Nineteen-year-old Tarikuwa Lemma is a survivor, of an international adoption scandal. When she was 13, she was effectively sold from her native Ethiopia to an American family. The corrupt “adoption agency” convinced her father, who was a widow, that Tarikuwa and her younger sisters were headed to the U.S. as part of an educational exchange program, and that they would return home every summer and on holiday breaks. Little did he know, his daughters had been placed with adoptive couples in the U.S., never to return. Tarikuwa’s name was changed against her will, and she was forbidden by her American “family” from speaking her native language. The issue of transnational adoption, its evangelical Christian component, and the exploitation of communities that sometimes results, is the subject of the book, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce, who appeared, along with Tarikuwa, on last Sunday’s “Melissa Harris Perry” show on MSNBC. Below is Tarikuwa’s satirical look at the “rescue” of children from her home country, to “better lives” in America.
Stop ‘Rescuing’ African Children Through Corrupt Adoptions
Tarikuwa Lemma appearing on Melissa Harris Perry Show April 28, 2013.
From The Grio — Nineteen-year…
And you know it’s probably not just Africa, either.
This is common in East and South Asia too.
White people forever trying to “rescue” children of color and then end up abusing them and shaming them for where they come from.
(via numinousnegrita)
