Wokefolk

The latter pillar, the reduction of all human relations to plain power dynamics — literally the Leninist “ Кто? Кого?” concept — conceives of a parent-child relationship exactly as it does a boss-worker relationship, or a ruler-ruled relationship. What normal people perceive as welcoming a child into their homes in the course of an adoption, these ideologues understand as an acquisition or a conquest. (Here see Dr Ibram X Kendi’s now-infamous tweet, endorsed by fellow racial essentialist Richard Spencer, characterizing the “colonizer” quality of the Barrett family’s adoptions.)

In the Chinese-adoption sphere, these are almost entirely young women in their twenties, who profess progressive politics, and will often acknowledge that they came to their critique — of their own parents and families — in the course of ideological indoctrination at college. Sustained engagement with this cohort reveals fairly quickly that the overwhelming majority of them appropriate the jargon and concepts of progressive race- and power-obsession to engage in re-litigation of entirely ordinary personal passages. Questions of self, meaning, parents, and nascent adulthood that rightly occupy the attention of anyone from ages 15 to 25 are subordinated to the rigid ideological strictures — and pre-ordained answers — of progressive cant.

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