How Hollywood sees diversity:

The “Better Dead Than Red” Cold War rhetoric that targeted Vietnamese children was an eerie echo of the “Kill the Indian, Save the Child” European settler programs and showed the ultimate priority of Operation Babylift: to neutralize “enemies” of the West.

Adoption standards had already codified with the stolen generations and mass abduction of Romani children over the centuries, but it only industrialized internationally with the wars in Vietnam and Korea, which were the first to become “supply countries” (yes, that is actually adoption terminology). The future generations of these countries (ESPECIALLY the generations born in the direct aftermath of war) were deemed as potentially dangerous to Western occupants (and by extent Western nations), who had terrorized, raped, or murdered so many of their birth parents.

Operation Babylift not only took falsified orphans via “relief” agencies, but also any other children they could find. Falsification was the rule, not the exception. And while white Christian paternalism and arrogance were certainly strong factors, even stronger (if more subtle and lesser known) was a fearful geopolitical agenda advocated even by the most anti-racist Westerners. Pearl S. Buck, Nobel Prize-winning writer and official “enemy of the state” in the U.S. for her vocal opposition of racial segregation, widely encouraged the adoption of Asian war children as politically advantageous to “Western democratic” interests.

I’ve also had people joyfully tell me they adopted an Asian baby, and showed me photos, expecting for me to praise them, as if there was some great psychic connection all Asians share. I’ve read Korean babies were the first babies to be sent overseas to be adopted.