Racialized Choices: Chinese Adoption and the `White Noise' of Blackness
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The transnational, transracial adoption of children provides the opportunity to explore how race binds and differentiates kinship and national belonging, especially when considered in relation to options for adopting both at home and abroad. More specifically, the reasons white parents give for choosing to adopt from China reveal how the normative white, American family is constructed through discourses of foreign and domestic, Asian and black. I explore three themes that contribute to the relative desirability of adopting Chinese children: they are seemingly unfettered by attachments, racially “flexible,” and readily constructed as rescuable. In these discourses that bring Chinese children home, blackness serves as a mediating backdrop — a domestic “white noise.” But China — US adoption unsettles as much as it reproduces racial stratifications; ongoing encounters with intimate relations of difference push at the boundaries of white privilege and weak multiculturalism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it