Rudy Owens, taken in October 2018, in Portland, Oregon
In the spring of 2012, I took up blogging to share my perspectives on public health, the field I was entering and completing graduate studies in, at the University of Washington School of Public Health.
Since that time, my blog has racked up more than 79,000 page views and 56,000 visitors. To everyone who visited during the past six years, I want to say, thanks for stopping by and thanks for taking the time read my essays on topics that bring together many of my research and personal passions. It has been a blast.
During these last six years, my blog evolved. I first posted about public health topics I cared about. This included everything from the benefits of pet ownership to the need for greater gun control to the prevalence of vaccination deniers in my current state of Oregon. For the past two years I blogged more frequently about adoption policy issues and my efforts to achieve equal treatment under the law to access my original birth records.
From 2016 to 2018, I also was writing and finishing my memoir, called You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are. It offers a critical look at the U.S. adoption experience as a major public health issue and a political system that denies millions of adoptees equal treatment by law.
That huge project, on top of a full-time job, often kept me from publishing essays here.
In the last two years, I have been posting most of my new content on my book website, and even re-posting some of those essays here. I also have been creating longer written essays with my photography work. I continue to publish photo essays on my photo blog.
If you have been a visitor in the past, I encourage you to visit and bookmark these sites for my more current work:
All of the content, research, and essays I published here will remain live and here for some time to come. I still get daily visitors from around the world and want to ensure they find the material that brought them to this site.
You are welcome to bookmark my work. Please contact me about other uses of work, which I outline here. Enjoy your visit.
Rudy Owens in Michigan in June 2018, promoting adoptee rights and his new book on the American adoption experience.
I just spent four days in my birth state, Michigan, to raise awareness about the lack of equal rights for literally thousands of Michigan-born adoptees. I timed my trip right after the release of my newly published memoir on my adoption experience and examination of the system as a public health, legal, and political issue. In addition to speaking to some lawmakers, many more staff, and Michigan media, I returned to the spot where I was born a child to an unwed mother and then placed into the adoption system. For me that had special significance. (Catch the media coverage generated by my visit here: longer podcast interview and shorter videotaped interview with Michigan Radio, on June 8, 2018.)
Measuring Success or the Lack of it:
Let’s be blunt. I cannot claim any clear victories from my outreach and interviews. Michigan has no pending legislation that would revise Michigan’s statutes that deny Michigander adoptees’ their original birth certificate and other vital records. What’s more, given the current balance of power in Michigan—with the GOP firmly in control of both houses of the legislature and in the governor’s office—it is highly unlikely any reformist adoptee rights measure will be coming soon.
Rudy Owens in the Michigan Senate office building in Lansing in June 2018.
Nationally adoption for the GOP remains the policy alternative to abortion, and Michigan’s adoption’s placement system is mostly run by dozens of Christian organizations, who are supported by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. Politically, Michigan’s Republicans are aligned with social and Christian conservatives on many policy matters.
Therefore, I chose to advocate mostly with Democratic lawmakers and their staff, though I did reach out to some Republican senators and representatives, including the office of Senate Majority Leader, Sen. Arlan Meekhoff, who I learned from legislative staff is an adult adoptee. I made the rounds and visited in person every office of all Democratic representatives and senators, and GOP members in both houses.
Legislative staff were courteous and professional, and they patiently heard my short “elevator speech” on the need to promote equal treatment by law for all adoptees to access their records when they turned 18. I proposed four simple ways to improve customer service at the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), which oversees all vital records and tightly controls the release of adoptee records with the strictest and at times prejudicial interpretation of the state’s utterly confusing adoption law.
Before I had arrived in Lansing on Tuesday, June 5, 2018, I emailed every lawmaker a link to my website for my book on my experience as a Michigan adoptee who was denied his identity and records for decades. Some of the staff had read my email and were ready to speak with me.
The historic Michigan State Capitol Building, taken in June 2018.
Not to my surprise two senior staffers of lawmakers told me about their personal family experiences with Michigan’s adoption laws. Both were negative. The family members of the two staffers had been denied their identity documents or records because of their status their whole lives. They had both passed away, and in one case, an adoption agency had refused to provide even the required legal non-identifying information documents to the surviving spouse of the adoptee. The surviving spouse wanted to find out family medical history to help the couple’s surviving children know if they had any family medical history that may have been passed on.
In this one staffer’s case, they were able to find a dead spouse’s biological and living father and receive information—information that had been withheld because of outdated state laws for decades.
I had a productive exchange with Detroit state Rep. Bettie Cook Scott in her office. Rep. Scott liked my T-shirt that said “Adoptee Rights Are Human Rights,” and she said she supported the principle. She expressed reservations about releasing information to adoptees to protect the privacy of the mother. I explained to her that no birth mother was ever given any legal promise of confidentiality when they relinquished their kin, often in very stressful circumstances in the decades after WWII. I also reaffirmed my firm view that all adults should, as a matter of law, be treated equally by law.
Despite our differences, she saw me in rotunda area of the Capitol and asked me to request that I be recognized by her on the floor of the House of Representatives. I filled out the recognition form. I then entered the visitor’s gallery. After receiving permission from the Speaker of the House, she asked the House to recognize me as a Detroit adoptee who had flown out from Oregon to advocate for adoptee rights as human rights. She speaker asked me to rise, and I got a warm applause from lawmakers and the other visitors. That was great.
Conversation Cafe in Lansing to promote adoptee rights.
Taking it to the Streets, in Lansing
On day two of my visit, I wanted to try what I call café conversations. This involved setting up a small table with a chair and having message signs. My two signs said: “Talk to an Adoptee” and “Proud to Be: Detroit Native, Bastard, Adoptee.” I set up shop at a corner of the main capitol square in Lansing, near the statue honoring sharpshooters from the Civil War.
Most of the passers-by were lobbyists talking on their phones, long oblivious to any political stunt and protester they have seen over the years in Lansing. Most never even made eye contact with me. A bill that would be approved later that day to end Michigan’s status as a “right to work” state also had drawn hundreds of trades people to the capital to protest the pending measure that they opposed. They were mostly big, burly, and very tough Michigan men and a few equally scrappy looking women, Wearing their union shirts and work gear, they did not seem to care who I was either. I got a few laughs too.
Rudy Owens and a fellow Michigan adoptee in Lansing, both of whom were denied their original birth certificates by the state because they were adopted.
This might have been a flop if I did not have some amazing and moving conversations with strangers.
One 40-year-old woman told me she had given up her son to an open adoption and still remained in touch with him. She later had two girls of her own. She expressed support for my efforts and wanted to read book. She was practically in tears talking about her decision to have given up her son when she had hit a rough patch in her life and knew she could not be a good mother and raise him.
Another woman, two years younger than me asked, “What’s this sign about?” I told her I was a Detroit adoptee who had been denied my birth certificate for 51 years, even 27 years after I knew my birth family until I got a court order. She then shared she too was an adoptee who had found her birth mother when she was 21. She had been placed by the Catholic Church-run St. Vincent De Paul Society. She loved that I had gotten my birth certificate and expressed deep frustration she could not get her certificate. We gave each other high fives and posed for pictures in front of my sign “Talk to an Adoptee.”
Two bike cops stopped by and asked what I was about. When I told them, one of the young policeman on a mountain bike said he too was adopted in a family of eight adopted children. He did not share his personal views on adoption records, but could relate to my story about being adopted in Michigan. I took pictures of him and cool mountain bike.
A man in his late 50s came straight up to my table and also asked what I was doing. When I mentioned his book, he told me he had adopted five children, in his case two sets of siblings. The set with three siblings were Native American, and he said the “authorities” had determined the girls’ relatives were not deemed “fit” to raise them. However, he said, he was trying to keep them informed about their culture as much he could.
I had been hoping for more conversations, but after three hours I decided I was not going to accomplish more that busy day. The state’s dairy council tent about 100 yards from me had drawn hundreds with free ice cream giveaways, and I had no traffic. The photos I took and posted on social media helped tell the story about bringing my narrative of being denied equal rights as an adoptee to the public. However, the method did not lead to any viral media or any media attention.
The Capitol-based reporter for the Detroit News, who I spoke to a day earlier in his office and who, coincidentally, was adopted and even sympathetic to the unequal legal treatment of adoptees, passed on my pitch for a story or interview. His job was to cover the “big bills,” not a little-known adoptee and author. He gave me a quick hello going to and from the Michigan Senate chambers that morning and let my story float by.
Media Coverage:
Rudy Owens with Steve Neavling and Nurse Charms at 910 AM Superstation in Southfield, Michigan.
Over the next two days I landed two broadcast media interviews, in Detroit and Ann Arbor, which reached listeners in Detroit, in Michigan, and even nationally.
On Thursday, June 7, 2018, Southfield-based 910 AM Superstation, an ABC affiliate, invited me on to a talk radio program hosted by independent journalist Steve Neavling. He is also the publisher the Motorcity Muckracker news site. Neavling’s show, “The Muckracker Report,” takes on a range of political and controversial issues with a progressive perspective, and he was fascinated by the story of Crittenton General Hospital, where I was born and literally thousands of families were separated by adoption.
During our on air interview, he shared his father was an adoptee from Pennsylvania who never found his biological family. We had a great conversation on the history of adoption placement, the way the Crittenton maternity homes and hospitals became centers for adoption promotion, and how these past issues that I describe in my book had a direct connection to the controversial policy of the Trump White House to separate families and children at the southern U.S. border as a form of deterrence.
This connection had been a hot thread among adoptee advocates since late May, as progressives activists around the country had been responding to children of nearly 1,500 unaccounted for migrant children as of late May (and growing since) and had begun hashtag-style protests with the lines “#WhereAreTheChildren.” Nationally, it appeared that no one but adoptees was noting that millions had been separated by adoption with barely any public recognition of these painful historic facts. I made that point during the interview.
We also talked about a range of issues such as the state law denying equal treatment by law for adoptees, how the MDHHS treats adoptees seeking help, and how many adoptees and their kin are in the United States and Michigan.
roducer Mercedes Mejia speaks with author Rudy Owens during an interview for the Michigan Radio new program Stateside.
On June 8, 2018, in Ann Arbor and my final day in Michigan, I had a more than 11 minute interview with Lester Graham, one of the hosts of the show Stateside, produced by the NPR affiliate Michigan Radio. We avoided the controversial issue of adoption as a form of family separation and the hospital where that occurred for decades in Detroit and where I was born and relinquished into adoption. Instead we discussed Michigan’s laws that I said denied adoptees their human rights. We also talked about the four simple ideas I proposed that could improve how the MDHHS deals with adoptees, even with the current laws in place.
