As a transnational adoptee, who grew up racially marooned, and within the cult of White supremacist evangelicalism I never heard any Pastor, person, or theologian make reference, or name as valuable for the purpose of spiritual formation, any adoptee-centered ways of knowing the Creator, the world around me, or myself. How does a decontextualized life discover its own legibility when it is taught it is to be read as, “grateful”, as “object of charity”, and perhaps most devastatingly, as “nigger”, and thus; utterly worthy of exclusion except under the terms of assimilating into the lifeways of White Colonizer Christianity? And why is it that with such an emphasis on adoption, Christians do not seek out the theologies of adoptees, preferring instead to be formed by the theologies and worldviews of adopters? What becomes invisible to us— adoptees, adopters, and our wider society— when we only care to see the storylines of grateful adoptees? Those adoptees who do not make us uncomfortable as they reckon with the trauma and loss inherent in adoption, especially transnational/racial adoption
The story of Moses is a story of a transnational adoptee coming to Critical Consciousness, Adopter Saviorism, Religious Nationalism and the active, intimate threat of Empire that often lives in families constructed through transnational adoption. The life of Moses is a story of a trafficked boy whose name— Drawn From The Water— was given him because his first mother floated him down a river, in a tarred basket, away from the breast and body he knew, away from the State sanctioned genocide that surely awaited him if he were to remain with the mother who made her child her own embodied prayer for survival.
My own first mother cast me away like this, too.
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