Oct 31 ·
There’s No Such Thing As An Orphan
November is #NAAM (National Adoption Awareness Month), and before you waste your time watching horribly exploitative films like Instant Family, it’s high time we cleared something up, you and me:
There is no such thing as an orphan. There is only colonization.
Now,
before you start throwing dictionaries at me, which would be very
unpleasant, we must remember that language is constructed by people, and
people are subjective. Though a definition for a word may be one thing,
the way we use it is something else entirely. The textbook definition for an orphan is “a child whose parents are dead,” and if we were
textbook in our use of the word, then many senior care facilities ought
to be renamed “orphanages.” But we don’t use “orphan” in this context,
because we understand that loss of parents doesn’t mean loss of family. Organizations like UNICEF have formerly limited the definition of orphan to those children under 18 years of age
who have lost one or both parents. Fine, this clears up my former
comment about the senior community. But I’d still like to ask a few
questions to further shore up what I mean when I say that our intended
use is different from the reality of the situation.
When
I say the word “orphan,” who is it you picture? What is their race?
Where on the globe do they live? There is little doubt in my mind that
the image this word conjures is not unlike those at the Live-Aid
concert, and that’s not unintentional. Yet, let’s say there is a family
of white, upper-middle-class characters in a film, and the main
character’s sister and brother-in-law have just died in a car accident.
This person’s six year old nephew is now, technically, an orphan. But
would you imagine international organizations suddenly showing up at the
house to take non-consensual photos of the child, blasting their image
and embellished bio to couples in foreign countries, and then asking for
tens of thousands of dollars to adopt said child? I doubt it. Our first
thought is that the main character should take their nephew in. That’s
because we understand that it’s important to #keepfamiliestogether. At
least, we’d like to believe we understand that; because we sure don’t
practice it.
It is said that more than 80% of the world’s “orphans” have one living parent.
Out of the remaining percent who reportedly do not have either parent
present, none of our statistics include the role of aunts, uncles,
grandparents or adult siblings. The only unifying factor of struggle
between the majority of these children is that they tend to come from
poor(er) families. This is what separates the aforementioned fictional
character from those international children we deem “orphaned;” a
family’s access to resources.
source: MEDIUM
source: MEDIUM
Posts
