Book Review:
The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States
by Kit Myers
reviewed by Kerry Woodward
April 2025
The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States, by Kit Myers (University of California Press, 2025), is a “genealogy” (i.e., critical, non-linear history) of transracial and transnational adoptions (TRNAs) in the United States. Myers is an assistant professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Merced, and a Korean transracial/transnational adoptee.
I read Myers’s book with interest as both a parent who adopted transracially and a sociologist who studies poverty, race, and the child welfare system. Myers begins with the premise that all transracial adoptions involve violence (and, in most cases, great love), and ends by arguing for the abolition of the child welfare system and institutionalized adoption.
An abolitionist approach to adoption seeks to address an important reality: without the violence of poverty, racism, colonialism, and gender oppression, few adoptions would exist. For most adoptive parents, our children came to us because of these forms of violence and we greeted them with love. Myers argues that the harm caused by this violence doesn’t disappear just because it was met with love. The book is compelling and compassionate; even if abolition seems unrealistic or too radical to you, it is well worth the read.
Although Myers focuses on transracial domestic adoptions (TRAs), which can be private or public (i.e., placement via state child welfare systems), and transracial/transnational adoptions, which are nearly all private, he rarely distinguishes between private and public adoptions. By ignoring this distinction, Myers makes an important point about systemic similarities. We often think that private domestic adoption is different because it doesn’t involve involuntary removal (i.e., because it was the birthmother’s choice); yet in reality, poverty and associated challenges are the driving forces in almost all domestic adoptions (perhaps especially when it comes to children of color). There are exceptions, but overwhelmingly, mothers choosing to place their children for adoption are struggling both financially and in some other way(s)—just as is true in most cases where parental rights are terminated. Thus, Myers’s joint treatment of public and private transracial adoption—alongside transnational adoption—forces us to recognize the structural inequalities and conditions that lead to, or at least contribute to, most adoptions—private or public, international or domestic.
The Violence of Love details the early history of TRNA adoptions from Korea and Vietnam, Black domestic TRAs, and American Indian TRNAs (Myers considers these both transracial and transnational, because of tribal sovereignty). Exploring the post-World War II era through the 1970s, Myers uncovers new material and synthesizes this history in a fascinating way. Next, he explores past efforts to change the way we talk about adoption—namely the emergence of “positive” and “respectful” adoption language. Myers is critical of these efforts—largely attributed to Marietta Spencer and Pat Johnston—for their role in normalizing adoptive families at the expense of first mothers, especially first mothers of color. As an adoptive parent who learned this language early on, I found this history enlightening. Myers also discusses early studies of transracial adoption “outcomes”—studies that, based largely on the self-reporting of TRNA parents, showed that transracially adopted children were as “well-adjusted” as other children. Myers argues that efforts to shift our language, along with the spread of these questionable scientific findings, effectually marginalized first mothers and shifted attention away from the structural conditions that made TRNAs supposedly necessary.
Turning to adoption policies, Myers critically examines more recent laws impacting transracial adoption, specifically the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act of 1994 and the Interethnic Adoption Provisions of 1996. Describing the framework of these federal laws as “color-evasive”—a term intended to improve the accuracy of “color-blind”—Myers shows how these laws eschewed the significance of race and required public agencies to place children in foster and adoptive homes without considering the race of the child or parents. Myers argues that under the guise of ensuring permanent homes for children of color, MEPA-IEP “protected white group rights” at the expense of Black and brown children and families. The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) that followed in 1997 further ensured a “supply” of Black and brown children available for adoption by instituting short time limits on reunification efforts for children in foster care.
Myers then turns to the last few decades of transnational adoptions, particularly from Asia, exploring the discourse of “opposite futures” that commonly surrounds them. Transnational adoptions (which are frequently also transracial) are seen as being in children’s “best interests” because they “rescue” children from what are often seen as bad, violent places and bring them to good, loving families in the U.S. (imagined as a good, peaceful, and free country). In this framework, adopted children can have a “full life” that wasn’t possible where they came from. Myers questions the legitimacy of this perspective, highlighting things like the underground rehoming of adoptees by adoptive parents, and the immigration issues—including deportations—that some transnational adoptees have faced, to illustrate some of the extreme violence that can follow from transnational adoption. He also shows how the Hague Convention, which sought to improve the ethics of international adoptions and prevent further child trafficking scandals, was largely an effort to improve the bureaucratic processes of transnational adoption and efficiency for adoptive parents, rather than aiming to preserve families or find homes in their native countries.
Finally, Myers devotes a chapter to American Indian adoptions, addressing the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), enacted in response to the astronomical rates of Indian children being separated from their families and placed in (mostly white) foster and adoptive families. ICWA aims first to improve efforts to keep American Indian families together, and then to establish a set of criteria that states must follow to keep Indian children with their families and tribes—or, if that’s not possible, with American Indians of another tribe. Myers examines the 2013 Supreme Court case, Adoptive Family v. Baby Girl, which sided with the rights of white adoptive parents over those of purportedly sovereign tribes, and the 2023 case, Haaland vs. Brackeen, which produced a limited ruling that prevented the dismantling of ICWA, but failed to secure its legal precedence. The Court’s decision upheld ICWA for now, but invited future challenges to the law, specifically ones based on the false notion of “reverse racism.” Yet, as Myers makes clear, ICWA isn’t about treating Indian children differently based on race, it is about tribal sovereignty—the right of American Indian tribes, each with their own membership criteria, to care for and make decisions about their youngest members whenever possible.
In his conclusion, Myers explores the idea of abolition, specifically of institutionalized adoption and the child welfare system. Myers writes that transracial and transnational adoptions “emerged out of individual, institutional, and state forms of love, yet structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence created the conditions and/or became the effects of TRNAs.” He builds his argument for abolition using the language of love, and a focus on kinship and its many meanings. He discusses birth families, which he describes as “ghostly kin” or a “present absence.” And he explores ways we might think about kinship differently, asking: how can we care for children with love and without terminating parental rights or removing children from their communities? For example, he posits the notion of “relational permanence,” formed not by legal means, but by non-biological parents and biological parents working together.
Abolitionism, for Myers, is a way to keep the love, and get rid of the violence. As a framework, abolitionism does not lay out a clear path to a better world; mostly, it asks the hard questions and seeks to develop a vision of a different, better world. But Myers does share some ideas about what abolition could look like: He calls for reproductive justice, meaning the right to have or not have a child, and the right to parent a child safely. To ensure this latter right, parents must have the support they need to parent their own children, if they so choose. This would entail robust economic and other types of community support. Myers points to mutual aid organizations, but also to the forms of federal aid that emerged during the pandemic—direct financial assistance to families (i.e., stimulus payments and child tax credits), extended unemployment benefits, and food stamps (SNAP). He calls on us to create new ways of loving, new ways of safeguarding families, and new ways of embracing the extension of kinship rather than the separation of families and severing of ties.
One doesn’t have to believe wholeheartedly in abolition to agree with many of the ideas Myers and other abolitionists promote. There are many things that child welfare/adoption abolitionists and critical reformists can agree on—such as decreasing poverty, building robust community support, and promoting deep and lasting biological family connections. I encourage you—whether you identify as an abolitionist or not—to read Myers’s thought-provoking book and engage in the work to ameliorate the violent structures that underpin so many adoptions.
Kerry Woodward is an adoptive parent and Professor of Sociology, California State University, Long Beach and co-editor (with Jennifer Randles) of Policing Not Protecting Families: The Child Welfare System as Poverty Governance (NYU Press, 2025).