During our Q&A, I highlighted my basic reason for writing the book, to shed light on the story of adoption and how it is a story that impacts millions and keeps families from knowing each other. I was able to throw in medical history as a reason to allow all adult adoptees to access their records and highlighted how poorly counted adoptees are, which prevents policymakers from knowing the impact of current legislation and policies.
Michigan Radio staff also did a videotaped interview with me with station producer Mercedes Mejia, to run on their website. She asked me about my book, where I was from and who I was, and why it was important for me to get my birth certificate. I told her it was magical to have that document in my hands, as a symbol of my connection to my original birth identity and family ancestry. She asked what advice I would give to someone who might have wanted to have done what I did. I said it was worth it to have done something that promoted equality and was for principles that made the country stronger and better.
Above all I appreciated how the Michigan Radio news team did not focus on my adoption reunion with my birth family. That itself almost made my cross-country adventure worth the cost, in time and money.
Back to My Place of Origin
Crittenton General Hospital in Detroit, taken in 1933 (from the National Florence Crittenton Mission).
During the two days in the Detroit and Ann Arbor area, I finally visited the place of my birth: Crittenton General Hospital, the epicenter of adoption in Michigan for decades.
The building is now torn down. In its place is a large, boxy utilitarian set of buildings housing the Detroit Jobs Center and a nursing home, all surrounded by a gated steel fence. There is no plaque mentioning the hospital, how long it operated, and who it served. The surrounding area, just west of the John Lodge Freeway and at the intersections of Rosa Parks Boulevard and Tuxedo Street, is severely distressed.
Multiple houses a half a block from the old hospital site were in various states of collapsing. On Rosa Parks, by the rear entrance to the jobs center, a two-story apartment was slowly falling down—and no doubt would be destroyed one day or, sadly, torched by an arsonist.
The former Crittenton Maternity Home on Woodrow Wilson is now the home of Cass Community Social Services. The former home used to house single mothers before they gave birth next door at the former Crittenton General Hospital, from the the 1950s through the 1970s.
The former Crittenton Maternity Home, in a three-story brick building next to the old hospital site, is still standing. It is now run by Cass Community Social Services. I saw a young and I’m sure poor mother with her child entering the building. I realized how the story of single mothers continues today, but with different issues and without the full-throated promotion of adoption by nearly all major groups involved in social work and the care of children. I took some photos of the home and then went to the hospital site.
I took out my sign that I had quickly made in my car using a fat Sharpie. It simply said: “I was born here.”
I took multiple pictures, on a hot, muggy, and sunny day, but I could not manage a smile. I could not make light of my origins at this place, where so many mothers said goodbye, forever, to their children. It is not a happy story.
Rudy Owens at the site of the former Crittenton General Hospital, where he was born and relinquished into foster care in the mid-1960s, and then adopted at five and a half weeks after his birth.
Despite my stern appearance, I felt a sense of elation to have finally returned to my place of origins. It felt like closure. I accomplished what I set out to do decades earlier, for myself and on behalf of other adoptees denied knowledge of who they were and where they came from.
This time, I had controlled the story. This time, I was telling that to the world this story with my newly published book and public conversations that had been connecting with readers. This time, I owned the moment, unlike the one when I arrived as a nearly underweight baby, heading into the U.S. adoption system in Michigan and a new family.
And no one, not the state of Michigan or the groups who determined my life because of my status as an illegitimate child, could ever take that from me.
Yeah, it was worth it. That selfie and throwaway sign were my Trajan’s Column, as glorious as anything ever built by a conquering Roman emperor. The adoptee hero, as I frequently describe all adoptees searching for their past, had returned victorious to Rome (Detroit), even if there were no crowds throwing garlands upon me and no one to write poetry celebrating that victory. I had written that story already.
Author Rudy Owens sports his advocacy shirt with a simple idea that equality is a human right.
One of the reasons I wrote You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, my recently published memoir and critical examination of the U.S. adoption system, was to promote equal treatment of all adoptees by law. The way this ultimately will happen is through the force of law, and in the United States, that will be legislative changes on a state by state basis, given past failures to mount a congressional effort to allow adoptees to receive their birth records by a national legal standard. I am not expecting change to happen fast.
Because I am a realist and know that real grand strategy is a long game, played by deeply committed interest groups and persons who understand power, I also am advocating for shorter term victories that can be accomplished as part of incremental progress. Ultimately, I want my work to contribute to changing Michigan’s outdated and discriminatory adoptions adoption records laws that deny most Michigan adoptees, like me, their family ancestry, birth records, and equal legal status.
I will be promoting these very simple and mostly bureaucratic changes this week (first week of June 2018) when I head to Michigan and meet with lawmakers in person and tell them my story about being denied my identity and records by the state and its public healthy bureaucracy, simply because I was born a bastard and adoptee.
FOUR EASY STEPS THAT WILL HELP AND PROVIDE NO HARM:
1. Provide Accurate Data on Adoptees Born in Michigan: The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) can use minimal resources to estimate the number of adoptees and adoptee relinquishments in Michigan and make that information public. Right now there is no accurate figure that is published showing how many Michigan natives were adopted. Knowing their numbers can highlight the impact of laws impacting all adoptees. This figure can be made public and easily accessible on the state’s/MDHHS’s web sites.
2.Track All Requests for Birth Records by All Michigan Adoptees: The MDHHS claims it doesn’t track how many requests are made by adoptees seeking their birth records. Without accurate data, the impact of state laws cannot be measured. The public has a right to know who and how many people are impacted by state laws that deny a class of people equal treatment by law in accessing their records of origin. A tracking system can easily be created in a database with simple information: date of birth, names of adoptee, location of birth, and even reasons for requests. Reports can be prepared that hide the identity of adoptees when they are made public annually or upon request by the legislature or the media/public.
Instead of tracking all adoptee records requests, the state, as of 2009, uses a log of records released only. This does not count requests rejected or all requests for records assistance, according to an MDHHS spokesperson’s statement from July 2016. As of that month, 549 records requests were fulfilled since fall 2009, and it is unknown if those included original birth records. There is no data on adoptee records requests fulfilled prior to fall 2009, according to MDHHS.
3.Conduct a Performance Audit of the Central Adoption Registry (CAR): The CAR, run by Connie Stevens, is a one-person office with extensive gatekeeper authority to manage all birth records requests from adoptees sent from courts or agencies if adoptees’ birth records information may or may not be released. Even the office’s superior, Glenn Copeland, defers decisions to the CAR. Though the office has authority to approve the release of adoptee birth records, it claims it cannot be contacted by adoptees, many of whom report consistent unprofessional treatment when they seek help from the CAR with Michigan’s overly complex adoptee records system. To ensure the office is treating all requests fairly and acting impartially to serve all residents, a basic performance audit can be conducted to highlight problems and solutions that ensure equitable service to the public. (FYI, here is where you can contact the CAR, and do not expect calls back quickly, if you get them.)
4.Provide Additional Staff Resources to Answer Adoptee Questions: Because the CAR claims it does not help adoptees, the state can dedicate staffing time from other vital records personnel to handle questions from adoptees trying to navigate Michigan’s complex adoptee records laws. This is a principle of basic good governance, to assist and help the public navigate state systems and provide good customer service. A contact number and email should be made visible on the MDHHS website for adoptee records information.
Author note: I published a nearly identical version of this post on my memoir website on June 2, 2018.
This is part of my original record of birth, showing my arrival in the world in Detroit, Michigan. It was then hidden from me for decades because I was born a bastard, who became an adoptee and thus denied equal treatment under the law by Michigan, its courts, and my adoption agency.
As the year 2017 comes to a close, millions of American adoptees are no closer to receiving equal treatment under U.S. laws than they were decades earlier. In 1975, the United Kingdom long moved on from this issue, giving all adoptees full access to their records once they turned 18. In fact, the issue of adoptee equal rights is not even a concern in many developed nations. Not so in the United States, the country with the greatest number of adoptees than any developed country in the world.
From a strategic perspective, most U.S. adoptees have not organized cohesively or embraced successful strategies that have altered this battlefield. This includes the all-critical inner battle of the mind that must occur first before any change and tactical advance occurs on the messy, fluid field of combat in the real world. I will focus mostly on this critical aspect of adoptee rights work in this essay, while also addressing the national scene.
Most of us know from our own experiences we can’t change the outer world without changing our inner world. I believe it is time to reset the chessboard and start anew, starting first with each individual adoptee. It is way past due for adoptees to show more backbone and grit, beginning in their own house.
The Dying Gaul, a celebrated sculpture of the defeated soul.
Project Strength, Not Vulnerability: Today, far too many adoptees celebrate a losing attitude, portraying themselves as “trauma victims.” They confess to being desperate, needy, unhappy adults who are incapable of mastering their emotions and managing inner conflict. While there is clear and strong public health evidence on long-term health impacts of early childhood and prenatal experiences, adoptee-led trauma branding ultimately undermines adoptee rights as a larger political cause. (I write this as an adoptee born as a near-low-birth-weight infant, who needed emergency hospital care during my first two weeks of life.) So long as adoptees identify themselves as defeated souls and do not project a public image as standard bearers of centuries-old struggles for basic human rights, they will never win anything and remain captives of their own cages. Unfortunately, those who embrace a weak public image will define adoptees’ public perception and the larger national story defining adoptees and their collective national experience. As long as this losing mentality prevails, all adoptees will be held back.
Frederick Douglas, from the Library of Congress collection.
Learn from the Masters and Apply that Wisdom: Many adoptees in the United States can sharpen their focus by reading any book of their choosing that motivates them to understand conflict and struggles. Take abolitionist Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and anti-slavery crusader and author of several books on his slavery experience. Douglass learned as a young man in captivity that his freedom came first through mental defiance and firm resolve, not in his circumstance, which he later overcame. Douglass wrote: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Any biography of any accomplished person will show they all had conflict and controlled their fate by first winning their internal battles. They mastered their thinking and then launched their external crusades—many more brutal and unfair than the minefield of adoptee discrimination and adoption law. For adoptees needing inspiration, I recommend the author Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, The 33 Strategies of War, and more. His treatise on war offers a cool, hard look at human conflict and offers wisdom demonstrated by historic greats from Sun Tzu to Napoleon Bonaparte to Muhammad Ali. He provides a set of ideas how to grab victory from whatever conflict and foes you face.
