304 Dr. Michele Merritt
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/304
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.
You are listening to Adoptees On the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radkey. Today's guest is Dr. Michele Merritt, a philosophy professor who's coined the new term adoptism to describe the ways adoptees are marginalized. Michele shares some of her personal story, including the curiosity she always had about where she came from.
We discuss what led her to start critiquing adoption publicly and the barriers to publishing these critiques that some academic journals put in place, like the classic, I know one adoptee and they don't feel that way. We do mention suicide during this conversation, so please take care when deciding if this is a safe episode for you [00:01:00] to listen to.
We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Dr. Michele Merritt. Hi Michele.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Hi.
Haley Radke: I'm so glad to finally speak with you. I've learned from you over the years, I've followed your writing, and now we get to talk. I'd love it if you would share a little of your personal story with us.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Okay I'm basic. No, just a good old domestic white adoptee from a closed adoption way back in 1980. So like on the tail end of the, the baby scoop era, I guess technically over by them, but there was still a lot of that stigma going on, so in Florida especially, lots of closed adoptions still going on. Even my younger brother who was adopted in 86 was a closed adoption.
So you can see the kind of, it's still going on. [00:02:00] Same race parents, I have strangely, a mother adopted mother who looks very much like me. I've come to learn that was probably by design and I grew up in a great home. I'm still very close to my adopted parents and had a good life and kind of that fairytale positive adoption story that everybody wants us to buy.
So I didn't really have any problems being adopted, I guess you could say, for most of my life. Or I didn't know that I had any problems being adopted, and I did meet my biological mom. When I was 17 because I was this one thing about me, I was curious my whole life, just from a young age wanting to know what my parents were very open with me about being adopted.
So there were no secrets. But they told me the kind of story that I think a lot of adopted kids are told that your mom and dad loved you so much, they just couldn't take care of you. So they wanted a better life for you. And there was a lot of nebulous information about who they were. Like they were poor [00:03:00] and young and probably did drugs and that story.
And I wanted to know the truth for myself. I guess I've always been a truth seeker and finally just talked my dad into looking her up and I guess he paid the agency some exorbitant amount of money to search for her. I've come to realize that's what happens. You go searching and you have to pay the agency to do the search for you, which is really just them looking up where their people are that they've worked with in the past. So I don't know why they charge a thousand dollars for that, but yeah, so anyways, we found her, I met her very briefly and met two of her other children that she had since me, so my half siblings. But it was a kind of really quick. Hey, how you doing?
Nice to see you. I was 17 and I just wanted to see her face and that was that. And then I retreated back into my adopted life and realized, okay, I definitely, I'm glad I have my life that I have with my parents. After meeting her and seeing how she lived and the poverty and everything like that, it was eye-opening for me.
So [00:04:00] I just went back into my little, I don't know, illusory world and it wasn't until I had kids another 17 years later, that I started when I was pregnant with my first child. I suddenly realized like, I don't know where I came from. Like literally I don't know my birth story. I don't know how I came into the world.
Was it, a natural birth C-section, complicated premature? Was I healthy? What did my parents do while I was gestating? So I started looking for her again 'cause we had lost touch and didn't have I, this is, when I met her the first time, this was pre-internet and all that. So I had no like way of keeping tabs on her and then I just couldn't find her again.
And I found those two siblings of mine. But they're a little bit hit or miss when it comes to keeping up and maybe not the best siblings to be keeping up with, if it was a kind of dead end there. Yeah. And so I never found her and then just swept it back under the rug after my first child was born, because I had a very bad postpartum [00:05:00] situation with him.
Just very depressed and actually suicidal for quite a while after he was born. So that took up a lot of my mental space for a good year. Then I just became a mom for a while, and did that. And then we got pregnant again. And when my daughter was born, that's when like the kind of obsessive need to find my family came back and I wanted to find my dad because I realized my mom was a dead end situation and I just went nuts after she was born looking for my dad.
And I think I spent. The entire sabbatical that I had a whole semester off and I was with her just bonding my daughter and just also looking for my dad. And finally with DNA, I think it was 23 And Me and Ancestry and all that, found an uncle and messaged him. I actually messaged his wife and she was a professor at the same university that I had worked at in central Florida.
I had been there for a year teaching and I had no idea. And she was there in the communications department, so close to [00:06:00] philosophy. And I messaged her first actually 'cause I thought maybe professor to professor, I won't freak her out too much and say, Hey, I think you're married to my uncle.
I'm this long lost child of his brother, I think. And then when it was clear that's who it was, and I found a picture of my dad. I just, this is dramatic, but I remember sitting in my chair and seeing a picture of him finally and just falling out of my chair crying because I knew, like I saw his face and it's hard to explain, but his face and my daughter's face are like, they're just mirrors.
And I don't know, something intuitive told me at when she was born, I had to find him. So I find that interesting. Everybody that sees him and her, it's just, yeah. Spitting image. So yeah, I found him, and that was the end of 2019. I had a newborn and I had plans to meet him and I met him early 2020 before Covid hit and got to meet him in person.
