Domesticating foreign affairs: The African-American family, Korean war orphans, and Cold War civil rights

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans adopted hundreds of Korean children who had been displaced by the Korean War. These adoptions most often placed the children of Korean women and African-American soldiers in the care of African-American or interracial families throughout the U.S. Adoptions involving African-American families and Afro-Korean children were unlike other U.S.-Korean adoptions and they confounded child welfare communities faced with crafting protocols to accommodate these placements. This dissertation examines how the qualities adoption agencies' valued in potential parents constituted an idealized version of domesticity that positioned African-Americans outside of conventional definitions of suitable adoptive parents. I argue that African-Americans' resistance of gender and racial barriers embedded in adoption procedures expanded institutional definitions of ideal adoptive families and promoted public discourses that equated their U.S. and Korean adoptions with the attainment of civil rights and the containment of communism.;This study analyzes the ways Afro-Korean adoptions revealed the political dimensions of the African-American family. I explore how members of disparate communities interpreted the significance of African Americans' adoptions and constructed discourses to explain the political dimensions of these so-called private arrangements. Two closely related dynamics made African Americans' participation in Korean adoptions possible. First, Afro-Korean adoptions took place at a critical point in the American Civil Rights Movement when efforts to eliminate racial inequality shined a spotlight on institutions that perpetuated racial exclusion. This circumstance made a few reform-minded social workers sensitive to the ways inequality shaped African Americans choices, even as they employed the procedure of matching families based on shared racial identity. This method simultaneously exposed how race shaped the adoption industry and made African Americans indispensable to Afro-Korean placements. Second, Cold War anxieties made U.S.-Korean adoptions a central feature of U.S.-Korean relations and put American race relations on display in international arenas. In this context threats to the African-American adoptive family destabilized the nation's investment in and performance of democratic ideals. Together, these influences made Afro-Korean adoptive families politically powerful and symbolically valuable to African Americans' struggles for racial equality.