Here are a few of the concepts from Greene that I think adoptees should consider as they choose how they want to live their lives and then change the world around them.
Have a Grand Strategic Vision: Today, no grand vision unifies the adoptee rights movement—a situation that must be remedied. It is also a movement without a clearly defined national leader, unlike historic predecessors like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, ACT UP, or the Human Rights Campaign. The closest concept unifying adoptee rights is the call by many for human rights and equal rights, recognized in statute, as those laws apply to persons who were placed for adoption. This includes giving all adoptees unfettered and full access to original birth records, without any exception. Many adoptees lack a personal vision too, preventing them from achieving individual success in their fight for their rights and records. This too must be changed, but by each individual adoptee, and in their own way. Only the individual has the power to make that change.
In the United States, adoption law is controlled at the state level. Here proponents of adoption and laws ensuring adoption secrecy, such as pro-adoption, anti-adoptee rights groups like the National Council for Adoption, have maximized a divide-and-conquer strategy that prevents adoptees from mounting a national campaign. Advocacy today focuses mostly on battles in state legislatures over bills to change adoptees’ access to birth records. These fights may bring in up to three or nearly four dozen local and national groups, including longtime groups like Bastard Nation, newer upstarts like the Adoptee Rights Law Center, and state-level groups like California Open. Most adoptees are not involved in these battles as they try to find their own records or families. However, all adoptees are connected to this national debate and need the same overarching strategic approach that is needed nationally.
Ultimately not having a clear end game and objectives will prevent many adoptees from engaging fully in what will be a protracted, long campaign. That can translate to lifelong failure. Greene’s synopsis of the critical role of grand strategy should be a wake up call to all adoptee rights advocates, including those who have to advocate for themselves: “What have distinguished all history’s grand strategists and can distinguish you, too, are specific, detailed, focused goals. Contemplate them day in and day out and imagine how it will feel to reach them and what reaching them will look like. By a psychological law peculiar to humans, clearly visualizing them this way will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Abraham Lincoln suffered many defeats prior to becoming our nation’s greatest president, including the 1858 race for the U.S. Senate seat in Illinois against his more well-known rival Stephen Douglas. All great leaders have faced defeat and grown from those losses.
Learn from Defeat: Every person in life suffers setbacks. Adoptees who seek their records and identity, unlike nonadoptees, are beset by obstacles imposed by hostile public health bureaucracies, harmful propaganda from the massive pro-adoption and Christian pro-family industry, media stereotypes that frame adoptees as damaged goods or ungrateful bastards, family members, friends, and especially discriminatory laws rooted in historic prejudice against illegitimately born people. Every single defeat represents a learning opportunity if you have an open, flexible mind that can take these setbacks and inform your future efforts. As Greene notes, “Victory and defeat are what you make of them; it is how you deal with them that matters.”
Define your Opponents and Expose Them and Their Weaknesses: Greene’s 33 Strategies of War highlights countless historic examples how combatants overcome their enemies by attacking the weakest link in any chain. He calls this “hit them where it hurts.” Frequently this means exposing individuals who make decisions and holding them accountable to the public. Famous social activist Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals,” called this “picking the target.” “Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies,” he wrote. “Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.” For adoptee rights activists, this means putting a face on those who say “no,” rather than succumbing like sheep to the nameless bureaucrats who operate in secret and hide behind the façade of laws and “process.”
Glenn Copeland, state registrar of Michigan and the senior official who exceeded his legal authority denying me my birth certificate, in likely violation of state law. Adoptees need to identify the people who support outdated views of adoptees and closed records and who work to deny adoptees their legal and original birth documents.
In my case, I identified every Michigan official in the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services involved in trying to withhold my birth certificate illegally, such as State Registrar Glenn Copeland. I published their emails about my birth record petition on my websites, revealing how public officials discussed adoptees seeking records that should have been released decades earlier.
Some groups, like Bastard Nation, do call out by name all of the foes and friends of adoptee rights, which others should learn from. My question to the larger adoptee community is this: Why aren’t all adoptee rights activists embracing one of the best tools of a free press, shining light on wrongdoing, to expose the harmful workings of public officials in their treatment of adoptees? This is a proven strategy and one rooted in the American free press tradition. It’s yours to use.
Become a Fighter, Not a Victim: Anyone who perceives himself or herself as crushed by circumstance will never muster the courage or vision to become an advocate or warrior for change, particularly against an old, large, and entrenched system like U.S. adoption. As Greene notes, “Control is an issue in all relationships. It is human nature to abhor feelings of helplessness and to strive for power. … Your task as a strategist is twofold: First, recognize the struggle for control in all aspects of life, and never be taken in by those who claim they are not interested in control.” Make no mistake, adoption secrecy is firmly rooted in states and their bureaucracies exerting power over a mostly unorganized group. Saying you are weak and projecting that image gives those in control greater power over you and all other adoptees. Remember Frederick Douglass’ admonishment that the “limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Joan of Arc, hero and savior of France, and one of the most inspirational leaders of history.
Therefore adoptees should see themselves as members of a powerful group, who have been forged through adversity and opposition, who are connected to historic heroes who fought for rights on behalf of those denied their rights. Nearly every great civilization has a story of those who have been wronged, but who changed the course of events by becoming the strong. In Scotland, the hero was Robert the Bruce, who defeated the English. In ancient Rome it was Spartacus and the revolting slaves, whose legacy survived millennia after their defeat. In the American South, it was the Civil Rights activists and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. Martin Luther King, who challenged the power of the Southern states and Jim Crow laws and won major legislative change nationwide with the passage of two landmark civil rights measures. Find the hero and movements that resonate with you and embrace their power.
Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” from 1851. As a general, George Washington understood the importance of controlling the battlefield and grand strategy.
Define The Battlefield: In his summary of war strategies, Greene writes, “To have the power that only strategy can bring, you must be able to elevate yourself above the battlefield, to focus on your long-term objectives, to craft an entire campaign, to get out of the reactive mode that so many battles in life lock you into. Keeping your overall goals in mind, it becomes much easier to decide when to fight and when to walk away.” Today, much of U.S. adoptee rights advocacy is stuck in complicated, state-level legislative battles over often regressive state legislation. Most recently, state lawmakers in New York and Florida have introduced legislation that has consumed adoptee rights advocates. In Hawaii in 2016, adoptee rights champions did define the battlefield and reclaimed their rights by passing a law granting all adoptees who are adults over 18 access to their records. In other cases, like New Jersey, a law was signed in 2014 and implemented in 2016 that created a class of adoptees denied forever their human right to know their ancestry because of a so-called “veto.”
Missing in this tactical coverage is how the adoptee rights struggle should be told nationally, outside of the typical media obsession over adoption reunion stories (what some adoptees call “reunion porn”). That space has been seized in the post-World War II decades by the pro-life, Christian, and fundamentalist community who have forged a national story about adoption as a selfless act promoting god’s will and a system that shows the benevolence of loving adoptive families. Adoptee strategists will need to counter the adoption industry’s national story by focusing on adoptee rights as human rights and as something as American as the First Amendment. Some advocates are doing this. More needs to be done. Frontline adoptee activists need to fight off any pretender group that claims that space. As Green states, “War demands the utmost in realism, seeing things as they are.”
Know Your Enemies: Greene correctly states that no one in history ever won anything without first identifying those who opposed them. “Life is endless battle and conflict, and you cannot fight effectively unless you identify your enemies,” writes Greene. This maxim applies to the struggle for adoptees. Bastard Nation did that well already, publishing a list of many dogged and well-financed foes of adoptee rights (“Know Thine Enemies”). In knowing who they face, adoptees are better able to find allies, collaborators, and even possible swing groups who may pivot if the messages of equality, human rights, and justice override the powerful and slippery propaganda of the well-funded, Christian-leaning, anti-abortion, and pro-adoption advocates like the National Council for Adoption.
Adoptee rights strategists must familiarize themselves with overt anti-adoptee rights groups and their methods to develop a winning strategy. Greene correctly summarizes what hundreds of other historic strategists who have made history have long noted: “Do not be naïve: with some enemies there can be no compromise, no middle ground.” For that reason, adoptee rights groups will face continued setbacks if they also fail to recognize false advocates (the “Benedict bastards”) and those who divide and conquer among adoptees themselves. Adoptees need to use this real politik litmus test for groups who lack a clear vision for full equality, including state-level charlatan groups who claim to support adoptee rights, but promote harmful laws that deny all equal rights.
Launch a Revolution of Thinking: As Greene notes, all people face battles, hourly and daily. “But the greatest battle of all is with yourself—your weakness, your emotions, your lack of resolution in seeing things through to the end,” writes Greene. “Instead of repressing your doubts and fears, you must face the down, do battle with them.” Above all, success comes after you remove distracting emotion from critical thinking. This is a tall task for any adoptee, who often and rightly feels outrage and injustice at being denied their original names, equal legal rights, medical history, and equality. What results is an explosive outrage. This feeling has frequently served as great motivator, and even a catalyst for historic change.
The greatest strategist of them all, Sun Tau, provides many strategies adoptees can embrace to first win the inner battle and then succeed against their adversaries.
To overcome your adversaries and the underlying legal injustice, you cannot afford the luxury of wallowing in your emotional state or turmoil when you map your long-term strategy for victory. You need to master your situation, turn your defeats into wisdom that inform your future actions, and embrace actions that achieve clear victories and not repeated losses. This can take years. You will get nowhere unless you define where your campaign will end and what you fight for. A campaign devoid of justice and focused on piecemeal objectives—the approach of some so-called adoptee rights advocates—is not a coherent, visionary strategy. It is a losing campaign before the battle begins.
Fighting a long game and knowing your actions are just and that laws are wrong can help carry you through the months and years of defeat. But ultimately winning the battle in one’s mind is your greatest key to victory. As the great Chinese strategist Sun-Tzu wrote nearly 2,500 years ago: “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first, and then seek to win.”
[Author note: On June 10, 2018, I updated this essay, removing references to the now closed Donaldson Adoption Institute, and the American Adoption Conference (AAC). Regarding the AAC, the group this spring announced a very clear policy position supporting the right of adoptees to be treated equally by law, which signalled to me the group is commited to genuine legal reform and thus the activities to achieve that in the years to come.]
By advocating for your rights, you reclaim your story, your name, your power, and your dignity.
For the past several years, fellow Michigan adoptees who were born after World War II have contacted me seeking help. They want what they are entitled to as a birthright and under core human rights principles of international law: their original birth certificates (OBCs), held in secret, by the state of Michigan.
