Season 6, Episode 33: Adoption and Whiteness with Rebecca, Jenny and Danielle

n this episode, Danielle, Jenny, and Rebecca explore the tangled relationship between white evangelicalism, missionary culture, adoption, and whiteness. Beginning with Jenny’s research on Uganda, purity culture, and the savior narratives surrounding white women missionaries, the conversation moves into the harms of transracial and international adoption, especially when children are severed from family, culture, land, and language under the banner of God’s calling.

Rebecca brings a deeply personal and structural lens to adoption, naming how adoptive parents are often cast as heroes while the child’s story is flattened or rewritten. Danielle connects these patterns to white evangelical politics, immigration enforcement, and the theological contradictions that allow some children to be “saved” while others are abandoned, detained, or deported. Together, they examine how whiteness requires disconnection, how capitalism and scarcity reinforce racial allegiance, and how Christian theology has often been used to sanctify violence rather than confront it.

The episode asks what it means to move beyond saviorism toward responsibility, coalition, and truth-telling about the systems that create harm in the first place.