Monday, December 01, 2008

Transracial adoption

Via my pal Howie, here's an imperfect but interesting essay in the Seattle Stranger about transracial adoption:

It would be easier for white people if race did not exist. Or if everyone could agree that race did not matter, that is. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "transracial" first appeared publicly in a 1971 Time magazine article. The article introduced transracial adoption, or adoption across racial boundaries—most often white parents adopting children of color—and reported a strange phenomenon. According to a study in Britain, some white parents "tended to 'deny their child's color, or to say he was growing lighter, or that other people thought he was suntanned and did not recognize him as colored. Sometimes the reality was fully accepted [by the parents] only after the very light child had grown noticeably darker after being exposed to bright sunlight on holiday.'"

It's such an outrageous finding that it sounds like a joke. Stephen Colbert's dimwitted white-guy alter ego has a joke like this, when he says on The Colbert Report, always in the most ridiculous of situations: "As you know, I don't see color." The joke is funny because in so many ways it's true. Plenty of white people don't see color. We refuse to look at it, prefer not to see too much difference, because difference almost always makes us feel bad by comparison.

Transracial adoption is awkward to discuss at first, because although it is designed to chart a radically integrated future, on the surface its structure repeats the segregated past. Just look at the basic structure of a family and apply race to the equation. The most crude way to put it: Whites are in charge, children of color are subordinate, and adults of color are out of the picture. And that's not even talking about class.

And yet there are more of these families now than ever. The exact number of transracial adoptees in this country is unknown, but the practice, which began in earnest in the 1970s, has been on the rise for at least 10 years. Twenty-six percent of black children adopted from foster care in 2004—about 4,200 kids—were adopted transracially, almost all by white parents, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect at Cornell University and the Department of Health and Human Services. That figure is up from 14 percent in 1998 and, according to adoption experts, it has continued to climb. The 2000 census, the first to collect information on adoptions, counted just over 16,000 white households with adopted black children. In the last 15 years, Americans have adopted more than 200,000 children from overseas, but that trend is cooling off, partly because international adoptions are so expensive.

3 comments:

Dawn said...

After Madison came home, there were some people in our life (fortunately not people we see often) who tried to deny her color, saying that because she is biracial she surely wouldn't be *that* black. (Brown-skinned babies are lighter when they are first born and get darker as they get older.) But when white people say they don't see color, what they mean is they like to pretend everyone is white.

Anonymous said...

"It would be easier for white people if race did not exist."

Was that supposed to b a joke? Is racism really toughest on white people?

Next, I'd like to point out that you have failed to distinguish international from domestic adoption. The fact is that there are half a million children in US foster care - more than 100,000 of whom COULD be adopted while adopters flock to South America, eastern Europe Asia and Africa...leaving the US foster kids right where they are.

All adoptions not under the auspices of the state - private and religious - are in the business of filling a demand. They represent a multi-billion dollar industry that is rampant with corruption and exploitation and are very, very different from adopting a child through social services.

Even the most reputable US agency is often dealing with an unscrupulous foreign agency who may or may not know the origins of children.

I highly recommend you read the following:

1. Child Trafficking by David Smolin works.bepress.com/david_smolin/

2. Romania for Export Only
romania-forexportonly.blogspot.com/

3. The Lie We Love by E.J.Graff
http://tinyurl.com/6p2sbb

4. And finally, read what those adopted internationally and or interracially feel as adults:

http://www.transracialabductees.org/index.html

and: http://tinyurl.com/5qdjqe

Jeremy Adam Smith said...

"Was that supposed to b a joke?"

I don't know if this is clear, Mirah, but that quote is from a pretty long essay, to which I linked; as I said, I think the piece is interesting but imperfect on a number of levels. You should go check out the source material and leave this comment there, if possible.