The number of queries I received from adoptees increased in the last year, since I won a nearly three-decade-old contest with the state to give me my original birth certificate and published my story about that victory on my website.
Because of these requests, I am publishing a short guide that may help some of the thousands of fellow adoptees born in Michigan deprived of their equal rights by Michigan’s discriminatory and harmful adoption laws. To navigate this system, adoptees will need to deal with state courts and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS). That agency overseas the state’s public health bureaucracy and has ultimate authority for adoptees’ official vital records—including their original birth documents.
This guide provides practical advice and logistical assistance. You also will need to review the FAQs I have published on my website for my forthcoming book on adoption. Also consult tips published by Bastard Nation’s Shea Grimm (dated but still relevant) on accessing your adoption records. This is not Michigan specific, however.
Click on this image to see adoptee rights lawyer Greg Luce’s illustration of the Michigan “donut hole” that denies thousands of Michigan adoptees access to their birth record. Image courtesy of Greg Luce, https://adopteerightslaw.com/.
Michigan Adoptees Born Between 1945 and 1980
This guide focuses on Michigan adoptees born between May 28, 1945 and September 12, 1980. I was born during this time. According to the state’s website, “For those adoptions that occurred between May 28, 1945 and September 12, 1980, the release of the original birth certificate is contingent upon a court order.” As an adoptee seeking your OBC, that means you are almost certainly going to court, and it will not be easy. More on that shortly.
This 35-year span defined by law was not an accident. These were the boom years for adoption, when single women who became pregnant were pressured by society and many powerful medical, social work, and religious groups to give up millions of infants through the late 1970s. Thus the law intentionally harms the biggest pool of adopted citizens from the state by restricting their right to know who they are and their family ancestry and medical history.
Getting a Court Order: An Uphill Slog through a Hostile Environment
Those born before May 28, 1945 or after September 12, 1980 still face legal barriers. Read this summary of state law, published on the Adoptee Rights Law Center website. Greg Luce, an adoptee rights advocate who runs this website, elegantly describes Michigan’s convoluted system this way: “Michigan has such a confusing and complex system that only lawyers or those invested in such a complicated bureaucratic framework could fully comprehend it. To seek an OBC in Michigan you must 1) apply through an agency or court, which 2) forwards a clearance request form to the state’s “central adoption registry,” which 3) searches the registry and then 3) returns a clearance reply form to the court or agency that 4) is used to inform the adoptee that 5) a birth parent has denied any release of information (and the OBC is therefore unavailable) or that 6) a birth parent agrees to the release of information, upon which 7) the adoptee may obtain a copy of the clearance reply form and may then 7) supply the clearance reply form to the state registrar, which 8) issues a non-certified copy of the original birth certificate to the adoptee. Oh, if you were born between 1945 and 1980, this whole mechanism doesn’t even apply to you. Like other donut hole states, if you fall into that hole you need a court order to get your OBC.”
Michigan’s Communications to Adoptees Seeking an OBC:
You can read a succinct summary of the process published by the Adoptee Rights Coalition. The state also provides a short summary, which does not address how to navigate court order requests for adoptions that occurred between May 28, 1945 and September 12, 1980.
Rudy Owens holds a copy of his original birth certificate (some info whited out intentionally). Michigan denied my human right to my birth record for 27 years. They failed. I did not.
Key Points for Michigan Adoptees to Consider Before Beginning Court Advocacy for OBCs:
1. Current laws in Michigan, and the way its laws and vital records systems function today, are intended to prevent most Michigan adoptees from getting their original birth documents—forever. Remember that always. I will say that again: Remember that always. The political and legal systems governing adoption laws cause real harm to adoptees and deny them their basic human rights. You must be realistic how this plays out statewide and nationally. The laws vary by state. You cannot afford ignorance of the system or the players who control it. You must educate yourself about this reality. Know your friends and especially your opponents in your effort to achieve equal rights and your OBC.
2. No one will help you who works for theMDHSS, the state’s public health agency that controls your birth records. You can ask them for help, but you will not get it. The agency has an adversarial relationship with adoptees. In fact, you must be prepared to fight them, even once you get your court order—if you get one. They may even attempt to delay the release of your original birth certificate once presented with a judge’s ruling. This happened to me. See my FAQs also.
3. TheMichigan Central Adoption Registry is a mostly unaccountable bureaucracy of one employee (Connie Stevens; stevensc2@michigan.gov) with no regulatory oversight. Do not contact it. See Luce’s description above regarding its mandate. Its website states it “is accessed by the court or agency; individual adopted persons do not contact the Registry.” This office does not answer phone calls, but may return one. Expect no help, even if you deserve it and need it.
4. The mediamay not be sympathetic to you, unless you have some emotional and tear-jerking reunion story. Overall, the media has a tepid interest in adoptee rights and in the past has viewed them in a discriminatory way—sometimes portraying them as uppity bastards who are not thankful they were taken in by loving families, etc. See the adoptee rights group Bastard Nation’s essay on this harmful stereotype. You can try to enlist the media, but do not assume the media will be a natural ally in the court of public opinion. That said, you should engage them, and you may find an ally in their ranks. Always try, and try again.
5. Remember, this takes time. You must give yourself anywhere from three months and much longer. You need to file your paperwork, advocate and push a court to set up a date, have your court date, and then submit, hopefully, your court order to Michigan Vital Records for your original birth certificate (OBC). You are running a marathon, not an 800-meter race. Stay focused on the end goal, always.
6. Rely on yourself. This is a personal journey. Most of us will do it alone. Most of us are not wildly rich and cannot afford to hire people to do unpleasant and tedious advocacy work. I encourage you not to seek help from any so-called confidential intermediaries or social workers. (Please avoid a Michigan confidential intermediary named Darryl Royal–he is not a real adoptee rights advocate.) There are some true legal advocates out there who work on cases. I suggest contacting the Adoptee Rights Law Center for possible tips if you really have a strong case needing litigation.
Starting Your Court Order Request:
Adoptees in the donut hole years need to find the court of jurisdiction for adoption records requests. For Wayne County/Detroit, where I was born, it is the Family-Juvenile Division of the Third Judicial Circuit Court of Michigan. Its address and contact information is: Third Judicial Circuit Court, Family Division Attention: Post Adoptions 1025 E. Forest Avenue Detroit, MI 48207-1098 Tel: (313) 224-5261; direct line: (313) 833-0032
Circuit courts likely have jurisdiction for issuing court orders for an adoptee. Find your court of jurisdiction here. This may be the hardest detail to figure out. The Third Judicial Circuit Court covers anyone born in Detroit, and adoptees there number in the thousands because that was home to Crittenton General Hospital, one of the nation’s largest maternity hospitals that facilitated adoptions for more than 30 years.
Download or request the instructions from the court in your jurisdiction, or contact that court for additional information. The instructions from the Family-Juvenile Division of the Third Judicial Circuit Court of Michigan are found online. Make a copy for your records.
Here are the instructions for Wayne County adoptees seeking to set up a court date and to petition a judge. Before you send your request in, make a copy of everything. Send your request certified mail. Make a cover letter listing everything you are sending and be courteous and professional. Show the court and judge that you are a professional and have your case in order. Show them you know the law and your rights.
You will need to send the following:
A $20 filing fee (as of 2016)
A copy of your photo identification
A copy of your adoptive birth certificate.
A completed Release of Information Authorization Adult Adoptee (FormFIA 1920). Include in the comments area on this form that you are requesting your original birth certificate (it’s a short box that says “additional comments”—make your pitch about your rights to your record).
A FormPCA 327Petition For Adoption Information and Order (note, this is not listed in required forms, and this was added as a last-minute requirement before my court date—so it won’t hurt to do it now).
If the birth certificate you are requesting is for a deceased, direct descendant, proof of the relationship and death are required (ie: death certificate, birth certificate, etc.).
Also, the above forms should be completed with the information regarding the adoptee.
Provide a written statement, no longer than a page, making your case why you deserve your birth record. This is your story, so only you can write it. Note, this is not required, but STRONGLY encouraged.
This historic photo of a Crittenton mission from the late 1950s or 1960s shows how expecting mothers who stayed at Crittenton homes and hospitals were given maternal health instructions. Almost all of those mothers gave up their infants, for adoption at the encouragement of doctors, social workers, and staff at Crittenton and other maternity homes in the decades after World War II. (Photo courtesy of the National Crittenton Foundation.)
This week I was informed by a Michigan historical publication that its editorial committee rejected my proposed article on the historical significance of my birthplace, Crittenton General Hospital. “While the committee appreciates the article you submitted, it unfortunately does not meet our magazine’s editorial needs and we will be unable to accept it for publication,” the editor wrote.
This means that an article I proposed to tell the story of thousands of single Michigan mothers who gave up their children for adoption in the decades after World War II in Detroit will not reach a wider audience in Michigan. For that, I am disappointed.
I respectfully asked for feedback how I did not meet their needs, and did not get a reply. I do not expect a response, and to date have not received one.
[Author’s update, 9/15/2017, 1:05 p.m.: Hours after publishing this article, I received a reply from the publication I had contacted that its editorial committee thought my article was a “personal opinion piece,” which they do not accept in their publications. That reply arrived only after I had provided the publication a courtesy email to let them know I had published this article.]
No publication is obligated to tell any writer why they are rejected. Rejection is the norm in the world of writing and publishing. It also inspires good writers.
However, this outcome, which I have experienced when reaching out to many different publications to engage them on the history and problems in the U.S. adoption system, likely has other issues beyond my storytelling abilities or even the merits of the stories I am trying to tell.
The outcome falls into a trend of editorial bias by people who likely do not recognize how their decisions about covering the story of the U.S. adoption system and its history are influenced by their own subconscious views. My forthcoming book on the U.S. adoption experience investigates how bias influences individuals’ and society’s views about illegitimately born people (bastards like me), including adoptees. I also have published an essay on that topic on my blog.
Is it Bad Writing/Research, Bias, or a ‘Suspect’ Writer/Researcher?
Source: Pannucci, Christopher J., and Edwin G. Wilkins. “Identifying and Avoiding Bias in Research.” Plastic and reconstructive surgery 126.2 (2010): 619–625. PMC. Web. 15 Sept. 2017.
The larger issue of research bias is well documented in human-subjects research. That field boasts a staggering list of biases that impact the research outcomes, before, during, and after clinical trials. It also is a well-documented issue in communications.
