Black Friday Baby, Part Two

Egad, I’ve been dreading this, but I did promise. So here’s the rest of Funny Alabama Daddy’s very funny riff on how funny it is to be white raising a black child in the USA. Let’s get Aware about race and humor in adoption! Ready? Me neither.

Now that he’s gotten his “black Friday” joke in, Funnyman Daddy tells us about visiting a nursing home with his baby, where we learn all old people love babies, except for one impossibly old, bitter woman.

Because racism is for old people, and when they die, it will be gone, right? (Or maybe when we all interbreed humanity into a medium brown color, then it’ll be gone. Sure it will.) At any rate, the only reason we have racism now is the existence of old women Funnyman Daddy doesn’t like even though they make him look and feel very enlightened for doing fuck-all about racism.

Anyway, impossibly-old woman demands to know why Funnyman Daddy “didn’t get a white baby,” and his response is that it’s after Labor Day. Aha. Ahahaah. Funny Daddy then assures us the woman’s response was “Oh, well that makes sense,” which it almost certainly was not, anymore than the Wal-Mart security guard actually patted his gun. Then he laments that he cannot kick the old woman because she is in a wheelchair and the audience laughs. Funny Daddy says:

“And my wife is beautiful and my daughter is beautiful. That’s the number one question we get asked, is ‘Did you pick your daughter out?’ No, we did not. Most people don’t know this….”

Wait, what? Out of nowhere: The females I choose to have in my life are beautiful and that’s what I’m asked about all the time: whether or not we picked this baby out.” Non sequitur, or is he implying that since both are beautiful, he could have but didn’t choose a baby that matched his wife in beauty? What the fuck? Why are people laughing at this nonsense? Dunno, but it continues. “Most people don’t know this, but if you adopt a child from outside of the United States […] you immediately have to take the baby to a pediatrician.”

Annd? Are you implying the pediatrician will take one look at a newly-adopted baby, KNOW whether or not you picked her out yourself, and declare her unhealthy if you did? I mean, Sir, what the fuck are you saying? This is a routine you spent time perfecting at home, yes? And you’re doing it to prove–or you want us to think so, anyway–that there’s nothing wrong with adopting a black baby. So you’re giving us your funniest stuff and best logical evidence, right? Then what is this No, I didn’t pick her out, I had to take her to a baby doctor! mess? If you’re out of material, why not thank the audience and leave on a high note?

On he goes, and finally there’s a joke about the pediatrician’s telling Funny Daddy that his daughter’s skin will dry out easily and that he might want to apply something like coconut oil. Why is that a joke? Because it’s marinating the baby! And comparing a black person to food is just the newest, least-racist joke a funny white man has ever joked, isn’t it? (Seriously, if you’re not familiar with this, read some more books by white authors; they have a marked tendency to describe a black person’s skin color as that of a food item.)

And that’s all: the marinating thing is (mercifully) the end of the clip. We never find out what his point about NOT picking out the baby was supposed to be. He just…left it hanging there.

This is all they’ve got, Folks. This is the best the defenders of international and interracial adoption can do, and it’s old, stale crap. To any of my fellow white people who don’t already know: Being a little less racist than Lyndon Larouche doesn’t make you not racist. Being “color blind,” “not having a racist bone in [your] body,” or “not caring if someone is black, white, green or purple” doesn’t make you not racist, either: it makes you willfully ignorant and unwilling to engage with racism at all. And that is the opposite of being capable of raising a black child in a white world. Finally, laughing about the position you have put an innocent Kenyan baby in is…well, it’s deplorable. So are this man and his hooting audience.

I can’t wait for his high-larious routine about black hair, can you?

Here We Go Again

Yay! It’s National Adoption “Awareness” Month, in which almost nobody is made aware of anything about adoption except that it exists. Apparently people’s brains fall out every Halloween and they have to be reminded about adoption (and furniture and birds, for all I know).

I kid, of course. The one and only thing NAAM really wants us to be “aware” of is the fact that we should adopt because a Sad Child need us…only really it’s a baby and it doesn’t need us, we want it. This whole November mess was meant to be about moving kids out of foster care into permanent homes. Yet almost nobody considering adoption or even hearing the word “adoption” thinks about that at all. They think, as they have since adoption as we know it was invented less than a century ago, about a very pretty, very new, healthy white baby some woman is out there making Just For Them–possibly thanks to god, who in his infinite cruelty couldn’t find a better way to get that kid into their family where it belongs.

And that is the opposite of awareness. That is just more evidence that adoption, like most institutions that promise the impossible, wants your money. Those willing to spend that money always insist they are not buying a person, and in a way, they’re right. What they’re buying–what they’re willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for–is the illusion that the person had and has no other family.

NAAM never offers up much awareness of how it feels to be adopted (unless the answer is wonderful, grateful, and impossibly un-curious about one’s origins). It certainly doesn’t want to make anyone aware of how it feels to relinquish a child for adoption (unless the answer is grateful, glad to get on with life, and a little sad, but only in a very giving, very distant, blurry-lensed way: awww).

In short, there’s nothing special about November. It’s pitching the same “awareness” we’re told about adoption the rest of the year. That is bullshit, and it needs to change. Some of us who have an actual awareness of adoption have been trying to change it for decades now. Very few people listen.

So here we are again this year to shout a little louder. November is a wild ride, so keep your heads, arms and legs inside the car at all times. See you tomorrow!