A Conversation with Becky Belcore

Introduce yourself to our readers! Also feel free to include any website and social media links you’d like included.

Hello! My name is Becky Belcore (she/her) and I am the co-director of a national Asian American organization called NAKASEC. I met NAKASEC 26 years ago when I was in my early twenties. I was adopted from Korea by white parents when I was one year old, and in 1996 a Korean American friend of mine introduced me to NAKASEC’s Chicago affiliate, HANA Center. HANA Center offered a young people’s program, which all of our affiliates continue to operate to this day as we believe in the power of youth organizing and leadership, and I signed up for Korean language, history, social issues and drumming classes. I then learned that they also had a social justice bent, so I decided to volunteer (I was working as a union organizer at that time). Since then I have served in almost every role in the organization- as volunteer, a program staff and later executive director of our Chicago affiliate, as a board member, donor and now a staff of NAKASEC. I co-founded a project of NAKASEC’s that is adoptee led and centered, called Adoptees for Justice. You can learn more about our organizations at: www.NAKASEC.org, www.Hanacenter.org, www.adopteesforjustice.org; @nakasec and @hanacenter on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; @adoptees4Just on Twitter, and @adoptees4justice on Facebook and Instagram

 Tell us about your work with NAKASEC. What does it stand for?

 NAKASEC stands for National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC). NAKASEC was founded by grassroots, community-based affiliates across the country that have roots in the democracy movement in Korea. NAKASEC’s mission is to organize Korean and Asian Americans to achieve social, racial and economic justice. Our grassroots affiliates are located in New York & New Jersey (MinKwon Center for Community Action), Pennsylvania (Woori Center), Virginia (Hamkae Center), Illinois (HANA Center) and Texas (Woori Juntos). They serve, organize and support the grassroots leadership of multigenerational Korean Americans and English speaking Asian Americans. Our affiliates who work with our most vulnerable community members every day- the low income, limited English proficient, recent immigrant, undocumented, young people, women, and seniors- come together to determine NAKASEC’s national priorities and campaigns. This ensures that our national work is always informed by and accountable to those it seeks to impact. NAKASEC’s main campaigns have centered around immigrant justice, which we see as the intersection of immigrant rights with racial, gender, queer and trans- the intersections of all we are as people- justice. Reproductive justice is immigrant justice. We have been organizing to win a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants of which almost 2 million are Asian American, and to promote family reunification through ending detention and deportation and strengthening the family-based immigration system.

You’ve spoken about your experience as a Korean adoptee. Do you feel your identity has been weaponized by anti-choicers?

As adoptees, particularly as transnational and transracial adoptees adopted by white Americans, we are consistently told we should be grateful for our very existence, particularly to our white parents who “saved” us and provided us with a “better life.” The anti-choice movement seizes upon this framework, often pointing to adoption as the answer for pregnant people who cannot or do not want to continue their pregnancies. I often hear from individuals and through the media people flippantly saying “well, they can just put the child up for adoption,” as if the process and experience of carrying a pregnancy to term, giving birth, relinquishing a child and spending the rest of your life with emotions around that is easy. The focus of the anti-choice conversation is always the fetus and never the person who is pregnant, but it obviously will have a profound impact on the pregnant person. From what we see of Korean adoptees who are reunited with their birth parents, there is an incredible amount of grief and loss that occurs for them as a result of adoption, regardless of their circumstances. Adoption is also not easy for the child; it is a game of roulette- you have no control over who adopts you and what kind of family situation in which you will be raised. Through our work at Adoptees for Justice which focuses on securing citizenship for thousands of intercountry adoptees who are actually being deported back to our countries of birth even though we cannot speak the language, do not know the culture and often have no known family, we have met hundreds of adoptees with a myriad of adoption experiences. We all struggle with our identities particularly as people of color growing up in predominately white families and white communities; we all have lost our original names, birth dates, languages, cultures and histories.  We have white adoptive parents who often deny and invalidate our experiences as Asian Americans and Asian American women and nonbinary folks. There are many adoptees who have been physically, mentally and sexually abused, and who have been relinquished again by their first adoptive families and rehomed or grown up in state institutions. And now the US government, who facilitated our adoption to this country, is actually deporting some of us back to our countries of origin, separating us from the only families we have ever known. All of this is to say that adoption is complicated- for the birth parent and for the adoptee- and should never be offered as an “easy solution” to pregnancy, and should definitely not be used in an argument to strip people of their reproductive rights.

