In 1976, Gov. Dukakis of Massachusetts designated the first week of November as Adoption Week, an effort to increase adoptions from foster care. In 1984, President Ford proclaimed Adoption Week a national event. In 1998, President Clinton declared November as “National Adoption Month.”
The month has thus had many iterations, as have attitudes about it. More recently, the month has been recast as National Adoptee Awareness Month, by Grace Newton (a Chinese adoptee) writing here in Red Thread Broken, by Shane Bouel, an adoptee writing on Medium “Taking Back National Adoptee Awareness Month, and via Astrid Castro, a Colombian adoptee and founder of Adoption Mosaic, speaking on Instagram.
Last November, The Rumpus devoted its November issue to adoptee-focused essays to reclaim National Adoptee Awareness Month.
While those examples are current, this effort to reframe the month has been going on for at least ten years.
In 2014, Korean adoptee Rosita Gonzalez of Lost Daughters created a #flipthescript campaign on Twitter. That campaign generated a significant video in 2014, “Adoptees ‘Flip the Script’ on National Adoption Month,” via (and including) Angela Tucker of The Adopted Life. Full disclosure: I know, love, and admire many of the speakers.
U.S. adoptee Laura Barcella wrote about the video and the efforts to reframe National Adoption Month in the New York Times: “Adoptees Like Me ‘Flip the Script’ on the Pro-Adoption Narrative.”
Be sure also to check out this resource: “Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology (The AN-YA Project,” described on Amazon as “a dynamic artistic exploration of adoptee expression and experience. This anthology offers readers a diverse compilation of literature and artistry from a global community of adoptees. From playwrights to poets, filmmakers to photographers, essay writers to lyricists —all have joined together inside these pages to enlighten and educate.”
This month, if you are reading and learning about adoption, be sure to see who is speaking: is it an adoptee? Or is it an adoptive parent or adoption agency? Focus on learning from adult adoptees first.