Our fight for Palestinian liberation and adoptee justice are bound together.
Network of Politicized Adoptees (NPA) supports Palestinian liberation and self-determination. Our origins and experiences as transnational transracial adoptees compel us to act in solidarity with movements that are fighting imperialism, settler-colonialism, and white supremacy.
The parallels between the root causes of oppression of the Palestinian people and the root causes of harm within international adoption, which caused the separation of our communities and families, are clear. All of NPA’s leaders were displaced to the US alone as children and now live there on stolen land because of Western powers’ geopolitical aims and extractive interests in our homelands, resulting in wars and domestic policies in our countries of origin that separate children and destroy families.
We recognize the historic and current violence in Gaza as an adoptee issue. We denounce the foreign calls happening right now to adopt Palestinian children. Removing children from Palestinian communities does not end the genocide enterprise, but rather magnifies their loss of cultural knowledge and extended care networks. Genocide is many layers of losses. We deeply mourn the thousands of lives taken and strongly assert that international adoption championed by white saviorism, which seeks to recast its self-serving actions maintaining a violent status quo as humanitarian efforts, is not a solution to the violence we are witnessing.
Instead, we follow Palestinian organizations’ current calls to the US government to stop funding these atrocities, to demand an immediate ceasefire, and to support urgent humanitarian aid into Gaza, and ultimately long-term, UN protection for Palestinians to live in Palestine. We believe children should be able to live in peace with their families and communities of origin with access to the physical places that sustained their ancestors.
In solidarity,
NPA Steering Committee
(Margie/Eun Joo, Kurt, Katherine, Julia, Mari & Lindsay)
The parallels between the root causes of oppression of the Palestinian people and the root causes of harm within international adoption, which caused the separation of our communities and families, are clear. All of NPA’s leaders were displaced to the US alone as children and now live there on stolen land because of Western powers’ geopolitical aims and extractive interests in our homelands, resulting in wars and domestic policies in our countries of origin that separate children and destroy families.
We recognize the historic and current violence in Gaza as an adoptee issue. We denounce the foreign calls happening right now to adopt Palestinian children. Removing children from Palestinian communities does not end the genocide enterprise, but rather magnifies their loss of cultural knowledge and extended care networks. Genocide is many layers of losses. We deeply mourn the thousands of lives taken and strongly assert that international adoption championed by white saviorism, which seeks to recast its self-serving actions maintaining a violent status quo as humanitarian efforts, is not a solution to the violence we are witnessing.
Instead, we follow Palestinian organizations’ current calls to the US government to stop funding these atrocities, to demand an immediate ceasefire, and to support urgent humanitarian aid into Gaza, and ultimately long-term, UN protection for Palestinians to live in Palestine. We believe children should be able to live in peace with their families and communities of origin with access to the physical places that sustained their ancestors.
In solidarity,
NPA Steering Committee
(Margie/Eun Joo, Kurt, Katherine, Julia, Mari & Lindsay)