And then he died like a couple months later, just suddenly. So that set me off into a whole, [00:07:00] like other, I don't even know what that, there's not a name for that kind of depression that happens after that. Loss second time, you know that many of us have, but I'm still close to his brother, my uncle, and yeah, I'm in a happy reunion.
I guess I hate that word as we'll talk about later, a happy reunion state with my uncle. And yeah, that's it feeds into how I got into critiquing adoption from philosophy, but it was being home with Covid going on and finding my dad, and just being really pissed off about all of the things that had prevented me from knowing my family all this time I. And then I started looking through philosophy, literature and realizing like. Nobody in my discipline writes about this. And if they do, it's very like formulaic, commercial appeal kind of adoption is good and here's a good reason, like philosophically that you should adopt 'cause it's good for the environment. There's actually a paper that says that.
Haley Radke: No.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah, it's good. It's good because, we don't need to be making more babies and filling up the planet with more babies and it's good to, there's just it's [00:08:00] ridiculous actually the way philosophers will try to spin adoption as a positive thing.
That also made me mad and I realized I needed to throw my voice into the mix and use my discipline for something other than what I had been, which is mostly writing about dogs and how dogs think. And so I've shifted gears since then. But yeah, that's how I got to where I am now.
Haley Radke: I'm so sorry for the loss of your dad twice. That's brutal.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah. It was tough having such young kids too when it happened, because I just lost myself, like for about two weeks, I think. And luckily I have a great partner that just swept up everything and let me be in this pile of tears and depression for however long I needed to be.
And yeah, I didn't know it was gonna hit me so hard. You think I didn't even know him my whole life, so why am I so upset? And yeah.
Haley Radke: Do know one thing I'm a little bit stuck on is how you said you look so much [00:09:00] like your adoptive mother. Do you remember people telling you that when you were a kid? And what was your response? Because I had that happen all the time. And I would always be like, I'm adopted.
Dr. Michele Merritt: That's funny. Yeah. I, I don't really remember. I probably doing a little historical reconstruction here, but I do, I, I remember being told that a lot. I'm not sure what I said. I was a very reticent child.
I didn't talk much at all, and I'm still like socially awkward in a lot of ways, but I've come out of my shell over the years with confidence built from academia and other things. But when I was a kid, it was painfully bad how shy I was. And people would say, oh, you look just, they would talk to my mom. They wouldn't say it to me. They would say, she looks just like you. I'd hear that and then they'd look at me and wink or whatever, and I just remember being very uncomfortable. I was made uncomfortable by that, and it was like she would look at me and wink, and it was our little secret almost that I was adopted, but [00:10:00] then I wasn't as bold as you, I don't think to say I'm a adopted.
Haley Radke: It's always funny to me to think about that. So when you said that, I was like what do, what did you do? Because I was just like, I'm not theirs. Just let's be clear.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah. It's one of those things I probably just went the little nervous laugh that I do still to this day, that I get so mad at myself about when I, somebody said something really infuriating and I wanna tell them off, and then instead I just like, so I'm sure I did something like that as a kid, but I don't know.
I just remember thinking like. It was weird to be told that, but I knew that my adoptive mother just was beaming and I didn't wanna hurt her feelings, she just loved it so much that she looked like me.
Haley Radke: Totally. That's a big rabbit trail. We can go down, we can talk about that after.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah.
Haley Radke: In a recent paper that you published, you have a little footnote in there and it's in the main piece of your paper as well, talking about how your papers critiquing, [00:11:00] adoption, keep getting rejected from all of these different academic journals. Why do you think that is?
Dr. Michele Merritt: So the saga of this particular paper is actually funny. I've published other things since then that were a lot easier to publish. Like you mentioned, ASAC, they were, they've published me twice now in the span of time that it took me to get this one paper published in a major academic journal for feminist philosophy. So Feminist Philosophy Quarterly is like one of the top journals in my field I think. And it's open access, so that's a benefit for it. And the saga of that situation is just, I started in 2020, like I said, when I was starting to be awoken to the situation of adoption being not what I thought it was and wrote a paper and it was rough to be fair, it wasn't really ready for publication. And, but I still sent it off and it just was like rejected and they gave some good feedback. And so this is like maybe how you should re, you have three papers that you're trying to do here. Fix it and, but it's rejected.
Maybe you can try again [00:12:00] later. And so I did and then sent it somewhere else and that just got rejected outta hand. Not even an explanation at one journal. Sent it to another journal. I sent it actually to, I hesitate to say this, but I'm gonna do it anyways too. My former advisor, who is an editor at a journal, sent it there and it still got rejected.
And the commentary in that particular submission, one of several comments were choice that you'll laugh at. One of them was I know somebody who's adopted, and this is not at all how they view things.
Haley Radke: I'm sure these had so many conversations about it. It's amazing how deeply intimate people are familiar with our stories.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Oh, this, and these are academics too that are reviewing journals. They're supposed to be the top in their field to be making unbiased surveys of these papers that are coming in and they're telling me the author like I know somebody that's adopted and this doesn't hold water for me. I'm like, that's not a good response, but okay.
