PO Box 4607
New Windsor, New York 12553-7845
bastards.org 614-795-6819 @BastardsUnite
Bastard Nation Executive Committee Statement of Solidarity
With
Black Lives Matter
Distribute Freely!
June 8, 2020
Anti-Black racism is the keystone of White supremacy. It does not operate in isolation or an historical vacuum. The recent murders of George Floyd in Minnesota, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, Tony McDade in Florida, and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky are not isolated incidents. Their deaths are the latest iteration of over 400 years of American racist-motivated murder, rape, expropriation, and exploitation where Black bodies have consistently been treated with callous disregard.
Today we see massive justifiable rage across the country against this systemic racism that permeates the United States, exhibited by agents of the state: police, courts, legislatures, schools, and social services.
The Bastard Nation Executive Committee expresses our solidarity with Black Lives Matter and with those in the US and around the world protesting police violence and systemic racism. We support all peaceful protest. We support free expression and the right to address and demand redress from the government. We support self-determination, self- ownership, and autonomy. We support human dignity and civil and human rights.
Bastard Nation condemns racism, the abrogation of free speech, civil rights, police repression, police brutality, state secrets, and state-based violence.
Every day as adoptee rights activists we confront racism and concomitant classism in the adoption and foster care systems:
- Failure of the adoption industry, the public in general, as well as the media to listen to the experience and criticisms by Black adoptees and foster care alumni of adoption/transracial adoption, foster care, and forced family separation and destruction.
- Racism veiled in benevolent adoption narratives of “color blindness.”
- The valorization of transracial adoption and adopters (including celebrities).
- Promotion, especially by the adoption industry, of white saviorism elevating “worthy” white, often evangelical adopters, over Black biological families.
- Unadoption and re-homing of Black adoptees who don’t “fit in” with adopters’ expectations and fantasies.
- Destruction of Black families through social service and court harassment of Black women and the removal of their children on questionable claims of neglect or abuse, ending in the transfer of those children into the foster and adoption systems.
- Monetizing of Black adoptees and foster children by guardians and adopters via blogs, vlogs. and other media.
- Globalization of child trade and traffick by neo-liberal academics and policy-makers lecturing that Black parents owe it to their children to adopt them out into white Western/cultural systems to give them a “better life.
- Deportation of internationally adopted Black and People of Color because their adopters, adoption agencies, or the US government didn’t follow through with citizenship procedures decades ago.
Bastard Nation does not and will not tolerate racist postings in our social media or webpage. Racist material and comments will be removed immediately and the poster removed and blocked from further access.
We urge our friends and allies to speak up in person and online as well.
No Justice. No Peace.
Bastard Nation Executive Committee:
Marley Greiner, Executive Chair
Mari Tatlow Steed, Vice President
Marla Paul, Secretary
Annette O’Connell, Treasurer