What impact do you think Roe being overturned is going to have on the adoption space?

Adoptees on social media are already sharing and voicing their perspectives and opinions. Even some adoptees who feel they had a positive adoption experience do not agree with the idea that adoption should be used as the salve to unwanted pregnancies. There are many of us in the adoption space who believe that governments should do more to support women, non-binary and transgender folks, especially those who are low-income and are people of color, in accessing abortion and resources to keep their pregnancy if that is their choice. No one should be forced to have a child if they do not want to and no one should have to give up a child if they do not want to- it is two sides of the same coin. This debate opens up for us working on adoptee rights an opportunity to raise this conversation into the mainstream and provide education from an adoptee perspective.

How do you feel Dobbs will uniquely affect Asian women and non-binary people?

Asian women and non-binary people, along with Black women and non-binary people, are some of the strongest supporters of reproductive rights and choice. 7 out of 10 Asian Americans support the legalization of abortion, and 93% of Asian American & Pacific Islander women believe that people should have the right to abortion access. This decision will disproportionately impact those most vulnerable in our community who already have the least access to resources. When I used to work at HANA Center, we had a young women’s program and I regularly was asked by participants to take them to Planned Parenthood for reproductive services, because they could not ask their immigrant parents- these kinds of organizations and resources are invaluable.  While this decision is devastating to our communities, we can use it as an opportunity to organize and unite across our Asian ethnicities and with other people of color and allies to fight for our rights. Moreover, Asia has been the largest exporter of children for adoption in the world; it is also an opportunity for Asian American adoptees to offer our voice and share our experiences and opinions towards change for everyone

What can people be doing to help right now?

People can be organizing at the local and state levels to support people in gaining access to reproductive services at the individual level while also working towards local and state protections and resources. Local power eventually leads to national power, so what we do locally in this moment is critical. The mid-term elections also are coming up this November, and Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group and electorate in the United States. For those of us who can vote, we should make our positions on issues heard at the polls, and for those who cannot vote, make sure those you know who can are doing so.

What are some other organizations doing good work, or other people? Shout them out!

NAKASEC has been promoting this link: https://www.thecut.com/article/donate-abortion-fund-roe-v-wade-how-to-help.html

It has been a very rough few weeks. How are you taking care of yourself? Share some tips with our audience!

This is a rough time in history with so many issues at stake: reproductive rights, immigration, gun violence, climate change- the list can go on and on. It can be overwhelming and discouraging, especially when I think of myself as the mother to a teenage girl. What kind of world will there be for her when she grows up? For myself, the thing that helps me is just continuing to try to change things. My mentor, Curtis Muhammad who was a veteran of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Civil Rights Movement, always told me that the number one important ingredient in movement building is hope- the belief that things can change and we can be part of changing it. I feel so grateful to have a vehicle like NAKASEC and the community I work in and with- they inspire hope within me every single day. So whether you are helping a neighbor or a friend with a problem, struggling through a difficult conversation with someone, participating in a rally, sharing information on social media, creating political art, or sharing through a publications like your magazine, I believe all these acts contribute positive energy into the world and build the hope we need for the long term.

My co-director recently took me to a feminist Buddhist monastery in Northern California for a week. It was the first time I had an experience like that, and what I learned is that internal change is just as important as external change. Often organizers solely focus on the external change- changing our society, laws and policies and the world around us. But if we do not work on our own internal change- the change that helps us live in the present moment, see the beauty in ourselves and others, then we burn out. We also are always learning and growing as people. So what I learned is that there must be a balance of internal and external change- that is something we will be working on at NAKASEC in the coming time.

Finally, we ask this question of every interviewee: what do you think the biggest problem facing Asian women and non-binary people today is?

The biggest problem facing us today is that money and power are valued more than humanity and life. Everything that is happening fundamentally is a people-made disaster; it is people, mainly wealthy white cisgender corporate men, who are stripping us of our reproductive rights, blocking climate change interventions, promoting the mass distribution of guns throughout our country, deporting immigrants and separating families, allowing the police and other vigilantes to murder Black people and upholding a system of mass incarceration. And since it is a people-made disaster, it must be people power that dismantles these systems of oppression and builds a liberatory world where all people have fundamental access to the basic human rights of quality food, housing, education, health care, communications, transportation, healthy and safe environments and to be with their loved ones. As Asian women and non-binary people today, because we are impacted by all these systems of oppression, we understand them and have a role and responsibility to be part of the solution for all of us.