In the Best Interests of the Child
Two-year-old Elijah tears around the corner of the house, punching the lawn with his short, muscular legs, and jumps laughing into his father’s arms.
“Daddy!” he screams gleefully as his father, Jim, spins him in the air and turns him upside down. “More! Again!” Elijah demands, his brown hands clasping Jim’s pale arms. Jim smilingly obliges. Elijah has just spoken some of the few English words he has learned. English is his new family’s language.
Both of them dizzy, Jim sets Elijah down. “Agua?” he asks his son. The little boy vigorously nods his head and bends to take a few gulps from the garden hose his father holds out. Jim has just spoken one of the few Spanish words he knows. Spanish is his son’s language.
The ever active boy runs to join his older sister Helen jumping on the mini trampoline in the backyard of this suburban St. Paul home. His brown skin and black hair contrast markedly with his sister’s white skin and blond hair.
It will be a few years before Elijah, whose name was Armando and who lived in Guatemala until two months before, realizes that not only is he the only person of color in this family of six, he is the only person of color in the whole neighborhood.
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Proud mother Janice rolls her newly adopted daughter to a corner playground in San Francisco. Excited neighborhood children run up to see their new playmate as 13-month-old Ashley is lifted from the stroller.
One curious preschool girl furrows her brow as she looks back and forth between Ashley and Janice. Finally, she looks up at Janice, “She’s got black skin. How come you don’t have black skin?”
Janice opens and closes her mouth a few times. “Because she was born that way,” she says with a faltering smile.
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Andrea, a Chinese-American social worker, is in front of a group of prospective adoptive parents recounting being raised by Jewish parents in an all-white section of St. Louis. "Let's just say I'm going to be in therapy," she says, her eyes glittering with resentment, "for a long, long time."[1]
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It goes by several names: interracial adoption, transracial adoption, transcultural adoption, cross cultural adoption… But no matter the preferred term, the fact is that “the joining of racially different parents and children together in adoptive families”[2] is on the rise in the United States, up from eight percent of all adoptions in 1987 according to the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS)[3] to fifteen percent in the last ten years[4]. These families consist predominantly of white parents raising children of color and comprise domestic adoptions as well as children adopted from other countries.
The reasons for this rise are several. Though over sixty percent of parents looking to adopt are white, only forty-four percent of children available domestically are of European descent[4]. Contrarily, about fifty percent of children awaiting adoption are black when black people make up twelve to thirteen percent of the total population[5]. The remaining five percent of adoptees come from other, non-white ethnicities. In San Francisco, the gulf is even wider. Here seventy percent of available children are black while at eight percent the City’s black population is less than the national average.[1] To further aggravate the situation, only four percent of all of these children fall into the most preferred category: healthy infants or toddlers. The rest are school aged or special needs children. To put the situation in market terms: demand is high while supply is low.
Given the relatively small number of available adoptees, parents often wait years to adopt domestically. Many of these parents look beyond our borders to have their dreams of parenthood realized, with a great number of adoptions coming from Asia or, as in the case of my nephew Elijah above, Central and South America. These cross cultural families add to the pool of transracial families created domestically.
The increase in the number of transracial adoptions can also be traced to the law. In the past, adoption agencies could and often did channel children to families based on race. All of that changed in 1994 when Congress passed the Multiethnic Placement Act (MEPA). MEPA prohibited adoption agencies from delaying or denying the adoption of a child “on the basis of the race, color, or national origin of the adoptive or foster parent, or the child involved.” This law was designed specifically to decrease the amount of time parents wait to adopt and to “end discrimination” in adoption.[6] Critics of the law contend that its intent was mainly to give white parents more opportunity to adopt the most sought-after children.
But what of the increasing number of children who find themselves in these families? Those children who do not have a choice about what family they end up in? Is it better that a child of color be adopted by a loving family, any family, no matter the race? Or should the child be raised by parents of his/her own race? Parents who could teach first hand the intricacies of navigating an inherently racist society?
