Reality show re-unites adoptee with real father…along with chance of winning $100,000

JC

MSN News reports the latest in tasteless reality TV. On January 3^rd, Fox will present a special enititled “Who’s Your Daddy?” A woman who was adopted at birth has to pick her real birth father from among 8 men. One will be the correct one, the others, each just acting as if they are the correct choices. If she picks the right one, she wins $100,000. If she does not pick correctly, the imposter walks away with the 100 thou. And then facelifts for all!!! Oops. Sorry. That’s another show.

Activists in the adoption community immediately attacked the special…"This is really perverse," said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan P. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a research and policy organization.

Pertman, a former Boston Globe reporter and author of the book Adoption Nation, predicted the television show would denigrate the experiences of families who have gone through adoption. "It really is sort of one-stop shopping for insulting millions of people, maybe tens of millions," he said.

LETTER TO EDITOR

Love more than black and white

JC

Our letter to the editor regarding an article on interracial relationships was printed in today’s Corvallis Gazette-Times:

We are writing in response to Mary Ann Albright's Dec. 12 article, "Love sees no color."

Mixed Media Watch is a grassroots coalition we started that works to promote more realistic, three-dimensional portrayals of mixed race people, couples and families in the media.

While it was nice to see a positive portrayal of interracial relationships in Ms. Albright's article, we were disappointed that she only featured couples in which one partner is black, and the other is white.

We hope that in any future articles about interracial couples, your newspaper will reflect the far more diverse reality of the mixed race community. While only 6 percent of African-American husbands and 2 percent of African-American wives are in interracial marriages, the intermarriage rate among other groups is much, much higher. In the case of Japanese-American women, for example, 49 percent are married to non-Japanese-American men.

And interracial marriages don't happen only between white and non-white people — there are many couples in which both partners are people of color (e.g., Black/Asian, Latino/Black). In short, being in an interracial relationship is not just a black/white thing.

As the number of interracial couples has grown, so have the number of resources available for mixed race individuals and interracial couples and families. It is important that people recognize that support does exist. For a fairly comprehensive list of resources, please visit www.swirlinc.org, or visit us at www.mixedmediawatch.com.

Jen Chau and Carmen Van Kerckhove
New York