THIRD WORLD BABIES AS COUTURE

The disgusting wave of African children being adopted from the African continent and the Caribbean has become a deplorable phenomenon among the American bourgeoisie, including the celebrity types like Madonna, Sandra Bullock and Angelina Jolie. For the mainstream, these liberals are hailed as progressive philanthropists who want to see a better world. However, for activists, this phenomenon proves to be age-old liberal ploys to commodify African bodies. As opposed to being against the neo-liberal policies that make the so-called third world unable to sustain their youth and therefore continue to grow their societies, these liberals believe the answer is to buy these African children as if they were the new Gucci or Louis Vatton bag. It has become a fashionable statement and a form of couture to have an African child hanging from their sides.

This ridiculous state of affairs becomes even worse when so-called African-Americans have fallen into this same mindset. For some reason, many of them feel that they are separate and detached from the conditions that they see for Africans living in ravaged parts of the world. This is epitomized by one blogger that I frequent (mainly for new hairstyle ideas) who made a post where she seemed to be in dismay that African people living in America don’t adopt from overseas. Her exact words were: “At the height of the Haitian earthquake relief efforts I remember seeing a short clip of “families at the airport, all anxious to meet their new adoptees.” The camera pans the crowd and there was not one person of color!” While this sister tries to be an inspiration in terms of connecting with ourselves as African women spiritually and culturally, she’s definitely one of those mainstream Christian Negros that does not understand political economy.

It is obvious that while she may be attempting to come from a place of love, she is someone who believes (conscientiously or not) that she and the rest of her African-American cohorts are better off and represent the vanguard of all African people. So to that end, her solution is to fix African people’s problems in the market and through the colonizers illegitimate laws that govern adoption. Her answer is not to build for self-determination for all African people, for us to have control over the means of production and to overthrow the neo-colonial puppets who work for the European empires. Her answer is to spend money that goes to the state who is the perpetrator of all the atrocities that make such things as adoption “necessary”.

I say that because she would not fix her fingers to type such a thing if she thought about the fact that most African people in America are living under the same conditions as African people in Haiti and on the continent. While she may enjoy many comforts based on her petty bourgeoisie lifestyle and while many struggling African people in this country may have little more than Africans abroad, our conditions economically and physically are the same. We are all oppressed by the same white supremacist system, and in that case, Africans in this country don’t have the resources and means to be able to adopt Africans living abroad. Adopting from overseas is costly and that accounts for the process of getting them here. What African in this country, including the petty bourgeoisie, has the wherewithal to be able to sustain such an arrangement? While we are constantly being targeted for gentrification, where will those adopted children live? While we are faced with mass unemployment, how will those children receive the proper care? Of course you don’t see African people in line to adopt a child from half way around the world, we’re barely holding on to take care of our own flesh and blood. White people have benefitted from our stolen wealth and be it through white guilt, opportunism, or whatever else they feel as the oppressor nation, they have the surplus value to assuage whatever feelings of guilt they harbor.

This post came from a woman who truly believes that she is separate and distinct from African people throughout the world. Despite her efforts to tout cultural African values by wearing Egyptian heads on a chain around her neck, and going to African exhibits, she is still a representative of the shortsighted petty bourgeoisie who believes that they have arrived with the advent of Obama. It proves that without an understanding of political economy and how it has affected African people as an internal colony in this country; people will always be and stay confused as to their place in the world. It’s time to stop confusing race nationalism with true enlightenment because it is obvious that she is still lost.

Oct201012

Zari Sundiata

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