And then I was told my tone was too aggressive in one of my, one of the responses, which this is a feminist [00:13:00] philosophy paper don't we know what tone policing is? Are we not supposed to do that here? But, and to be honest, I don't see my tone is aggressive in anything that I write, but maybe it is. I just don't see it. I'm not an aggressive person anyways, so I was frustrated to say the least, and I finally sent it to Feminist Philosophy Quarterly. I'm not even sure exactly when, but it finally came back with a r and r, revise and re revise and resubmit. Which is better than nothing. Lots of revisions.
I did the revisions. One of the reviewers just took off and decided not to do the second round, so we had to find another reviewer, and it just kept going back and forth and finally got to a place where they said they'd accept it. And four years of that and for that paper to finally come out, and I think I probably would've given up if it had been any other paper, but this was like really important to me to get out into the world, and as much as I hated the blood, sweat, and tears that I had to put into it, sometimes I was ready to throw it against the wall. In the interim, I had [00:14:00] come across some work that really helped me bring into focus exactly what I was trying to do, which with this term adoptism being a specific way that adopted people are marginalized and that comes from reading the 2023 book, Undoing Suicidism is, which is a term that Alexandre Baril coined to talk about suicidal people being marginalized, specifically because they're suicidal. So I basically took his word. And said, I'm gonna use this formula that he's got, but to talk about adopted people. And if I hadn't waited until I read his book, I wouldn't have had that. So it's serendipitous that.
Haley Radke: Oh, okay.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Let's talk a little bit more about this term. I love it. I love giving us language to use when we're critiquing adoption. And so having a new term adoptism like. It was really helpful for me. Can you explain a little bit more about what you think about when you're [00:15:00] using that, inventing the term, you're inventing a new term? That's pretty cool.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Philosophers are known for this, probably infamous for, this maybe is the right word, but I actually really like the term and I think it's. Like you said, it's necessary for us to have language that's our own, because all the language that adopted people have had over the years has been foisted on us it seems.
So this is the term that we can reclaim. This is specifically how we are mistreated, subjected to injustices on various levels, both epistemic and, moral injustice sometimes too. But it's also like a good term to pick up on specifically how being adopted is a source of discrimination or prejudice or marginalization, because I think one of the things is to be really careful not to talk about being marginalized is if I'm a white woman marginalized in the same way as a black adopted person or a trans adopted person.
But since we're all adopted how can we [00:16:00] talk about the ways that being adopted specifically has impacted us? And even that's gonna be tricky because there's international adoptees and transracial adoptees and different kinds of adoption. And I focus on plenary adoption, which is that, the kind of adoption where you're completely subtracted from permanently and irrevocably your biological family.
It's not like stepparent adoption or kinship adoption. So anyways, but if we recognize that there's all these different intersections that all of us are living at, that we're marginalized in different ways, and some of us are sitting at many intersections and some of us are only sitting at one or two.
But the thing that kind of unites us is this, the fact of being adopted and how that societally is viewed in a very specific way, especially in this country, and causes a lot of marginalization of people that wanna tell their stories that run counter to what that dominant social narrative is. And so that's, that term adoptism is like the way that I see it is, it's the term that captures that.
Nothing's gonna [00:17:00] capture everything but it, in the paper I talk about how, for example, one of the ways adoptism shows up, adoptist ideology is assuming that adopted people aren't authorities on their own lived experience that they shouldn't be talking and they should be silenced even, and gaslit. And so feminist philosophers have talked about these kinds of things like gaslighting, as forms of epistemic injustice.
So it's like being harmed specifically in your capacity to know things and to produce knowledge. And so adopted people, I see this as very obvious to me, adopted people are harmed in this way because they're not allowed to speak about their experiences unless they fit within the positive framework.
But if they speak negatively about being adopted, then they're, again, they're gaslit. They're silenced, they're told they're being too aggressive.
Haley Radke: They're, their articles rejected 'cause somebody knows somebody that loves being adopted. Yeah.
Dr. Michele Merritt: So to me, this is just like quintessential example of epistemic injustice that adopted people often face.
And that's what I focus on the paper is the [00:18:00] epistemic part of this, because I can't even, I'm quite literally a case here where I've been trying to produce knowledge in my field. That I have a PhD in. As a tenured professor at a university, I still cannot get a word out because of these things happening to me.
So I have like my own personal story of this happening, but then I see it happening too with all of my peers that are adopted online trying to talk or trying to do their own advocacy. And being shut down.
Haley Radke: I love reading a paper and seeing my Twitter friends mentioned and tweets that I'm like I'm old.
I, I still call it that. I know it's called X now. That I was like, I remember when she tweeted that. But that's how we've built our community over these this last decade and gained just an even larger voice. And so to see folks like yourself and other critical adoption [00:19:00] scholars, adding to this like in a academic discourse situation is also really amazing.