The open-source scientific publication PLoS noted in a 2009 editorial, “A large and growing literature details the many ways by which research and the subsequent published record can be inappropriately influenced, including publication bias, outcome reporting bias, financial and non-financial, competing interests, sponsors’ control of study data and publication, and restrictions on access to data and materials. But it can be difficult for an editor, reading a submitted manuscript, to disentangle these many influences and to understand whether the work ultimately represents valid science.”
When a writer or researcher is rejected, they have almost no chance of persuading a potential publisher to chance its views. If you push your case, you also are further discounted as too “attached” or “engaged.”
In the world of investigative journalism, you are even considered dangerous, and your own publications may turn against you if you fail to accept outcomes that can squash controversial stories. This is a common experience to anyone who has mattered in the world of journalism.
Author and investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The celebrated investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in 1993 that telling stories that some people do not want to read but should be told is often a thankless, even dangerous task.
“Reporters write a story once, and then there’s no response and they stop,” says Hersh. “Somehow the object [is] to keep on pushing. The problem is, what do you do when you make yourself a pain in the ass and you become suspect? Because as everybody knows, for some mysterious reasons, if you have a point of view in a newspaper room you are suspect. Or if you’re a true believer you’re dangerous, you’re political. That’s really crazy. Because it seems to me the only good stories that come out of anything come from people who have a passion about right and wrong, and good and bad. It’s a terrible tragedy. It’s very tough.”
I always turn to Hersh’s quote that I jotted down when I first became a journalist, when I need to remember that telling important stories, including ones that challenge orthodoxy and prejudice, will never be an easy road to travel. That is why I wrote my book about the American adoption experience, knowing it would not be an easy story to tell or to sell.
But anything that matters, really and truly matters, requires overcoming such obstacles. That is how you find personal meaning and how you make positive and meaningful change that may take years to achieve.
(Author’s note: This essay also can also be found on my You Don’t Know How Lucky You Arewebsite, where I provide information, essays, and resources on adoptee rights, adoption, evolutionary biology, adoption law, and other issues covered in my forthcoming memoir on the American adoption experience. Please visit that site to learn more about adoptee rights and research.)
The dark side of American policing once again became an international story late on July 15, when Minneapolis police shot dead Justine Damond outside of her own home, after she called 911 for police help.
The 40-year-old Australian woman and Minneapolis resident became an unlikely victim in a pattern of civilian shootings that are unheard of in Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia.
Australian citizen Justine Damond was killed by Minneapolis Police on July 15, 2017. Her shooting has sparked international concern about the number of police shootings and prevalence of gun violence in the United States. (Source: website of the deceased.)
The intense global coverage of Damond’s killing was inevitable given the unlikely profiles of the deceased and the trigger man.
A Victim and a Cop—How Both Defied the Uncomfortable Normal
Damond ultimately shared a fate of African-American men killed by law enforcement in recent years. Such men are easily categorized as a potential threat or criminals to police or to the public who fear them.
No one could claim Damond had any resemblance to Ferguson resident Michael Brown, the 18-year-old African-American man who was gunned down by white police officer Darren Wilson, 28, in August 2014.
Damond was white woman. She had blonde hair. She was unarmed and dressed in pajamas outside of her own house, on the eve of her marriage. Damond had called 911 as a good Samaritan, in response to sounds of a possible sexual assault she reportedly heard outside of her residence.
Damond was exactly the type of person all of want as a neighbor because of her concerns for others.
Damond also was a former vet and yoga instructor who moved to the United States in 2015 and was engaged to American businessman and Minneapolis resident Don Damond.
More importantly, she emigrated from Australia, where police seldom use deadly force and where there are strict gun control laws, first implemented two decades earlier.
The officer who killed her because of his alleged fear an ambush did not fit the profile of other officer-involved killings as well.
The policeman, Mohamed Noor, 32, is of Somali descent and a Moslem. Less than two years on the job, he was recruited by the Minneapolis police from the immigrant Somali community, where some young Somali-American men have been connected to the Islamic terror group al-Shabab in Somalia.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune provided detailed coverage of the killing and of the shooter, officer Mohamed Noor, a Somali-American recently hired two years ago by the Minneapolis Police Department.
Noor represented a model for others to follow and to bridge cultural divides.
In other words, a black man of Somali descent and Moslem American from a community that already was in the media crosshairs shot and killed an obviously attractive, white, middle-class, and foreign woman in a major American city.
Many observers were stunned the killing could have occurred to an innocent civilian who had called for police help to investigate a possible sexual assault—actions that police encourage every citizen to do in nearly every city in the United States.
Damond’s Killing: A Rorschach and Rashomon Study of Officer-Involved Shootings
The shooting death is already a Hollywood movie before all of the facts and fogs of conflicting stories will ever be known.
What little we know are the likely time of Damond’s death after her 911 call and that Noor, sitting in the patrol car’s passenger seat, shot her to death from the driver’s side window.
A witness reportedly has come forward saying he was biking home and filmed the effort to resuscitate her by Noor and officer Matthew Harrity. She was shot at nearly point-blank range in the abdomen, and the chances of survival would have been slim, even with the best medical help, were she even alive.
The more murky “facts” surrounding Damond’s death also call into question police accountability through the use of body cameras—an issue that has been hotly debated in the wake of repeated “officer-involved” shootings of minorities nationwide.
In this case, the two officers dispatched to Damond’s 911 call had turned off their body cameras, in violation of the city’s official and controversial video policy implemented a year earlier. To date, no explanation has been provided why the pair had not followed mandatory procedures to record their actions with body and dashboard cameras precisely to avoid the cloudy circumstances that now surround this killing. Police departments nationally have bristled at civilian demands for police-worn body cameras for years.
Officer Noor’s claim of being startled by a loud pop at the sight of a woman in pajamas has been lambasted by many who have voiced outrage.
Many minority activists demanding policy accountability for shootings of civilians allege non-white victims of police shootings often say they posed no threats before they were gunned down, like former Ferguson resident Brown. No jury has sided with the victims since Brown’s death.
The shooting had other ingredients for becoming an international incident:
The officer’s status as a Moslem man from an immigrant community potentially will attract the interest of Moslems globally. Many in that community are fearful and resentful of stereotyping, and President Donald Trump’s rhetoric against Moslems in the United States and his recent travel ban of Moslems from six Moslem-majority nations have alarmed many in the Moslem world.
Inside the United States, more white Americans, notably those who live in the suburbs and who are supposedly immune from heavy-handed, militarized policing, might become more alarmed that they too could be killed for engaging law enforcement for help. The shooting creates a PR barrier even among the police’s large and ready-built fan base.
Women in particular might be more fearful of ever calling any police officer for assistance, given the violence on display in Damond’s death. It would be fascinating to do a poll how many American woman who self-identify as middle-class and educated feel safe contacting local police for assistance, particularly in cases of domestic violence.
Foreign nationals, particularly international students and more affluent Asians and Europeans, might reconsider travel to the United States for travel, study, or business, given the racial dynamics of the shooting showing starkly that, yes, even white, blonde yoga instructors with charming Aussie accents are not safe in a secure area, from the local authorities.
Damond’s Death: Black, White, and Somewhere in Between
Within days after the shooting, troll commentaries in media stories on sites like Yahoo News were swift to describe the shooter’s ethnicity and religion as likely reasons why Noor killed Damond.
Other commentators on many news web sites mocked the irony that police thought the blonde female victim was accidentally mistaken for a large, scary black man.
Writing about the irony of the killing, The Root wryly noted, “Why is it that the one shooting that suddenly has white people fearing the cops is the shooting that takes one of their own? I’ll tell you why. It’s because they finally found their ‘perfect’ victim. She was white and blonde and rescued ducks out of sewers. She was the antithesis of the ‘superpredator’ image they want you to believe represents blackness. She didn’t deserve to die. But neither did any of the others.”
In Minneapolis, the response has defied some expected outcomes of those quick to frame the issue as black and white. Some who joined in protests a day after Damond’s death were African-American activists, who had protested the shooting of unarmed black motorist Philando Castile, 32, just outside of St. Paul by a Hispanic police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, on June 6, 2016.
Only a month earlier, on June 6, 2017, a jury acquited Janez. The story drew heated debates and national coverage and framed the public response to the Damond shooting from the start.
Castile was gunned down reaching for his wallet—a killing caught on the police dashboard camera. It is profoundly troubling footage to observe. His killing at the hands of a uniformed police officer—Hispanic, not white—was just another in a series of high-profile shootings of African-American men in the past three years that helped to launch the national Black Lives Matter movement.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune covered the resignation of Minneapolis Police Chief, Janeé Harteau, who stepped down on July 21 following the firestorm that erupted less than a week after the shooting of Justine Damond by a police officer at point-blank range.
Following Damond’s slaying, nearly 300 people attended Damond’s vigil. They included Cathy Jones, an African-American woman who had marched at protests with Black Lives Matter and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She told The Guardian newspaper, “I think it’s important because these are things that affect our community every single day. It’s never been about race. It’s been about police accountability.”
Many of protesters on July 20 in Damond’s neighborhood connected Damond’s death with Castile’s. His mother, Valerie Castile, was shown hugging the widowed fiancé, Dom Damond.
On July 21, Minneapolis Police Chief Janeé Harteau resigned under pressure. The same day, protesters disrupted Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges’ press conference.
The two female leaders, both white women, had long been at odds. Harteau had publicly battled city and state officials, and in October 2013, she rejected proposals for body cameras by Hodges and other city council members—a month before Hodges was elected mayor.
Why Damond Stands Out Beyond Her Race
Damond, 40, also fetched a striking image, in the photographs of her that splashed on the internet and airwaves soon after her death.
She was by all measures athletic and very attractive, with blonde hair and a winning smile. She had been a vet, who then became a yoga and meditation instructor. She was the type of middle-class woman you might spot in yoga tights, carrying a yoga pad in a gentrified neighborhood, like my own, where I daily see many women who match this demographic profile take classes at two local yoga studios.
Damond’s shooting generated intense interest from the Australian media and its leaders. The level of interest was larger than what Americans might see of shooting victims in their own country.
In Damond’s native country, news of the meditation teacher’s baffling death has dominated the airwaves, newspapers and websites for days, feeding into Australians’ long-held fears about America’s notorious culture of gun violence. Philip Alpers at the University of Sydney, who has studied U.S. gun issues, said, “The country is infested with possibly more guns than people. We see America as a very risky place in terms of gun violence—and so does the rest of the world.”
