Kit W. Myers, "The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States"(U California Press, 2025)
Overview of The Violence of Love: race, adoption, and political care
Dr. Kit W. Meyers' The Violence of Love reframes adoption as a site where love, law, race, and state power collide. Rather than accepting adoption as purely benevolent, Meyers interrogates how adoption policies and rhetoric construct "opposite futures," produce legal orphanhood, and reproduce racial hierarchies across domestic and international contexts.
Origins and historical context: postwar adoption industry and racial liberalism
Using archival, legal, and discursive research, Meyers traces the institutional expansion of adoption after World War II. He documents how agencies, government programs, and media framed white U.S. homes as sites of safety and modern possibility, while racialized spaces—Native reservations, Asian countries, and Black urban neighborhoods—were constructed as dangerous or stagnating.
Key concepts: opposite futures, color evasiveness, and the violence of love
Opposite futures describes how adoption is cast as rescuing children from an imagined bleak temporal and spatial future. Color evasiveness
Case studies and legal consequences
Meyers examines congressional hearings, federal laws (Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, Adoption and Safe Families Act), transnational frameworks like the Hague Convention, and landmark cases such as Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl and ICWA litigation. These examples illustrate how race-neutral or race-evasive policies often privilege white adoptive families while failing to address root causes driving family separation.
Language, science, and symbolic control
The book analyzes the rise of positive adoption language and social scientific outcome studies that normalized adoption by reframing birth parents and erasing complex contexts. Meyers argues that these moves enacted symbolic violence—destigmatizing adoptive families while minimizing the disparate experiences of women of color.
Paths forward: critical adoptee pedagogy, kinship, and abolitionist care
Meyers concludes with concrete alternatives: centering adoptee-led pedagogy, acknowledging ghostly kinship ties, supporting reproductive justice, and imagining abolition-inspired care systems that prioritize family preservation. These proposals aim to recover a more expansive, accountable understanding of love, kinship, and responsibility.
- Why this matters: The book challenges practitioners, policymakers, and families to reconsider adoption’s ethical landscape and to enact reforms that address structural inequality rather than mask it.
- Who should read it: scholars of race and family law, adoption practitioners, adoptees, policymakers, and educators seeking anti-racist, historically grounded perspectives on care.