I love the title. Be Grateful or Be Quiet. Literally how many times have we had something said to us? That implies that explicitly, probably more.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah. Just as an example of that is just talking about being adopted. I think I was giving a talk at Hendrix College in Arkansas. After the talk, a woman came up to me and she was very nice. She was not trying to be offensive, and I think she even knew that she prefaced it by saying, I just wanna ask you something. I know it's gonna sound bad. And then she finally came out with it and said, do your parents, do they know that you do this kind of work? Are they how do they handle all these things you're saying? And I just, I'm like, I am in my forties, ma'am. I'm allowed to do this work. I think we hear this a lot with adopted people. [00:20:00] I've seen it online. I've seen people comment these sort of sentiments that I'm just waiting till my adoptive parents die before I start really speaking truth.
And that just breaks my heart. Like you have a lot of life to live while they're alive. Don't waste it and be scared to talk, but we're so conditioned to not hurt our parents' feelings. All I think all children grow up this way, this sort of obligation and guilt and all of that we have towards our parents, but adopted people maybe have this extra layer because.
I don't wanna be given back. I don't wanna be rejected again. And, you've, you're an adult and you're still scared to say something. But that, and that's baked into her question is I'm supposed to worry about this as I'm giving a talk. As a professor, I'm worried, what would my mother say?
Haley Radke: And I just, I've heard that before too. And I wonder in what other situation are grown adults asked, what do your parents think about this?
Dr. Michele Merritt: I know I've tried to think of those parallels and I just, I have a hard time coming up with them. Yeah, it [00:21:00] happened. Just this, another story, another plug for adopted person that I recommend reading if you haven't, is SunAh Laybourn .
She has a book about the lives of Korean adoptees. I can't remember the exact title right now, but I've plugged in on Twitter before and I went to her book launch because she lives here in Memphis where I live. And teaches at University of Memphis and in her book launch. I'm sorry, this is maybe giving away stuff that she would not like to hear out there again.
But somebody asked the same thing of her, what do your parents think of this
Haley Radke: no
Dr. Michele Merritt: book that you just wrote? It's what? So yeah
Haley Radke: I had SunAh on she wrote Out of Place The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Okay.
Haley Radke: And I loved talking to her. 'cause she's a sociologist. And I asked her. I'm like, can you confirm that adoptees we're our own society, we're our own unique culture in society, right? And we do have you, you do this very well. I don't, you're very much I'm not speaking for all [00:22:00] adoptees. I don't know. Listen I talk a lot for adoptees. I know not everybody agrees with me, that's okay.
But we do have this shared experience that very much has altered the course of our lives. And to have that shorthand when you get to meet an adoptee in real life and you can just go right to the heart of the matter is pretty cool. That's, is that the only benefit of being adopted? I don't know, maybe one.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah. I have a, a paper from I think it's 2021 maybe from ASAC, about online community building, an adopted experience, and I was a lot more optimistic back then. I think that we can all have a community, and I know that word is contentious and I prefaced I have something in the paper where I say, I know that, but just the idea that there's a community of being.
It's paradoxical, the way I put it, I think it's like we're alone in our togetherness or together in our aloneness or something like that, is how I put it. That we, we really don't have [00:23:00] anything that unites us except for being adopted because then otherwise we're all very different people.
There are adopted people who are straight and gay and Republican and Democrat, and there's fighting inside our community over issues that have nothing to do with us being adopted really. But then it gets all tangled up and it makes us feel like we don't belong to each other as a community.
But then there is that one thing, like you said, that I could just walk into a room and if there's somebody adopted in there, we can immediately talk about those shared experiences, even if they're slightly different, they're at least similar enough that other people are not gonna understand in a way that we do.
Haley Radke: Yes, exactly. I long for the Utopian Society, which I realize is not realistic. Okay. We mentioned before this thing about you said language foisted upon us or something like that. And I love when you presented at ASAC, you talked about how much you hated the [00:24:00] term reunion and we've heard all kinds of things like, oh no it's a reunification or, I don't know.
I'm trying to think of the other alternatives people use, but I really appreciated you saying that. 'cause it is, it's like, it's almost this romanticized thing, just using the word like it's, I don't know. I've been put on a pedestal and we all know reunion is not any, you might get a honeymoon phase if you're lucky, but it's not all, it's cracked up to be all the time. What are your thoughts on that term?
Dr. Michele Merritt: I just, the word just strikes me as odd because it's re being like again, as if you were united ever in the first place. That's problematic already. At the start, yes, I was with my mother and father for a few minutes when I was born, but I wouldn't hardly call that a union.
And there was a lot of strife. At least in my story. There's a lot of strife about whether I was even going to be adopted and my grandmother apparently was fighting to keep me. But that's a [00:25:00] whole other story that we could talk about, right? That's not incentivized by adoption agencies. I don't think there was ever a union in the first place, but even if there was a union that I'm being re-put into when I meet them again, there's all these other family members that I was never with.
Like I have six siblings that I had never known I had until I found out about them. So we're not in reunion at all. That's not even the right word. We're like in, hey, how the hell did I not know you existed state. That's what we're in. That's not reunion. That's, I don't even know what you call that. I think I called it mind bleep during my presentation.
Haley Radke: Yes, you did.
Dr. Michele Merritt: I grew up with one adopted brother my whole life. And then to come to find out that there's six more out there that belong to me and my uncle, like I mentioned, who I am very much we're in pretty close contact and we visit him often with the kids.