The Daily Telegraph of Australia ran a banner headline and photo of Australian shooting victim Justine Damond that captured how many view the prevalence of gun violence in the United States outside of the country.
A front-page headline in her hometown Sydney newspaper summarized Australia’s reaction in blunt terms: “American Nightmare.”
Days after the killing, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnball told Australia’s Today Show what many Australians were also saying publicly about the case and violence in the United States: “How can a woman out in the street in her pajamas seeking assistance from police be shot like that? It is a shocking killing. We are demanding answers on behalf of her family. And our hearts go out to her family and all of her friends and loved ones. It’s a truly tragic, tragic killing there in Minneapolis.”
Shortly after the Minneapolis shooting, the Washington Post reported that more than 520 people had been shot and killed by police officers in the United States in the calendar year, well on pace to surpass 963 shooting deaths by police during 2016.
Deadly shootings by police are exceedingly rare in Australia, even though the police carry firearms. Only a handful are reported each year, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology. By comparison, the United States has by policy prevented the creation of national database of deadly police-involved shootings. The body count has come from independent media monitors.
At the time, then-Prime Minister John Howard—a conservative—warned Australians against following America’s lead on gun control, saying: “We have an opportunity in this country not to go down the American path.”
What my Reaction Tells me as Well:
Until this essay, I had not written any articles about the deaths of African-American and minority victims from encounters with the police. I have professional ties that now limit what I talk about on this blog. Also, I exhausted my energy writing and talking about gun violence in the United States, following the mass shootings in 2012 in Aurora, Colorado, which took 12 lives, and in Newtown, Connecticut, which claimed 26 victims.
My efforts to frame that story through a public health lens left me feeling powerless and that I could not make a difference. I ultimately stopped writing and talking about gun violence and focused this blog and my energies in more positive directions.
Yet again I am drawn into the discussion of an issue that I feel I cannot change. This time, however, many more affluent white Americans now know such random violence by gunfire can happen to any of them, even those who are most privileged by every measure, at the hands of police they call on for protection in supposedly safe, secure neighborhoods. Perhaps now there might be some momentum to reduce gun violence in the United States—something I longed for and then abandoned five years ago after the Newtown massacre.
The Donaldson Adoption Institute’s new campaign has a hashtag and tagline, but is it really about reform?
This article is a response to a recent newsletter flash I received from the adoption research and advocacy group called the Donaldson Adoption Institute (DAI). The organization has suddenly proclaimed a bold new advocacy position and campaign on adoptee rights as a “human rights” issue.
I will make three key points about this new effort and how adoptees, the media, policy-makers, and supporters of adoptee rights should cautiously view this and all other efforts by groups who claim to promote legal rights for adopted persons, illegitimately born people, and people who call themselves bastards:
The institute’s new campaign seeking to become the champion of “human rights” for adoptees seeking their birth records must be viewed critically given the group’s track record and the way it is linked to the promotion of what some adoptees and reporters like Dan Rather call the “adoption industry.”
Authentic advocacy and scholarship on adoptee rights or any issue involves “walking the talk” and having what ordinary folks call “street cred.” For example, Florence Fisher, and the group she lead in the 1970s called the Adoptees’ Liberty Movement Association (ALMA), showed that when ALMA took a clear stand for adoptees by calling for the “free access to our original birth certificates and the records of our adoption” and went to court in New York in 1977 with a federal class action lawsuit, claiming adoptees had rights under the U.S. Constitution’s 13th and 14th amendments to their original birth records. They lost but their actions spoke volumes. You have to demonstrate what you believe through meaningful action, not fluffy words of cute social media memes.
My work in my upcoming book on my adoption experience and how U.S. adoption should be understood through a public health lens gives full credit to insightful writers and advocates, like Lauren Sabina Kneisly, who clearly define the real power systems involved in adoption and the political realities of being an adoptee and bastard. Real advocates and credible scholars acknowledge their sources and forebears. Those who only seek influence or power in any field will try to co-opt the work of real reformers.
Why I am Troubled by Donaldson Adoption Institute’s Co-opting of Adoptee Claims to Human Rights
My forthcoming memoir and critical look at U.S. adoption, called You Don’t Know How Lucky You are, presents a public health and human rights perspective on adoption and how it denies human rights and legal rights to U.S. adoptees in most U.S. states. Visit: http://www.howluckyuare.com.
My forthcoming memoir on the U.S. adoption experience makes clear I will not and do not appropriate or claim ownership of many breakthrough actions and ideas in the long struggle of adoptees to have equal rights of non-adopted people in the United States.
I praise and quote scholars like professors E. Wayne Carp and Elizabeth Samuels, who have documented how adoptees’ and birth parents’ legal access to original birth records was severely restricted by state legislatures and public health bureaucracies in the decades after World War II. (Also see my post on the topic of discrimination against adoptees.)
To ensure accuracy and authenticity with my readers, I give each and every parent, writer, activist, scholar, organization, and leader full credit for their contributions to changing current practices and thinking. I do that to acknowledge who has meaningfully contributed to our understanding of adoption as a political, health, public health, historic, sociological, biological, and advocacy issue.
I also seek to steer policy-makers, adoptees, and the media to credible and relevant data to correctly frame adoption as a human rights, public health, and legal issue. That is also called responsible scholarship and “walking the talk” in the advocacy arena.
Donaldson Adoption Institute’s Status on Adoptee Rights
One group I continue to have trouble with concerning legal advocacy is the Donaldson Adoption Institute (DAI). The New York-based group has published research by scholars on adoption. I cite some of their work in my book. I appreciate how they cited the health issues associated with denying adoptees their family history and a 2016 study on public perceptions of adoptees and adoption. I like that the group supports openness in adoption, but I am very troubled by this concept in the context of their work that appears to support adoption without changing laws or formally acknowledging past wrongs.
However, I do not endorse their work to date as being clear, mission-driven advocacy that seeks to address historic discrimination against adoptees or work that seeks to change laws to promote equality for all adoptees by giving every single living adoptee full and unfettered access to their records–as done in most developed nations.
I say this despite the group’s sudden new commitment under a questionable logo: “50 States. 1 Movement. Restore Adoptee Rights!” The group announced this publicly on May 17, 2017, through an email “special communication.”
The DAI has a new image for its social media campaign to restore adoptee rights–a great idea, but are they committed to this mission based on their goals and actions?
I have yet to find in the institute’s work or website if the group acknowledges how other countries (England, Scotland, France, Germany, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Israel, Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway) have clear national laws that establish all adoptees’ legal right to their birth records or that the group suggests a policy solution proposal endorsing such an approach. (Please let me know if I missed something.)
The group’s diverse interests include topics like “promoting healthy identity formation in adoption,” transnational and biracial adoption issues, adoption by gay parents, and even counseling issues. While I find some of this work worthwhile for some groups, particularly transnational and bi-racial adoptees and their families, I am unconvinced still by what I see right now that the DAI can or ever will be a leader in fighting for real adoptee civil rights.
The group as recently as mid-2016 wasworking on another campaign (“transacton to transformation“), also with a catchy social media title, that urged changing adoption “to a more uniform and transformational process where everyone—expectant parents, first/birth parents, adopted persons and adoptive families and professionals—are better prepared and supported.” This in no way resembles a campaign focussed on ending discrimination against adoptees or challenging the real power structures who promote those views and profit by them. In many ways, this campaign is a contradiction to its newest effort that seemingly appropriates the concept of adoptee rights as “human rights.”
Grading Those Who Work in Adoptee Advocacy
This is a graphic with a summary of data published by Musings of the Lame, whose publisher, Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy, has published numerous articles on the business of adoption and its global reach.
The DAI claims its board has “adoption professionals, academics, adopted people, adoptive parents, first/birth parents, business leaders and other people concerned about adoption.” For any adoptee, the word “adoption professional” should be a hot red flag, because it includes perspectives of the multi-billion-dollar and global adoption industry and professions like social work, which still teaches adoption as a form of possible pathology.
Any group that seeks to sustain this industry should not be a leader in promoting meaningful change. Actual change can be seen in the Australian adoption reconciliation efforts, where the national government formally apologized in 2013 to all birth mothers and adoptees for causing harm. The DAI does not recognize in a formal way this historic action as a solution—yet another red flag for me.
The DAI’s mission statement—not even clearly called out on its website—is also muddled and does not clearly state its top goal is a lasting legal remedy and equality for adoptees by law: “The Donaldson Adoption Institute’s mission is to provide leadership that improves laws, policies and practices—through sound research, education and advocacy—in order to better the lives of everyone touched by adoption.” That is not a mission to change laws or change how adoption is understood as a political system, now sustained and promoted by the Republican Party, evangelical Christians, and groups that profit from adoption as a business.
Now the DAI calls for a national campaign—not coincidentally one it states that it wants to lead. Its announcement tries to claim the mantle of unnamed reformers from the 1970s. Key advocates in legal reform from that era such as Florence Fisher did not entangle themselves in the “business of adoption.” Quite simply, the DAI lacks street cred to lead as measured by its own actions and deeds.
Because of this, I strongly suggest that all adoptees and advocates for adoption hit the pause button and determine for themselves if they wish to do the group’s online survey, now organized to support this effort. This appears to be a power grab on advocacy in the often petty and often frustrating world of advocacy among a mostly powerless group—adoptees.
Who Is “Entitled” to Claim Leadership on Adoptee Legal Rights?
Suddenly, the DAI is using the overarching policy goal of the adoptee advocacy group Bastard Nation, whose mission statement boldly calls for “the civil and human rights of adult citizens who were adopted as children.” For the record, I am not a member of any adoptee advocacy group, and I do not know anyone in Bastard Nation in person.
The DAI now claims: “The tangible negative consequences of denying adopted people their OBC are numerous and sobering. Yet the most severe outcome rests in the fact that a fundamental human right is being denied to an entire group of people.”
What’s more, the DAI has suddenly made statements and language never used before regarding the laws that deny adoptees equal treatment under the law and their birth records. “This is a human rights violation that creates inequality for an entire group of people,” the group writes. “Everyone should have the right to know the truth of his or her birth.”
The New York Times covered the findings of the investigation of the horrific conditions that killed nearly four in five relinquished infants in Baltimore, in 1914. It was abuses against illegitimately born infants that led to national reforms to protect these infants and promote adoption standards that would prevent abuses and end the trafficking of humans.
