January 7, 2025
In his book debut, a UC Merced professor challenges the common narrative that adoption is mainly an act of love that benefits the adoptees, adoptive parents and birth parents, especially in cases that cross racial lines and national borders.
Kit Myers, a faculty member in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies , analyzed the adoption of Asian, Black and Native American children by White families for “The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States”
(University of California Press). In the book, Myers says race has been
positioned to mark certain homes, families and nations as better
sources than others for love, freedom and positive futures for the
adoptees.
The word “violence” refers not only to physical harm but also to forms of erasure and displacement in transnational or transracial adoptions. For example, the process of forming a new family can require removing or obscuring elements of the adoptee's history. These erasures are potentially traumatic, even when done with the perceived positive intention of creating new family bonds.
“The Violence of Love” confronts this discomforting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more extensive understandings of love, kinship and care.
Myers, a professor at UC Mered since 2016, said his book relates to broader research interests on the study of race as a social, relational and intersectional category of difference and power.
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