So he gets to see his great niece and nephew and [00:26:00] it's great, but it's not reunion 'cause he didn't meet me the first time. We met for the first time when I was in my thirties.
Haley Radke: And so there's people that don't know about us. There's the extended family. There's all the things. The other thing you pointed out in that presentation was this lack of shared we experiences and the missing bio synchronicity. And I was like, oh, yes, thank you. Because I, I just had, I just talked with my sisters yesterday and that's the lack, like the grief is in that the lacking years where we weren't together.
And there's no way to reclaim that. And there's no way to earn back the time you would've shared fighting over who gets to clean the bathroom next or the summer vacations or for me, it really hits when I see them in all the family pictures when you're not in the family pictures.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah. [00:27:00] That's another tough thing about sibling relationships, especially I think like by not having that. I watch my two children growing up, and they fight all the time, and I wish they wouldn't, but I'm also happy that they're going through that because they'll hopefully be closer later in life and they'll know each other.
They'll have that hist. It's like a shared history too. It's a narrative that the family is built around this shared cooperative narrative that you're building. And I just stepped into the picture with, I have two sisters on my dad's side that I'm, I'd say they're my closest siblings of all the ones that I've found and we have gotten together, and the kids I've met, so they've got like cousins, that the kids have cousins they spend time with now, and that's great, but it's like being an outsider because the two of them grew up together and they have the whole shared story of their childhood and I just showed up one day, but, and one of them thought she was the oldest sibling of the, there's three of them that were born to the same mother that my, my dad [00:28:00] remarried to, and she thought she was the oldest. And cut here I come. Nope.
Haley Radke: Just disrupting in that birth order. So when you started critiquing adoption. Writing about it and publishing. What was it like for you professionally at your university to not necessarily change the direction? I guess a little bit change the direction that your research was going to, have you had support from your university?
Dr. Michele Merritt: For the most part yeah, I think so. They've been really good about just supporting me doing whatever wild thing I wanna do. I got hired to do philosophy of mind and cognitive science and feminisms, like both of those things. So I could teach feminist philosophy, but also like more traditional philosophy of mind classes. Which I still do. The idea is that I would still be publishing in that domain. So feminism, I'm like, that's how I'm working it in is it's still a feminist project [00:29:00] to critique adoption. That's how I was able to publish a book on dogs too, because I was like, this is still cognitive science.
It's just I wanna talk about dogs, even though you all had no idea I was gonna do that. I've done pretty well research wise at my university, so I think they're just happy to keep me doing what I'm doing and appease me in that way. I don't wanna speak too much and have it jinxed, but I haven't made them too angry yet.
And I actually, with this adoption stuff, I just took a sabbatical last semester in the project justification was the book that I'm working on, which is basically that paper that I just published that you're talking about, the Be Grateful or Be Quiet Paper is an extended version of that, like a much more book length project about adoption, marginalization, and the need to consider abolition and all of that. So I proposed that book to my university and said, I need a sabbatical to get going on this. And they said yes. So I obviously am doing something that they're not too mad about yet.
Haley Radke: Oh, that's so exciting. Congratulations. [00:30:00] We absolutely need this. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna link to your paper 'cause you said it's open source Feminist Philosophy Quarterly.
So this particular one, I'm gonna link to it in the show notes for folks to read 'cause I'm gonna recommend it and spoiler like, anyway. I like people when you read it, you're gonna be like yes. Like Michele's saying the true thing, like this is how I've experienced it and this is how the ways I've been shut down and these are the ways we've been marginalized and like it's very, I think folks are gonna love it.
I'm curious about. When you, if you have students read it, do you teach anything about adoption in any of your classes? What's it like going against the societal narrative, but at least you have the authority of the professorship.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah. It's funny, I think one of the questions you asked me was something about do I have trouble, providing like my lived experience as opposed to like scientific research or something like that. And on the one hand it's I do provide the research too. 'cause I do a lot of that gathering of the data and saying, here's the what the data [00:31:00] say. It's not just me. But then like I think when I was publishing this paper in Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, one of the reviewers said, do you even need all that data if you're just telling us from your own experience, what it's like to be adopted and feminist philosophy, at least there's a call for that. Like we want more of that because it's the first person or insider perspective or what sociologists sometimes call the EMIC perspective. The insider perspective is not only allowed now, it's almost like necessary.
Like you, you shouldn't be writing about what it's like to experience racism if you're a white person, for example. We know that. That's why we don't read certain authors and say that they're the authority on what it's like. So I'm not gonna name names right now, but then I think the tide is finally turning in that way for adopted people, at least in feminist philosophy.
And I think my paper might actually be part of that move, I hope, because it's no, I should be talking about adoption, not these other people who've published on it that are adoptive parents. Those are the typical ones to publish literature in philosophy. They're adopted parents, so you know, I get, I [00:32:00] like that actually seems to be happening as just a matter of course in the humanities is the call for the insider perspective.