This is great language, but I am deeply worried such views are not sustainable by a group that is so deeply embedded in a system where groups can make $30,000 or more promoting adoption. The sale of babies to adoption farms that lead to horrific infant death outcomes of bastard babies in the early 1900s in Baltimore is a warning of the dangers of turning infants into sellable commodities. Adoptee rights advocates should distance themselves entirely from anyone associated with this practice for historic and policy reasons alone, not to mention moral concerns.
My Communications with the Donaldson Adoption Institute
Bastard Nation is an adoptee advocacy group with a clear mission statement to support the human rights of adoptees and support their legal rights to original birth records.
I am more troubled that the DAI is using language by groups like Bastard Nation and others. I also am confused that the group’s language strangely resembles legal arguments I shared with them in February and March 2016 by email. I wrote to the group then to ask them to define their advocacy views on the concept of adoptees’ rights to their records as a legal issue and as a human right, similar to how it is enshrined in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.
The organization wrote me back saying, “DAI believes that an adopted persons right to access their original birth certificate is fundamentally a civil and human rights issue.” However, the DAI did not make its messaging pivot until this new campaign was launched this week. (Please see my summary of my email exchanges with the DAI and the passages of my work I published on my book website in December 2016 and policy blog in January 2016.)
(Author’s Note: My goal as I write this post is to forward this post to the DAI and ask if they wish to issue any rebuttal commentary as the form of a response on my blog, which I will publish in the spirit of promoting a vigorous public discussion of adoptee and legal rights issues.)
As of today, May 20, 2017, the DAI has not credited any group or scholar in its new campaign to become the lead group. This is not required, but its failure to acknowledge by name the groups and persons who have laid out the data and legal case for a human rights campaign for adoptees should be a red flag to all persons who believe the United States should have an identical national law like England granting all adoptees full rights to their birth records at the age of 18.
My Indebtedness to Adoptee Advocates and Words of Wisdom on Adoptee Rights Advocacy
Lauren Sabina Kneisly’s web site promoting legal rights for adoptees and should be bookmarked by anyone who cares about civil rights and equal rights.
In writing my book on the American Adoption experience, I encountered several leaders for adoptee rights who shared nearly identical views with me on the complex perspectives of the institution of adoption, the discriminatory treatment of adoptees and bastards, and the failure of current so-called advocacy groups to provide meaningful leadership to frame adoption as a legal and human rights issue that harms adoptees.
One fellow adoptee and writer I feel most aligned to is Lauren Sabina Kneisly. Her blog, Baby Love Child, appears to be on hiatus, but it provides a superb primer on how to decipher messaging on adoptee rights advocacy.
Her blog does not endorse any group, but acknowledges the work of groups like Bastard Nation.
Kneisly wisely urges adoptees and their supporters to be mindful of the words used by groups and advocates. In other words, don’t fall for astroturfing or greenwashing, which co-opt the words, emotions, and ideas of real reformers by those who seek to profit from the status quo and who may actually not want change at all.
Usually the proof is in both the words and also the deeds, and greenwashing can be very slick. If it’s good, and it often is by such sales personnel, your emotions will be exploited without your conscious awareness.
Therefore, consider Kneisly’s recommendation for judging street cred and moral legitimacy for adoptee advocacy groups. She suggests these criteria:
Do they understand their status as part of a broader class of people and refuse to leave others behind?
Do they have a clear and single-minded focus on the real goal—equity for adoptees?
Do they reject substitutions, distractions, or attempts to divide and conquer that maintain state control and deflect from the goal of equality?
Do they identify who holds real power and what their conflicts of interest are?
Do they only settle for full equality for all those denied access in an inequitable manner?
Remember, as with all things in the real-world of politics and advocacy, trust your gut and disregard any marketing promise that sounds too good to be true, because it often isn’t.
Finally, if you want an example of clearly stated goals towards a policy objective, visit the Adoptee Rights Law Center, maintained by lawyer, adoptee, and activist Gregory Luce of Minnesota. I think he is doing great work to change the national discussion with facts, provide timely and accurate information, and support adoptee rights as a human right.
If you know of a group you like, send me a note. I would love to hear from you and share that on my website for my new book.
[Editor’s Note, Jan. 5, 2018: As of Jan. 4, 2018, the Donaldson Adoption Institute has announced it is closing. Lack of funding likely contributed to its demise. Its research will still be accessible online, according to its most recent public statement. Adoptee rights advocates will now need to fill a void when media cover the issue. Reporters seeking soundbites often turned to this group. True adoptee rights advocates need to insert themselves into the national conversation.]
The following post is drawn from my lecture notes that accompany my presentation on the struggles of Detroit, my birth city. You also can see a PDF version of that PowerPoint. (Note, it may take 20-30 seconds to download.)
My Detroit storytelling project began after I published an essay in a political blog that highlighted the struggles of Detroit, following my visit to the city in April 2015. My piece examined Detroit’s sad decay and my perspective on what I saw throughout my birth city by simply driving through it.
In fact I never intended to tell this story. But it soon became inescapable. It was a story that found me.
While attempting to explore areas near the River Rouge plant, I stumbled on the Delray neighborhood and was dumbstruck by the scale of destruction and decay.
Arson is visible throughout the decaying Delray neighborhood of Detroit, near the River Rouge factory.
My second recent trip in September 2015 included visits to where I briefly lived as a baby and where my biological family lived. I discovered that the home of my biological grandparents had been gutted and leveled in a neighborhood being razed, with many burned out shells that once were middle-class homes.
By 2015, Detroit had already become the poster child of a new documentary photography genre called “ruin porn.” As an outsider, people do have a right question if my work fit this pattern. But who gets to judge?
Photographer/blogger James Griffioen says there are two ways to do it: responsibly and exploitatively: “The few photographers and reporters I met weren’t interested at all in telling the story of Detroit, but instead gravitated to the most obvious (and over-photographed) ‘ruins,’ and then used them to illustrate stories about problems that had nothing to do with the city (which has looked like this for decades). … These photographers were showing up with $40,000 cameras to take pictures of houses worth less than their hotel bills.”
In late 2015 and early 2016, I was unable to find a likely partner to host a lecture and slide show of my work on Detroit. I reached out to every major university in the Portland area and the Multnomah County Library—twice on its part. None bit at my pitch for a free slide show and discussion. Here is the presentation I did share with my coworkers, which took a long view of Detroit’s rise and fall. (Note the PDF file is large and may take 20-30 seconds to full download.)
In my pitch to the library, I wrote: “Detroit, once the nation’s fourth largest city and global center to automobile manufacturing, is now a global icon of deindustrialization and urban decay. Population has fallen from 1.85 million in 1960 to 680,000 today. The city has experienced the country’s largest ever municipal bankruptcy. More than eight in 10 residents is African American, following decades of white flight that saw no equal anywhere in the American industrial heartland. With 80,000 abandoned buildings and homes.”
The fierce urgency of the topic was painfully evident to me in late 2015, as one GOP candidate was using issues of decay and the loss of manufacturing jobs as his battering ram to win the White House. As the world saw, those messages changed history in the old manufacturing states of Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. The man who changed history, Donald J. Trump, is now president of the Untied States. Democrats as a party and most liberals failed and still fail to grasp these changes if they live outside of the area.
For those outside of the so-called Rust Belt, including mostly liberal-leaning Portland where I live, Detroit is far away. Detroit’s issues, told through images and data, highlight deep problems in this now African-American city. The role of race and systemic racism are impossible to avoid. That includes how Detroit grew and declined. But it now includes how Detroiters themselves are managing a reality today. And yes, blame is to be found among those who have been in power in the past two decades.
Why Detroit’s Real Decay Matters in the Trump Era
For those who have not been paying attention, Detroit’s evolution into a shell of its greatness is the stage on which billionaire and now president Trump ascended to power.
His phrases could perfectly fit on any highway billboard entering Detroit: “Make America great again” and “We’re going to bring back manufacturing and American jobs.”
By now most Americans have heard those lines, repeatedly, from the most famous person on the planet.
The River Rouge Factory, site of the main production facility in metro Detroit for the Ford Motor Co.
His economic message, made during his successful campaign in Detroit, in the most blunt terms, is a vast critique of the country’s decline. This can be seen spectacularly in the fall of Detroit from a great city to a city that imploded. It is hardly a surprise that Trump successfully attacked the company that made Detroit famous, the Ford Motor Co., during a much publicized feud during the election. Trump won that battle hands down.
No one but perhaps the Ford Motor Co. and its supporters will argue Trump successfully pressured the company to shut down plans to build a new manufacturing facility in Mexico before he even took office and invest its resources back in the United States.
The election battle over American manufacturing is the inevitable outcome of America’s decline as a country with a manufacturing economic base. In 1959 a third of the American workforce was involved in manufacturing; in 2009 that figure was 12 percent. In the same time span, conversely, the percentage of service sector jobs increased by a similar amount. Many people who used to work in manufacturing are now employed as service workers out in the suburbs.
The Economic Policy Institute today notes that the automotive sector still accounts for one in every 22 jobs in the United States. Detroit was particularly dependent on the love affair. In 1950, Detroit’s population hits 1.85 million, making it America’s fourth-largest city, with 296,000 manufacturing jobs.
Who Is to Blame?
Japanese automotive manufacturing plants are widely dispersed in the United States
Today, a typical U.S. made car may now have parts made in Canada, Mexico, and overseas, all linked with just-in-time delivery systems. Foreign manufacturers like Toyota and Volkswagen are now firmly rooted throughout America, particularly in tax-friendly states. Since the 1950s, the Big Three have lost market share to their global competitors for the U.S. market. During recent negotiations now between GM and the UAW, GM threatened to outsource even more parts production to Mexican factories—plans now apparently on hold with Trump in the White House.
A painful visual reminder of the decline of automotive manufacturing is the old Packard Co. factory. Packard began operations in 1903 and closed in 1958, leaving behind it’s once state of the art factory. It remains a shell, now occasionally used for film sets of post-industrial-collapse and dystopian films. Factories no longer have horizontal building design like the closed Packard Plant.
The old Packard Co. plant is now a famous ruin celebrated in dystopian films and documentaries on the Motor City.
The Ford Motor Co. left its original site in Detroit, and Henry Ford located his world-famous River Rouge complex (built on land he purchased for just $10,000) in Dearborn just outside of Detroit. Ford has not built a car or truck in Detroit since 1910.
Today GM’s main assembly plant in Detroit is actually in Hamtramck, a city within the borders of Detroit. Chrysler’s HQ is in Auburn Hills, a suburb. GM is still located in downtown Detroit, though its brand Cadillac just moved to New York.
