Happy Thanksgiving from The Blaaag!
(What is my family having? Duck. And tofu soup. Go figure.)

... Fittingly named, because it does relativism so well. A blog attempting to educate on transracial adoptions, Choices features mostly posts by these select adopters themselves (one is a Barnard alum). But, as the New York Times often is with its tunneled, caring-white-person stories, the blog has had quite a number of very iffy, "othering" posts by adopting parents. Take a read...



The inaugural post of Choices is exactly the story of a first-world savior discovering the "magical" history of third-world innocent. In "Finding Zhao Gu", the adopting father writes about his search for the origins of his daughter. In doing so, he says a lot of generally self-righteous and Orientalist things - like "yearn[ing] to know the secrets that he, alone among millions in China, held within himself," how the events of his saviorship "felt like fate", and talking in English at the person who found her in order to achieve his personal sense of closure.

Not all of the posts are terrible. In "Beyond the Lion Dance," the same man writes about offering his two Chinese girls (pathological Chinese baby adopter?) a semblance of cultural belonging in Chinatown and worrying about the identity issues they might be faced with in the future. Another explains how she avoided the demeaning videos from African adoption agencies (but only until she actually forced her way to a child that she found particularly adorable, "with darling eyes and nappy hair that was tightly curled and uneven in appearance.")



One article, however, is just ridiculous. In "The Real Thing", Tama Janowitz tries to make herself immune to criticism about what seems like crass child-rearing ways while telling us the deeply ignorant things she says to people about her motherhood... things like, "I say to Willow: 'Well, you know, if you were still in China you would be working in a factory for 14 hours a day with only limited bathroom breaks!'" Her snarkiness knows few bounds. After calling her daughter's features "Mongolian", she proceeds to minimize the problems that other Asian adoptees have had with not having forged a cultural identity. Great writing, Tama - let me know when you want to peddle more of your irreverent, insensitive garbage over the internet... unless after Googling your own name you found that to be a bad idea.

I'm not alone in my disgust. If you want to see the problems that bloggers have already found with this writing, every word in this sentence links to a verbal lashing of this blog. And this is just what Carmen linked on Racialicious.

There's more... Carmen reports that the Times bloggers have been censoring dissenting comments from adult adoptees. Denying claims of their own racism... wow, we haven't seen this before. Relative Choices, all in all, makes me slightly sick. Of course the posts by adoptees themselves are pretty okay, but this should be a reason why we "loosely ethnicity-oriented" blogs exist - to catch mainstream writers in the very troubling things they say.

At this point, it's pretty obvious that whatever praise or criticisms I give will sound ripped off the commentaries of CU-Strike, Spec, and Bwog. So I'm going to let my commendations remain on the previous entry and move on.

It's easy to package campus events into convenient, airtight time frames; on Facebook, many happenings have set beginnings and ends in a typical "8:00-9:30 PM" fashion. It seems that the CU-Strike blog's sudden silence and packing up of South Lawn tents have marked an equally definitive end to the past two weeks' madness. The general climate on campus seems lighter and happier (partly due to the impending break). So has the wish, "We just want this shit to end", been granted? Can the groups against the Hunger Strike rest in peace?

During last night's IRC One Love/Open Mic event, over a heavenly plate of baked mac & cheese, a friend and I shared some casual conversation about these concerns.

And this is what I learned: Yes, students involved with the strike have consented to hitting the books again. Since South Lawn was cleared, the Kulawiks of Columbia/Barnard don't have to worry anymore about the Gentrification Octopus intruding on their finely-sliced-and-doused-with-wine lives. But they should savor the peace and quiet while they can, because Expansion into Harlem (Demand #3) has mostly been left untouched.

The Manhattanville expansion issue is another time bomb waiting to explode. The Harlem community and groups on campus have been working closely together since before the strike, so don't expect #3 to go ignored (Sorry, Colombo - we see how schlumped and bored you get after meetings). Plus, given the rate at which things have been going, I wouldn't be surprised if some campus riots were to take place in the next few days or weeks.

(Note: there's also a new Barnard dialogue tent. Figure it out.)