Then when I'm teaching, like to your question about teaching, I do, I bring it up in my feminist philosophy class for sure. We read several of my pieces, Ryan's pieces. Anything I can get my hands on that has to do with adoption, I'll have a little section on it. And they tend to be really open to it in a way that I think more established academics are not, and especially the really younger students, the students that are just in college 18 to 22. My intro to philosophy students, I teach that every semester, and I always include, I have to include shorter pieces so I wouldn't include my Be Grateful or Be Quiet piece there. I would go over their heads, I think. But I have a piece in The Nation that's really short and it's, I think it's, We Should Be Fighting for a World Without Adoption is the title of that.
I have them read that sort of towards the end when we're talking about ethics and social justice. And I was really [00:33:00] worried the first time I taught it that I was gonna get, tomatoes thrown at me or something like that. But really, I find that most of the students, they're just completely flabbergasted at some of the stats that I'll throw at them.
And some of the stories I'll tell them and they're just disgusted, especially when I throw up the, there's an NPR article from several years ago and it just, the title is Black Babies Cost Less Than White Babies. And I just throw that up there and they're like, what? And we've already been talking about MLK and racial justice at this point, so they're already like primed to be angry about some of these things.
And I find they're really receptive. And I have, every now and then I'll have an adopted person in my class who's, I don't have those adopted students so far that are like, no, I love being adopted please don't talk to me about your bad experience. They're like, yes, Dr. Merritt finally, somebody else gets it like, have you been on TikTok?
Have you seen that these people are talking? I'm like, yes, I have. I've been on TikTok. I'm old, but I have seen that people are angry about adoption on TikTok, so I think it's like. The kids are all right. Like it's, they're coming up and they're [00:34:00] getting it now. So I actually like talking about it to my students more than academics.
Haley Radke: I love that. Like really, I love that. It's so true. In my experience. Once you show people behind the curtain, it's like, how can you. Not get it like, who literally is arguing against family preservation. This is like chaotic to think that way. So I love that they can see it, that when you're showing them.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah, it's great.
Haley Radke: You've been very public with a variety of things that often people hold secret, so struggles with mental health. You mentioned earlier when you had your first child that you struggled with suicidal ideation. You've been public about some other issues. How is that for you? Do you, have you always been an [00:35:00] open book? Are you just wanting us to have more conversations about it? Do you ever wish, maybe like me, maybe you hadn't put your first and last name out on a podcast nine years ago and it just, this is what happens. What do you think about all that?
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah. It's funny because I don't think I've always been so open.
I told you I was totally shy when I was young, but I guess it was having children. That kind of just is, what's the catalyst, the first child I had, I just went through so much and I've had to be fully open and disclosive. I struggled with suicidal ideation ever since. I can remember being like young, 12, 13. Just really having a hard time when I was in my teenage years. I think a lot of that probably has to do with the hormones and the shifting and changing into an adult that goes on it. It can be really tumultuous, and I'm discovering that sort of happens later in life too, when your hormones start shifting again.
Haley Radke: And that's happened to me when I was 12 too. [00:36:00] That's when, yeah, that's when it started for me. Yeah.
Dr. Michele Merritt: And it's I've noticed that, so not surprisingly after having a baby, when your hormones are like completely on hiatus, like they don't even know what's going on your gut. You, I'm not trying to reduce it all to that, but I think you're.
The stage is set for things to go badly already, and we already know that one in two women, 50% of women or people who give birth, I should say, are at risk for some kind of mild depression or something after birth. But then like to have severe postpartum depression is a little less common, but it's still common enough that we should be paying attention to it more.
And so it really hit me hard and. All the suicidal stuff I had ever been through in my life came to the fore. And, I wasn't just passively suicidal. It was very active for a while there, and I needed like really intense care for a little while. And then when I was all settled and everything, I, that's when I decided I wanted to write about it.
And I wrote, not from the adopted perspective, just from the, hey, I'm a woman who's experienced postpartum depression. Postpartum [00:37:00] psychosis even. It was really bad. And look, I'm this like put together professor that most people would never suspect I'm struggling this much and I want everyone to know that it's totally not normal in the sense that it's fun and okay, but let's normalize this conversation so people aren't so ashamed to put it out there.
And I did. And then. A few days later, after I published that blog, CPS came to my house to investigate me for potentially hurting my child because of my blog and being honest about the, the nothing about my child, but about the suicidal stuff. You would think that I would stop at that point, but it's just, it's fueled me on to keep talking.
It's another thing like this is why we should talk because this crap happens to people. And yeah, I have since just not, in fact, I think I've gotten louder since that experience. So it was, again, another form of this kind of injustice that not adopted people, but suicidal people. This is exactly what Alexandre's work is like talking about suicidism that [00:38:00] suicidal people try to talk about being suicidal and they're immediately pathologized institutionalized. They have the cops called on them. They're even shot by the police, especially if they're not white, right? I mean it's, you can see the marginalization of suicidal people in society quite clearly, and I didn't know at the time there was a word for that could be applied to what I had gone through. So now I talk about it even more freely because I've been given this language to understand my experience.
