The Best Possible Immigrants by Rachel Rains Winslow

Author:Rachel Rains Winslow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2017-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

Racemaking: USAID and Social Welfare Experts

As debates over discrimination demonstrated, USAID and social welfare experts maintained a white-black color line among American-fathered orphans. Despite the GVN’s insistence that the South Vietnamese would care for all racially mixed children and not discriminate against them, USAID Administrator Daniel Parker determined that black children created “special problems” that demanded a separate strategy. Officials feared that a child’s black heritage could create new racial categories in Vietnam that would threaten the country’s fragile social structure. As in much of U.S. adoption history, the policy to place only black-fathered children reinforced that, once again, black orphans were the “problem.” To justify an exception to their anti-adoption position, USAID labeled black children as “hard to place.” While this euphemism accurately described an earlier era of domestic adoption, it was a misnomer for Vietnam since international adoption agencies had no problem finding families for black-Vietnamese children.62 Still, moving part-black children out of South Vietnam, ostensibly for their own protection, would convince the Senate subcommittee that the Nixon administration, through USAID, was “doing enough” for American-fathered children.

But there were other reasons to focus on black-Vietnamese children instead of American-fathered children in general. Superficially, it made racism a Vietnamese problem and one that no longer plagued the United States. Exporting part-black children out of Southeast Asia to the West offered evidence that America was now a haven for diversity. But, at its core, this venture projected a distinctly American black/white racial binary on Vietnamese soil that signified blackness was a threat to nation building. Such thinking revealed how “out of control” postwar liberals felt amid persistent racial crises and urban poverty: reminders of where development had failed. Showing their hand, USAID officials explicitly peppered their prose with racialized discussions of the “culture of poverty,” welfare, and prostitution, making it difficult to ascertain where the discussions of Vietnam ended and the United States began. Through the language of race, officials and experts at times conflated the “backwardness” of the Vietnamese with the moral depravity of African American families, revealing how Third World development campaigns ultimately reflected frustration with the lack of domestic modernization.63

Because South Vietnam represented the ideal model of how U.S. social welfare institutions could be exported to a decolonizing nation, it was particularly important that USAID eliminate any potential racial tension. Officials described how South Vietnam had a strong network of orphanages, school-based programs, and professional social workers. Building on existing institutions gave the United States an opportunity to see programs multiply quickly and validate American relief efforts.64 USAID and congressional Democrats also believed these strong social safety nets reinforced democratic government and hedged against demands for communist intervention.65 As one USAID memo explained, “disadvantaged children in Vietnam—more than any other single group—provide a highly visible index of both social problems and measures taken by the respective governments to demonstrate their humanitarian concern.” When articulating their philosophy of development, USAID administrators drew heavily from a 1970 United Nations paper titled “Social Welfare Planning in the Context of National

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