What is the work and how do you know if you're doing it? On Asian American history, activism, and solidarity with Rebecca Kinney
Adopted Feels
English - October 11, 2021 10:00 - 1 hour - 90.1 MB - ★★★★★ - 49 ratingsRelationships Society & Culture Personal Journals adoptee adoption korean adoptee korean adoption transnational adoption intercountry adoption race relationships diaspora adoptee stories Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
For transracial adoptees and people of colour, the past 18 months have felt like an emotional gauntlet. At least, they have for us. From the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, which saw a surge of the Black Lives Matter movement, to rising anti-Asian racism and the Atlanta shootings, to the disparate impacts of COVID-19 due to systemic racism and chronic underfunding in public health, there's been a lot to reckon with.
To keep educating ourselves, and in the hopes of continuing and deepening some of our earlier conversations on race and the fight for racial justice, we reached out to our friend, Korean American adoptee Rebecca Kinney.
Rebecca is an Associate Professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies and American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. She is the author of numerous articles and the book Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). She is a Fulbright Scholar Korea (2021-2022) and currently lives in Seoul.
This is a thought-provoking, in-depth conversation that traverses the historical, personal, and political. First, she starts with a 20-minute primer on Asian American racial formation and settler colonialism - kind of like an audio lecture. Then Rebecca talks about finding her own ethnic identity as a Korean adoptee from the white working class suburbs of Detroit, before we discuss the barriers to solidarity amongst Asian Americans and POCs, and how we might confront anti-black racism as Asian adoptees. Finally, Rebecca talks about living in Korea and her current Fulbright research, before we end with an extended random question segment. We learned a lot from Rebecca and we hope you do too.
To learn more about Rebecca’s work, visit https://bgsu.academia.edu/RebeccaJKinney or get in touch at [email protected]
Donate to the Black Lives Matter Movement here: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019