Haley Radke: Appreciate you speaking up about it, and we've seen several events where adoptees talk about suicide and suicide prevention and those kinds of things, which are so helpful in my opinion, in our community, especially since we're at higher risk of attempting suicide.
So thank you. Thank you for being one of the brave people to talk about it. I also, I just wanna say I. I love it when we'll say adoptees who have a perfectly happy, healthy childhood, [00:39:00] still in a good relationship critique adoption. Because one of the things you mentioned in your paper is how we get, you lobb, the, your ungrateful, angry, adopt you, you had a bad experience, those kinds of things and it's no, that didn't happen for you and. This system is still messed up.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah, and that's one of the things I really am trying to emphasize in my work more and more, and I'm happy to share my personal story. I have, everybody has their own story, but it's to me, unimportant to talk about all the ins and outs of my personal adoption narrative.
It's more like the systemic issues with adoption itself. So if we can separate out the personal from the systemic. Because there are gonna be plenty of adopted people who are, they have no problems being adopted. Just like there's plenty of women who don't seem to think there's any systemic sexism in this country right now.
Go ahead and have that fun delusion. That's fine. But that doesn't mean that it's not true that there's systemic issues with [00:40:00] the way women are treated or that there's systemic racism or, I'm not gonna compare. Adoption marginalization to racism, of course. But the analogy is just simply that there's systemic issues that exist, whether or not the people that are being oppressed by those systems want to admit as much, and maybe even, there are people that are marginalized within oppressive systems that somehow can reap benefits from within those systems enough to be blind to the fact that they're oppressed.
You know what I mean? So they're like. Maybe it's a woman who's white who's got a lot of money and doesn't seem to think that there's any injustices that women as a whole face, you know? So yeah. I think that applies to adopted people very much. And we have to move past our individual stories and start thinking collectively.
Haley Radke: I wanna read a couple lines from your paper.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Okay.
Haley Radke: Adoptees who deviate from the institution's expectations of happy and grateful are told they're psychologically damaged. [00:41:00] Huh. Even if adoptees use a polite tone or offer compelling and logical arguments, they're perceived as playing the perpetual victim or as being attention seekers.
Yeah, it's so good. I love this. Having a name for adoptism, which is this is society's view of adoption, this optimistic it's all those things. And I, and at the conclusion you say all adoptee voices need to be centered in discussions of adoption much like we ought to center the voices of members of any marginalized group when talking about what it's like to experience that form of marginalization.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah, exactly. Well done. Is there anything else you wanna tell us about your paper, your other writing? I think there's so many things people can learn from you. I don't even know if you're tweeting anymore, but like I, I learned a lot from you on Twitter back in the day.
I'm on Twitter, still haven't deleted my account, but I'm scared to post anything on there [00:42:00] lately, given the climate that we're in right now.
Dr. Michele Merritt: But I,
Haley Radke: it's so bleak.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah. I, people have deleted their accounts on mass and I've just taken this approach that I stay on there as a voyeur to see what is going on the other side of things, because, it's it's disgusting, but it needs to be observed so you can see what people are saying.
I do, I haven't been on social media a lot the last few months I've been taking a hiatus. But whenever I have something come out, I always post it. I have the silenced adoptee that I run on Instagram, and if it's something academic, I'll post it on my own personal Facebook, but publicly so it can be easily accessed.
Let's see, a couple papers coming out. I have the title of this paper should be fun. I'm not sure if this is gonna be open access or not. It's from a conference proceedings, but the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World is a great little group that I'm a part of and they did a panel at a conference last year called Everything Is BLEEP, and so my title is Adoption Is BLEEP so that's coming out soon I think.
[00:43:00] And then another paper on suicidality as part of a conference that I was at Oxford in 2023. Along the lines of what we were just talking about, like being punished for saying I'm suicidal. If I say that out loud, I get punished immediately. It's some of that personal narrative. Also, I do talk about adoption in that paper because I'm trying to bring these two things together in my work right now.
The idea of being adopted and being suicidal and how having both of those identities you get it from both sides. And there's some interesting parallels in the way that suicidal people and adopted people are treated generally. So since I've experienced both of those, I'm allowed to talk about them.
And I try to stay in my own lane otherwise, because, if I haven't experienced that particular identity or form of marginalization, I'm not gonna speak into it. But yeah those two papers are coming out probably soon, this month maybe. I hope.
Haley Radke: The other piece we're gonna link to is What it Costs to be Adopted that you wrote in Visible and you point out, all these major pieces about adoption adoptees are not consulted, [00:44:00] and then you share these three adoptee stories. I, it's so good, Michele. You're just such a fabulous writer. I can't wait for your book. Just keep keep doing what you're doing. I'm cheering you on.
I don't know that I'm gonna be introducing you to any new people. I'm sure lots of people are already reading your work, but I'm excited to share anyway and recommend you wholeheartedly to listeners, what did you wanna recommend to folks today?
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yes. Ryan would be my top person to plug. He's a great guy. He's from Australia, Korean adoptee, and we have co-authored a piece together in a book very, in some ways similar to what my paper is about, but he's got a lot of great work on being adopted. He's got the podcast Adopted Feels. You can look up his academic webpage. I think he's got a couple new things out that I haven't even read yet.