"Don't imagine that you're doing a child of color a favor by adopting it, because you're not," says Julia quietly to another group of prospective parents. Julia is a striking young black professional, raised in the Bay Area by white parents. "The suicide rate of transracial adoptees is higher than the national average. The children grow up alienated from their own race; they're not accepted by blacks, or whites either. If you sincerely want to help parentless African-American children, then work to change the laws so that it's easier for black people to adopt." Julia herself says that her parents, the parents who raised her, would have been third on her list of preferred families: after her birth parents and after black adoptive parents. Many argue that only parents of color can give their children the sense of identity and self worth they need to be wholly individuated adults.[1]
Yet there are contrary experiences out there. Ben, 20, a junior in political science at Cal State Fullerton, says growing up with white parents, a white sister, a black sister, and two black brothers has helped him get along with both races. "I fit into black and white society." said Ben, an African American. "I think being raised that way helped. I have really good friends, both black and white."[7]
There is a battle of statistics as well. Some, as Julia states above, point to increased rates of depression and suicide in children of color raised in white homes. A 1999 study conducted by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York found that many children felt as if they were white people trapped in Asian, black or Latino bodies. In fact, in a landmark 1972 statement, the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) declared its opposition to transracial adoption. It called the practice of placing black children in white adoptive families "a blatant form of racial and cultural genocide."
On the other hand, proponents of transracial adoption point to statistics that show that seventy-seven percent of children adopted transracially “adjusted successfully”[8] and can more easily handle the identity issues all adopted children face better than most because they cannot pretend to be like everyone else. In a 1995 study, transracial adoption was not found to be detrimental for the adoptee in terms of adjustment, self-esteem, academic achievement, peer relationships, parental and adult relationships.[9] Another study, conducted by Amanda L. Baden, Ph.D., of St. John's University, argues that transracial adoptees' exposure and competence in their birth culture “may not be necessary for good psychological adjustment." [4]
Proponents of transracial adoption say that adoption by families of any race or culture is better than allowing children to remain in foster care or the squalor of foreign orphanages. They point to higher rates of drug use, unemployment and homelessness among those raised in foster families.[8]
Opponents contend that the whole adoption business is inherently racist. Parents of color, they say, are routinely discouraged from applying for or screened out of the adoption process. They cite statistics that show that, although black parents adopt at twice the rate of whites, eighty to ninety percent of prospective black adoptive parents are turned down.
Yet amidst this ping pong match of conflicting statistics and opinions, there is one fact that almost all researchers agree upon: children of color raised transracially identify more strongly with their adoptive parents’ culture than their own. [4,5,7,8] To be sure strides have been made since the adoptive-parent-as-savior attitude of the Seventies when the child’s birth culture was not even considered. My brother Jim and his wife Stacey, as is the case with all parents looking to adopt transracially, had to attend cultural awareness training before they could adopt Armando/Elijah from Guatemala. They are encouraged to immerse their child as much as possible in his birth culture; to seek out role models to help him form a healthy sense of self. But that ongoing task is daunting. The nearest Spanish immersion school to Jim and Stacey’s home is a thirty-minute drive away. There are no Latino families in the neighborhood or at their church, an important part of their social life. Their family make-up is: white father, white mother, three white daughters, one Latino son. Whose culture will win out?
With so many conflicting facts and opinions out there, in the end we must err on the side of the child, using the one piece of data most agree upon. All of the love in the world cannot teach a child what it means to be black in our society. Or Asian. Or Latino. What good is an adult who has lost herself because she never had the chance to know herself? Most researchers agree that this is the likely scenario. It is clear that vast improvements could be made to the adoption procedure. We must make it easier for parents of color to adopt, for we can all agree that it is in the best interest of the child to be raised by parents who have the skills, experience and culture necessary to nurture the whole child.
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[1] Interracial Adoption: One Couple’s Story, Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/aug97/mothers/adoption970804.html
[2] Silverman, A.R. (1993). Outcomes of transracial adoption. The Future of Children, 3(1), 104-118.
[3] http://library.adoption.com/Interracial-Multicultural-Adoption/Transracial-Adoption/article/59/1.html
[4] Bashir, Samiya A., The best interest of the child, Colorlines Magazine: Race, Action, Culture, Winter, 2002 http://www.colorlines.com/
[5] African-American Leadership Group Condemns Racist Adoption Practices, March 1995, http://www.nationalcenter.org/TransRacialAdopt.html
[6] Hollinger, J.H. and The ABA Center on Children and the Law National Resource Center on Legal and Courts Issues. (1998). A guide to the Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994 as amended by the Interethnic Provisions of 1996. Washington, DC: American Bar Association.
[7] Interracial Adoption, http://www.adopting.org/inter.html
[8] Taylor, Robert and Thornton, Michael, Child Welfare and Transracial Adoption, Journal of Black Psychology, May 1996, v22 n2, pp.282-291.
[9] Sharma, A.R., McGue, M.K. and Benson, P.L. (1996). The emotional and behavioral adjustment of United States adopted adolescents: part 1. An overview. Children & Youth Services Review, 18, 83-100.
Original Artwork, "Family" RRB
posted by Robert @ 3:33 PM
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