sabreena’s parents had Canadian citizenship. But they don’t. So they have no rights in the country.
Traditionally, nations have determined citizenship eligibility by using one of two key principles: jus soli, which means that the right to citizenship derives from where you were born, and jus sanguinis, which means that citizenship stems from your blood (or ancestry).
In ancient Rome, one acquired citizenship if one was born to Roman citizens, although such matters are never perfectly clear. For one thing, in ancient Rome (and in many countries today, it could be argued), not everybody who was legally established in a nation enjoyed equal rights. Men had more rights than women, for example, and both had more rights than slaves, who were merely another person’s property unless they came to be emancipated. But even in Rome the principle of jus sanguinis was not absolute. Roman mythology conveys the idea that a person may acquire citizenship by means other than birth. The Greek historian Plutarch made note of this new, expanding concept of citizenship in Parallel Lives. Plutarch writes about Romulus and Remus, the mythological founders of Rome, who were said to have been suckled by a she-wolf. (Their fraternal bonding under the ribs of a wolf did not prevent Romulus from later murdering his brother with a stone.)
In Parallel Lives, Plutarch wrote that after the Romans abducted and raped the women of the Sabines, Romulus slew Acron, king of the Caeninenses, and then routed the king’s army and took his city. And then, wrote Plutarch: “To the captured citizens, however, he [Romulus] did no harm beyond ordering them to tear down their dwellings and accompany him to Rome, where, he promised them, they should be citizens on equal terms with the rest.” What interests me about Plutarch’s observation is that it shows us that thousands of years ago, nations were expanding notions of what might comprise citizenship, or how a person might become a citizen. Maybe this caught Plutarch’s interest because he, a Greek, became a naturalized citizen of Rome.
In modern history, scholars such as the French historian and political scientist Patrick Weil have noted that the principle of birthplace (jus soli) determined citizenship in eighteenth-century France and England. However, this changed after the French Revolution. By 1804, the new Civil Code offered citizenship at birth to any child of a French father, living in France or abroad. Other countries, such as Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, to name just a few, followed suit. But the British principle of jus soli took root in Canada, the United States, Australia, South Africa, and other jurisdictions.
In the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This amendment was adopted in 1868 to ensure that African-Americans would be recognized as U.S. citizens, and to reverse the effects of the 1857 “Dred Scott” case, in which the Supreme Court had ruled that African-Americans could not be considered citizens. This principle of the amendment was tested but vindicated in the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on in 1898. This case raised the argument that a certain citizen might not be a full citizen, with the right to return home after travels abroad, simply because of his blood or ancestry.
Wong Kim Ark — who had been born to Chinese parents in San Francisco around 1871 — left the United States and found himself denied re-entry later. Why? At the time, in the face of mounting racism against Chinese immigrants, the federal government was enacting legislation aimed at preventing Chinese people from immigrating to the U.S. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 began with the following lines: “In the opinion of the Government of the United States, the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory . . .” In a split decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favour of Wong Kim Ark, interpreting the Constitution to mean that almost all people born in the United States would acquire citizenship at birth. In a telling dissenting judgement, the chief justice and an associate justice of the Supreme Court disagreed, arguing that relying too firmly on the principle of jus soli would create an untenable situation by which “the children of foreigners, happening to be born to them while passing through the country, whether of royal parentage or not, or whether of the Mongolian, Malay or other race, were eligible to the presidency, while children of our citizens, born abroad, were not.”
They need not have worried. Jus sanguinis, or citizenship based on blood, also enjoys currency in the United States. A child born abroad of American parents, for example, will enjoy American citizenship — however, he or she is not allowed to become president. To ascend to the country’s highest office, you also have to be born in the country. (This is not the case in Canada, where four prime ministers — most recently, John Turner — have been born outside Canada.)
The significance of birthplace became the obsession of the “birther movement” — a group of Americans who vigorously advanced the theory that Barack Obama had been born outside the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president. Business magnate Donald Trump was among those leading the charge. In 2011, Obama released his long-form birth certificate, showing that he had been born, as he had stated all along, in Hawaii. Many African-American and other observers believed that the birther movement sprang from a deep-seated racism — the suggestion that Obama couldn’t possibly be a true American or a true president, because he was black.
“Born in the U.S.A.” is the title of a 1984 hit song by the singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen. The hard-driving vocal track, with its repetitive use of the four-word title, sounds like a chest-thumping national anthem, but the lyrics actually lament the dim prospects of American workers who are alienated and struggling after the Vietnam War. For the narrator in Springsteen’s song, to be “born in the U.S.A.” seems as much a liability as an asset.
In Canada too, citizenship is obtained at birth if one is born in Canada (the principle of jus soli), but if one is born abroad of a Canadian parent, one also acquires citizenship (jus sanguinis). However, the matter is complicated. In 2009, for example, the Canadian government moved to limit the extent to which jus sanguinis applied: a child born outside Canada of Canadian parents will no longer acquire Canadian citizenship if his or her parent acquired Canadian citizenship in the same way (being born outside the country, of Canadian parents). This is an example of the Canadian government moving to limit the application of jus sanguinis in order to control the number of people living outside Canada who are to be eligible for citizenship.
Audrey Macklin, professor and chair in human rights law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, mentions that if
Canadian citizenship rules are meant to include those with a meaningful connection to Canada and exclude those who lack it, then birthright citizenship is clearly an imperfect predictor. “If am born in Canada (jus soli) and my parents move to another country when I’m six months old and I never return, I remain a Canadian citizen,” Macklin wrote to me by email. “If I give birth to a child outside of Canada, that child will also be Canadian. But if I am born in the U.S. to Canadian graduate student parents, return to Canada when I’m a year old, grow up in Canada, then go study in the U.S. myself and have a baby there, my child will not be a Canadian.”
Israel’s law of return allows people of Jewish ancestry to move to the country and acquire citizenship, although the same law has drawn criticism for excluding Palestinians. The German Aussiedler rule used to allow ethnic Germans in other countries to come to Germany and claim citizenship, even though descendants of Turkish migrants who were born in Germany were not granted citizenship at birth. Many countries today offer a more liberalized application of jus sanguinis than Canada. For example, you may claim Italian citizenship — regardless of whether you speak Italian — if one distant ancestor of yours was a citizen of the country. Many European Union member states allow individuals to claim citizenship if one grandparent was a citizen — a rule which Canadians have often used to acquire an EU passport. Canada’s own move to limit the scope of who may be considered a citizen strikes me as a mean-spirited attempt to restrict access to the coveted key of citizenship. It seems to me that you should be able to belong in a country, and to enjoy the rights that go along with it, if you can establish a legitimate connection to that place — by ancestry, by place of birth, by dint of where you have lived for much or your life, or through a combination of those factors.
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