The Violence of Love : Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States

Abstract

The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act—a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary analysis, Kit W. Myers examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. He shows how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love and better futures—in contrast to others that are not. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress borders yet are attached to structural and symbolic forms of violence in complex ways. The Violence of Love confronts this discomforting reality to offer more capacious understandings of love and kinship. “An exploration of transracial adoption that is both invitation and challenge: to learn more about its history; to ask hard yet necessary questions about family, care, and kinship; and to ‘find adoptee voices and listen with love,’ as Myers writes, understanding that there can be no love without truth.” — NICOLE CHUNG, author of A Living Remedy and All You Can Ever Know “A book for anyone who wonders if the identity issues that many transracial adoptees face are outweighed by the positives of simply having a loving family.” — ANGELA TUCKER, author of “You Should Be Grateful” “An essential resource, The Violence of Love asks and answers a provocative, paradoxical question: How can transracial or transnational adoption be an act of both love and violence, and how can we envision a different future?” — JAERAN KIM, Associate Professor of Social Work, University of Washington Tacoma “Myers cuts through the objection that can often drown out studies of adoption: that adoptive parents love their children. This powerful book responds, Yes, but on a broad scale, that is exactly how transracial and transnational adoption accomplishes its structural violence.” — LAURA BRIGGS, author of Taking Children"