When actress Meg Ryan adopted a baby from China in 2008, she referred to the process as a “metaphysical kind of labor.” Ryan’s impulse to adopt a child from another country is rooted in what a recent book refers to as “white benevolence” and it is hard to survive.
White benevolence is a form of “paternalistic racism that reinforces instead of challenges racial hierarchies.” Verna St. Denis, one of the co-editors of this volume about the so-called “helping professions” that white women dominate, nursing, teaching, social work, narrates her experience growing up as an Indigenous child in Canada. She writes:
“We children could easily be removed and taken from our families because our families in particular our Indigenous mothers were and are now regarded as ‘bad mothers’ who were [are] a danger to their own children” (p.33).
For many, it’s easy to condemn the characterization of Indigenous mothers as “bad.” That is, what we might call garden-variety anti-racism.
But, what’s more difficult it seems, is to recognize and disavow the opposing construction, of white mothers like Meg Ryan as inherently “good mothers.” This notion of white mothers as inherently better suited to mothering is, as St. Denis points out, crucial to the project of colonization. She points directly to white women in social work as driving the destructive enforcement of colonial notions of what “family” should look like and to destroying Indigenous families by placing children in residential schools.
In a series of recent discoveries, more than 1,300 unmarked graves of Indigenous children have been identified at the sites of four former residential schools in western Canada. The goal of Canada’s Indian residential school system was similar to the U.S. Indian boarding school counterpart, in which more than 150,000 children were taken from their homes between 1883 and 1997, often forcibly, and placed in distant boarding schools where the focus was on manual labour, religious instruction and cultural assimilation. The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Centre concluded that the Indian Residential School system was an attempted “cultural genocide.” Earlier this week, people across Canada and the U.S. wore orange t-shirts to commemorate the children lost to this genocide.
This is by no means unique to Canada or the U.S. These kinds of residential schools were also common in the settler colonial state of Australia, as Margaret D Jacobs documents in her 2011 book, White Mother to a Dark Race.
The through line across the Anglosphere of Canada, the United States and Australia, is this notion of white motherhood as superior to the mothering by Indigenous women. We, who are raised femme and to believe in our own whiteness, also get told that we are by nature better mothers of all children. Further, many of us white women are convinced that this is our highest calling when it comes to service to our fellow humans, to go and be good mothers to children in need. This is often joined with a Christian-missionary zeal, as in the case of Renee Bach, the white woman from Virginia who, with no medical training whatsoever, went to Uganda to set up a clinic for children there. Bach is now being sued by the Ugandan government over the deaths of 109 children who went through her clinic. (For more on this, see the HBO documentary series, “Savior Complex.”)
In the U.S., the practice of cross-racial adoption follows a similar pattern. Typically, this is white parents adopting Black children, and/or children from other countries. This is an industry driven by white women, both as the social workers and administrators running adoption agencies, and the women demanding babies to fulfill their own desire for infants to raise. This industry is also fueled by missionary impulses, as described in the book Adopted for Life, Christian families are obligated to adopt children who might otherwise be “lost” to abortion or “lost” to growing up in a non-christian culture, thus, they are adopted “for life” twice when captured by a white, Christian family. The pain of this white benevolence for children who must endure it is immense.
There is a growing trove of nonfiction storytelling emerging from the now-adult children who are able to survive white benevolence. One of these is the compelling Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir, by Rebecca Carroll.
Carroll writes about what it was like growing up as a Black child to white adoptive parents in the mostly all-white state of New Hampshire. It is an agonizing account of erasure and being conspicuous, always at the same time. Imagine being noticed all the time for being different, then being told it doesn’t matter because “we’re all one race,” while also being reminded that you should be grateful. This is the pain of white benevolence in the hands of white savior moms, like Rebecca Carroll’s and like Meg Ryan. These are what I call “white savior moms.”
The reproduction of whiteness itself is destructive, and when it is not possible to pass on whiteness, then saviorism collapses. In 2014, a young white mother from Ohio began a YouTube channel and later an Instagram account that featured wholesome, family-themed videos and images of her and her children. Over the next several years, she became what one news outlet called a “mid-level Mom influencer” who boasted several high-profile sponsors of her con- tent. In 2017, she began to share regular posts about the two-and- a-half-year-old child she and her husband adopted from China. She shared details about the child’s autism diagnosis—often in posts sponsored by advertisers—and she wrote about what a struggle it was to be a parent to a special-needs child. Then on Mother’s Day in May 2020, she wrote that it had been one of the “hardest days ever.” Fans on her social media accounts worried that they hadn’t seen the little boy in some time. Then, she revealed that she and her husband had “re-homed” the boy. That is, they had returned the child they adopted and sent him to live with another family that could “better care for his needs.” Passing on whiteness is the thing that white savior moms are trying to do. And, because it wasn’t possible to easily pass on whiteness to a boy from China with autism, back he went, like a defective appliance.
The process of passing on whiteness is one that is often left to white women who are mothers and do the bulk of child-rearing work. Through mothering, white women do the work of teaching their children who is “safe” (the police) and who is deserving of empathy, food, justice (not racialized Others). It’s these practices that constitute the web of customs, habits, and mores that are passed down when someone is raised white. For many white women, perhaps like Meg Ryan, they simply feel “incomplete” if they cannot pass on whiteness.
This way of being in the world goes deeper than simply bias or prejudice. It’s rooted in who we feel connected to, where we feel safe, and how we move through the world.
It’s this process of being raised white that equips us for participating in the system of white supremacy because we have been taught it is natural and that we are innocent.