names

i've been feeling crummy and pretty out of it today. i spent most of the day in bed -- because being up and about tends to give me a raging headache.

:-P

but i'm not too ill to forget to be indignant about something.

i'm generally a proponent of international adoptions, and i think it's great when families open their homes up to children who are in need of care and a stable home-life. in fact, if i never bear a bratty kid in an image of myself, then i think i'd love to adopt from my family's homeland. but it's a real bother and a sad shame that a number of nations, like vietnam, erect all sorts of red tape that make it really difficult for people from other countries to adopt native kids.

what i do frown upon, though, is the fact that many of the parents who successfully adopt a young child tend to give the child a brand new name from the new parents' culture instead of allowing the child to keep the name that s/he is born with -- like one set of famous parents have done.

i suppose that if a child had not yet been named or was, perhaps, no more than 6 months old, i'd have no problem with giving the child a new name. but if the child is over 6 months old, then i start having a real problem with it because, to me, re-naming is pretty much nothing more than yet another form of colonization.

i know some adoptive parents turn out to be great parents. but i also know that other adoptive parents turn out to be crappy parents, especially in regards to non-white adoptees who never end up being completely enveloped within their adoptive families either implicitly or explicitly. in such cases, the act of re-naming is just yet another blow because it implicitly carries with it the notion that the child's culture and heritage aren't good enough and should be hidden or ignored. when that happens, it's a real damned shame.

plus, the act of naming itself just carries with it an inherent power and authority to usurp an individual's identity. the most extreme example is that one memorable scene in the movie roots, in which kunte kinte, recaptured after trying to run away from the slave plantation, gets whipped until he accepts his new name "toby."