The Ford Motor Co. left Detroit more than a century ago and located in next-door Dearborn.
It is no coincidence that Henry Ford, the man who helped to put Detroit on the map with mass production, high working-class wages, and assembly line production, also left Detroit in 1910 and relocated to Dearborn. Some argue his model for middle-class and car-owning, working-class Americans spurred the movement of residents from cities to the suburbs, including in the Detroit area.
Ford’s model called for the centralization, rationalization, and integration of all operations under one roof—fabricate the steal, create the parts, assemble the vehicles, sell to the marketplace. River Rouge was the manifestation of that vision. The original model shifted after the 1940s. Auto companies compartmentalized their operations and moved from the city. They shifted instead to horizontal building configurations. One-story buildings were and still are cheaper to build and maintain.
Who Brought About Decay?
Some blame the United Auto Workers for the downfall of auto manufacturing in the United States, others blame the manufacturers.
In 2011, UAW workers got $58/hour from Ford, $55 from GM, and $52 from Chrysler. After the bailout, a two-tier pay system was implemented for new employees (recently contested in labor negotiations with Fiat Chrysler in Fall 2015). GM alone had $100 billion in pension obligations when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2009, not all for union workers/UAW members.
Ford, GM, and Chrysler all relied on SUVs to boost their profitability, and those models spectacularly collapsed during the great recession, leading to bailouts by U.S. taxpayers of Chrysler (now Fiat/Chrysler) and GM. In December 2008, President Bush gave a provisional $17.4 billion bailout to GM and Chrysler. From May through July 2009 Chrysler and GM declared bankruptcy, and the President Obama administration provided financing and guided the automakers through expedited bankruptcy proceedings. A fundamental shift in management-labor relations occurred thereafter.
On Race and Riots:
Detroit has actually had three historic race related riots: 1863 (race related, tied to military draft, 2 dead), 1943 (34 killed, 25 were black), 1967 (43 dead, more than 2,000 buildings burned). That latter was the death knell for many whites determined to leave the city for the suburbs. The last riot followed historic demographic changes. From 1940 to 1970, 4 million blacks moved from the South to urban areas in the North, including Detroit.
The riots in Detroit in 1967 left 43 dead and 2,000 burned buildings. The city never recovered.
Scenes from the 1967 riots that forever changed the city and marked a turning point for white flight. My grandmother and grandfather (biological) moved out of west Detroit to the neighboring suburb of Livonia in 1968, a year after the riot.
As of 2014, Detroit was 83 percent African American, 7 percent white, and about 6 percent Hispanic/Latino of all major ethnic groups.
What About Leadership?
Mayor Coleman Young, the city’s first African American Mayor, has a controversial legacy from 1974 to 1994. The Wall Street Journal squarely blames him for the city’s decline that accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s. He is viewed by some, including the Detroit Free Press, for stoking racial flames. The Detroit Free Press however claims he was among the most frugal mayors and avoided debt, unlike his successors. My birth mother remembers him most for his inaction on Devil’s Night in 1989 and not stopping the first outbreak of widespread arson.
Former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is best known for his sexting scandal with an aide but also widespread corruption. The Detroit Free Press blames him for pushing it into unprecedented debt: “The greatest damage Kilpatrick did to the city’s long-term stability was with Wall Street’s help when he borrowed $1.44 billion in a flashy high-finance deal to restructure pension fund debt. That deal, which could cost $2.8 billion over the next 22 years, now represents nearly one-fifth of the city’s debt.”
Former Mayor of Detroit and convicted politician Kwame Kilpatrick.
In November 2012, GOP Gov. Rick Snyder signed legislation allowing for a state appointed financial manager or Chapter 9 bankruptcy for the Motor City. In February 2013, the state described Detroit status as “operational dysfunction” and in need of intervention.
In February 2013, Snyder appointed Kevyn Orr as emergency manager. Orr promptly called the city insolvent. Detroit debts totaled $18.5 billion, with twice as many pensioners as workers by this point. In July 2013, Orr filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, the first time ever by a municipality. After court hearings, the state signed bills in June 2014 to move Detroit out of insolvency.
The Detroit Free Press ran a lengthy series on billionaire Dan Gilbert’s connection to lending practices that led to blight in Detroit.
Billionaire Dan Gilbert, CEO of Quicken Loans and now Detroit real-estate mogul, also is partially blamed by the Detroit Free Press for exacerbating urban blight and the huge foreclosure crisis. Gilbert’s Quicken Loans was central to decay. Since 2000, Wayne County has held one of the world’s largest real estate auctions offering 20,000 properties a year acquired through foreclosure—5 percent of Detroit’s housing stock. The venerable New York Times in 2014 described the city’s plight as post-apocalyptic.
A City Gone Wild
The evidence of arson is omnipresent throughout Detroit. I saw hundreds of torched homes and buildings without really trying to find them. I also saw large numbers of abandoned and in some cases scrapped and pillaged schools, left abandoned because of consolidation, loss of students, and gross mismanagement by Detroit Public Schools (DPS). There were 1,500 suspected arson fires between January and July 2015, according to the Motor City Muckracker blog news site.
A glaring example of that decay can be seen in how the Detroit Public Schools literally left its supplies to rot, much perfectly good (textbooks, supplies, sporting equipment), after a fire. The book repository building was then bought by billionaire Ambassador Bridge owner Matty Maroun, who sealed it tight after famous photos surfaced in the 2008 and 2009. Photos of the repository by photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have now become world famous and synonymous with the city . The images can be found in their seminal work, The Ruins of Detroit.
The Michigan Central Station adorns the cover of the documentary photo book by French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre on the downfall of Detroit, called The Ruins of Detroit. It is a seminal work in photojournalism. It literally helped to spawn a new genre called ruin porn.
Today, many Detroiters are fiercely opposed to downsizing Detroit. In reality, some areas no longer have vital services delivered—water, lighting, public safety, fire protection. They have gone wild.
I remember one moment that captured this reality best during my last trip in late September 2015. I was driving in the center of the city. I needed to find a restroom. There were no facilities anywhere in sight. So I pulled my car over. There was an abandoned lot, with bushes shoulder-high. It looked like raccoons or coyotes could call it home. Not a soul was in sight. I relieved myself. I felt more like I was in an empty woods than a city that used to be the envy of the world.
(Note, I also have published a copy of my article on the blog section of the website for my forthcoming memoir and study of the American adoption experience called You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are.)
My forthcoming book, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are, takes a closer look at the strong evidence that shows the critical role of genetic relations in child-rearing and adoption.
The debate of the role over nature and nurture in raising adopted children has been the central issue of the institution since its inception and later growth into a global business and social engineering system that literally has created millions of family relations involving people who have no genetic relationship. Adoption historian Ellen Herman, of the University of Oregon, calls adoption as practiced in the United States “designated kinship by design.” It has been a large-scale experiment from the beginning, testing what Herman calls “enduring beliefs in the power of blood, and widespread doubts about whether families could thrive without it.”
A shot of some of the tens of thousands of babies relinquished for adoption through the maternity care facilities run by the National Florence Crittenton Mission. (Source: Sioux City Journal, “Wife of Nobel winner started life at Crittenton Center,” Sept.18, 2011.
Today, those who defend adoption, including social workers, adoption advocacy groups who champion closed birth records that harm adoptees, and many Christian and fundamentalist groups who embrace orphan adoption, argue that nature has a minimal or little role in the rearing of an adopted child.
The wealth of evidence from evolutionary biology and psychology and from studies of child abuse of stepchildren by a non-related parent show that genetic relations greatly impact child care in families, in most cultures globally. As Canadian evolutionary psychology researchers Margo Wilson and Martin Daly note, “There is nothing magical about parental discrimination: preferential treatment of one’s own young exists only where a species’ ecology demands it.”
Stories of abuse of adopted children crop up routinely, usually shared by adoptees on social media and not covered rigorously by the mainstream press. Occasionally a sensational story of a harmed adoptee does get extra attention.
Book cover to Kathryn Joyce’s book on the Christian adoption movement, The Child Catchers.
The 2011 killing of one young Ethiopian born orphan and adoptee, Hana Williams, in rural Sedro-Woolley, Washington, did lead to moral and political outrage and more nuanced reporting of the Christian transnational adoption movement. The writer Kathryn Joyce has profiled the business of global adoptions by evangelical U.S. Christian families and the underlying issues of creating families among non-related parents and children in her book TheChild Catchers. Joyce provides one of the most detailed profiles of this tragedy, taking on mostly taboo topics that many people involved in adoption do not wish to discuss, even professionally. Such discussions harm the very real “business of adoption” and what I sometimes call the “adoption industrial complex.”
Adoptees’ Experiences Often Go Unnoticed, But Their Stories Matter
Outside of these news flashes, adoptions happen daily and touch millions, and the tragic story of Hana Williams is an outlier. But the issues in her story matter.
Most adoption stories involve the mundane reality of simply growing up and having family relations, over decades. That experience is different for many adoptees. The long view of it over time can be hard to convey to nonadoptees, many of whom carry hidden biases against adoptees that also are rooted in most adoptees’ status as being illegitimately conceived.
The most recent episode of This American Life presents a story–360: Switched At Birth–that describes how two girls were switched at birth and brought up in two different families who lived near each other in Wisconsin. Both of the women described feeling lifelong differences from their family and even how their parents provided less interest in their well-being growing up. This is not remarkable nor even an indication of the two mothers acting badly to the girls they raised who were not their blood kin. The parents were acting as people will naturally do–showing discrimination that evolutionary biology research shows will ultimately favor one’s blood kin over someone who they know is not their genetic offspring.
As an adoptee listening to this story, I did not hear anything new or remarkable in this episode. I heard what sounded very normal to me, having grown up as an adoptee. It is called “being adopted.” It is how you live your life.
Likely the producers of This American Life wanted a story that was quirky and unique, because it was a classic “switcheroo story” straight from Mark Twain’s pantheon of stories, namely Pudd’nhead Wilson. It was not the boring adoption story about life as an adoptee–stories that do not get told well by most media. Adoptees’ lives do not qualify as news, except in these extreme moments. But these stories do matter because the taboo topics of illegitimacy and adoption, including how adoptees experience adoption throughout their entire life, impact millions of adoptees and their families.
You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are will explore the themes of kinship and parental discrimination in greater depth. For a sample, read a preview of Chapter 6: Blood Is Thicker than Water.
Rudy Owens' Blog 