He has another piece in that same book where we have a piece together. He has another piece. In that same book with somebody else. I'm trying to think. Oh, and he does really cool stuff about animals too. So we, Ryan and I [00:45:00] connected because he was, I was looking for I think I googled like philosophers and adoption, and I found very few people and I found him and oh, and he had some stuff about animals, and it's this is a cool person to talk to. So he's got, there was a, oh, I'm gonna forget the name of it. It's a podcast that he was interviewed for it was like the Big Think or something like that where he talks about this experience of looking in the mirror and being a Korean but being adopted by white people and like he thought he was white and like he this, like he didn't feel like he was in his own skin looking in the mirror, like seeing this person that he wasn't supposed to be. And he writes so eloquently about that. He does it from this phenomenological perspective, which is the tradition and philosophy of thinking about conscious experience from that first person subjective, like qualitative aspect of having awareness of oneself. And it's just, it's brilliant work. So he doesn't get enough attention and I think he should.
Haley Radke: I love that. I've listened to their podcast for a long time. They do such a great job, and [00:46:00] it's pod faded right now, you never know when there'll be a new episode.
Yeah. I look forward to reading some more of Ryan's work. Thank you so much, Michele. Where can we follow you and see when your papers are coming out into the world?
Dr. Michele Merritt: I have my website I try to keep that updated. It's just michelemerrit.com, which is one L in Michele. Everybody always messes that up.
And I have an Instagram account, which is the silenced adoptee, and I sometimes will write on Medium. I have a Medium page, although I have not done that in a long time. And Twitter, I have that too. Or X as it may be. Yeah.
Haley Radke: There's so many great medium pieces too. I love Dear Medium articles.
Dr. Michele Merritt: My medium is a collection of all kinds of things. So it's not just adoption, it's dogs and body image stuff, and it's a hodgepodge.
Haley Radke: All kinds of things. You are a very well-rounded person. Okay, maybe we could talk about dogs another time. 'cause dogs are my number one love in [00:47:00] life.
Dr. Michele Merritt: I actually do I wonder how much adopted people really are like attached to animals. It seems like there's a lot of us, and I'm wondering what that might be like, what's the story there? I have theories. I have a future project of kind of connecting up the dog stuff that I do with the adoption stuff and thinking about how we care for animals and care for people and that kind of thing.
Haley Radke: Yes, please. We did a whole healing series episode on what happens when your dog dies for a adoptees, because I was unwell, to say the least.
Dr. Michele Merritt: Yeah. I've been working at the Humane Society for a few years now, just as a volunteer dog walker, and I have a piece actually on Medium about this like complex feeling that happens when I get attached to a dog there that I'm not taking home because we have two dogs and I've been complaining about the hair in the house as it is. Like I, we cannot have another dog and two children, but I still wanna bring them all home. And so I get attached to one and I think maybe just, maybe we could have this third dog and [00:48:00] then I'll come in to walk the dogs the next day and the dog's been adopted and I just it's a very complex thing to experience that emotion like that you're happy that the dog's gonna have a home but you're sad because you wanted the dog to be home with you and. The dogs being adopted in a way that humans, the rigorous process that people have to go through to even get that dog home with them compared to how some humans can just be plucked right out of the delivery room. Like it's nothing. So I just, it, I just sit there sometimes at the Humane Society and just cry on the bench with one of the dogs I'm walking thinking about that stuff. So I'm just weird. I don't know.
Haley Radke: No, you're good people. That's good. Thank you so much, Michele. Such an honor to get to know you a little better.
I can't believe the privilege I've gotten to speak to so many super intelligent people about adoption. I've [00:49:00] learned so much from the scholars we've had on the show, the authors we've had on the show, and folks that are just sharing their regular stories, experiences. They don't study adoption, but they just wanna share their story.
I've learned so much from any, everyone that's had the generosity to share on the show. And it's amazing to me after, I think it's come, it's, I think it's nine years, you guys, it's gonna be nine years, pretty soon. It's amazing to me. I'm still learning. I'm still learning. Every conversation I have I get something new out of it and I hope you do too.
So thank you so much to Michele and the other guests who have been willing to share their stories. I'm feeling reflective because as you're listening to this episode 300 was, a little while ago, but in my time it's just come out [00:50:00] and just some of the super sweet comments and messages I've received about the impact the show has had.
They're just washing over me. So I'm just feeling gratitude for you, willing to listen, and for all those people willing to to share with us. So just truly an honor and a privilege. So thank you. And one more way to keep the show going is to join Patreon. You can go to adopteeson.com/community.
And we have some awesome Zoom events that you can join us for. And they're always listed over on our website on the calendar, and we'd love to have you join. That's how I get to meet listeners now and it's pretty fun. So come and read with us in book club. Hang out at an Adoptees Off Script Party.
Come ask questions from a therapist. Ask an adoptee therapist events we have so much great stuff for you over there. Adoptees on.com/community. Thank you so much for listening. [00:51:00] Let's talk again soon.
