What is privilege?
Who has the privilege in adoption?
Who has the privilege in adoption?
Dr. Hasberry believes that privilege refers to the benefits or advantages that one has access to solely based on belonging to a certain group or class. Privileges are those things we can take for granted because they come with "membership".
Who has the privilege in adoption?
Who has the privilege in adoption?
Who has the privilege in adoption?
In adoption, money and perception influence who has privilege. Adopted parents primarily have the financial capital to influence adoption practices. Adoption agencies have policy and legal backing to influence adoption. Even western societies' media influence how we view adoption as altruistic parents "saving" children in need.
Who doesn't have privilege in adoption?
Who doesn't have privilege in adoption?
Who doesn't have privilege in adoption?
The adoption narrative is traditionally dominated by adoptive parent and adoption agency voices. Left out of that narrative are adoptees and birth parents/families. Dr. Hasberry happens to be both. In addition, she is a scholar and a therapist. This makes her work an important addition to the marginalized narrative of adoptees and birth mothers. Abby uses the privilege of her platform to bring truth, vulnerability, and healing to the table.
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Who doesn't have privilege in adoption?
Who doesn't have privilege in adoption?
Released February 18, 2025
Adopting Privilege highlights the haves and have nots of adoption while also examining the privileges that Dr. Hasberry was afforded as a transracial adoptee raised adjacent to whiteness and affluence. Abby also examines the healing work she has done and the responsibility she feels to contribute her story to the adoption narrative as a transracial adoptee, birth mother, and therapist.
About Adopting Privilege
What People are Saying...
There are many adoptee voices emerging through written narratives, which is wonderful. THIS ONE, however, pulled me in and I didn’t just read it, I devoured it -- intrigued and impressed by what I was reading and experiencing. Dr. Hasberry, as she prefers to be called, and rightly so, gives the reader (me) an opportunity to pause at the end of each heart-wrenching, insightful chapter with an affirmation. Not a corny affirmation, but one that takes the trauma that she experienced, and the trauma that I witnessed as a reader, as well as a fellow adoptee, and rewrites the narrative in a way I have not seen before. Affirmation: I boldly take up space.
As I reflect on my own adoption reunion roller coaster, reading about Dr. Hasberry’s life experiences and that she has grown and flourished as a strong, Black, passionate and compassionate leader in education. She is a voice for adoptees who may not have the ability to articulate the experience, the bewilderment, the injustice that is baked into adoption. I am always impressed by writers who can turn a narrative into a work of art, a place for others to find not only Dr. Hasberry, but find themselves, ourselves, myself.
While Dr. Hasberry speaks boldly and with consternation about being isolated as the only Black child in a white family, the only Black student in a white school, she takes steps to remedy that isolation, by learning and embracing things that are quintessentially Black, things that as a white person and a white reader, I have no knowledge. Music, clothing and hair care – teenage basics – are things she has to learn from peers, as her family had no connection to Black culture. She has evolved into a voice for change: White adoptive parents, do better. Maybe even going so far as to advocate for abolition: White adoptive parents, don’t do it.
Those of us from the Baby Scoop Era are coming out of the fog in droves, it seems, and those with the chops to write it all down and share this realization that adoption is not only not a “solution” to a “problem” but that it is compiling trauma upon trauma. If adoption can be stopped, or reframed, or abolished as an industry, the world will be a better place, people will be healthier, and we can stop lying to ourselves that adoption is a “win win” situation. Two adults may want to have a baby, and if it doesn’t happen naturally, there’s a sense of entitlement: We will adopt a baby. We want a baby. It’s just the same as if someone wants a puppy, a baby dog. Instead of taking in a dog that really needs a home, they will go to a “puppy mill” or a “breeder” and as soon as the puppy is weaned, will take that baby dog home and train it they way they want it to be. Even in dog breeding, the genetics of the dog will determine it’s personality and potential. So why would humans convince themselves that if they remove a newborn from the mother, and place it in the hands and home of strangers, that baby will grow up to be like, think like, and share the characteristics of the adopters? Dr. Hasberry may have experienced a form of white privilege, as in a private school education, but when it came to her self-determination, especially when she was accepted to the college of her choice, with scholarships to boot, her parents informed her, two weeks prior to moving into the dorm, that they could not afford the room and board at her chosen college. My heart sank when reading this: it’s the betrayal of an unwritten, unspoken promise.
Without beating it over the reader’s head, the word resilience comes up, and there is no better word to describe how Dr. Hasberry has navigated the outrageous fortunes that were slung her way, every step of the way. And as any adoptee knows, the story doesn’t end when the book ends. This journey, this life, this different life we were given, with large holes in the narrative and in our souls, which she likens to a doughnut hole, isn’t over until it’s over. Dr. Hasberry now has new relationships to navigate, new joys and disappointments to withstand, and the overall injustice of the adoption industry.
Many thanks to Dr. Hasberry, for such a well written, articulate, beautiful, heart wrenching, soul crushing, exhilarating, exasperating and exhausting tale of resilience, reclamation of identity and purpose, and AFFIRMATIONS that are necessary and nurturing.
Diane S.
Adoptee
Book Reviews
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