We had a great Christmas in our house. I got an unexpected Christmas gift from someone I don't even know, David Nicholson. His article in the Washington Post on Christmas Eve was wonderful. I consider it a gift anytime someone brings transracial, domestic adoption to the public eye in a positive way. I hope you enjoy.
Whenever I see a white couple with an Asian or Hispanic
child, I can't help wondering whether adoption -- like the personal ads -- is
one of the last areas of American life where naked expressions of racial
preference are acceptable.
I know that sentiment seems ungenerous. Most of the
children I see would have grown up in dire circumstances if they hadn't been
adopted, and many will find me mean-spirited for gainsaying any child a chance
at a happy and successful life. All the same, I can't understand why so many
white American couples go overseas to adopt, ignoring the plight of black
children in the United States, such as the hundreds in the District of
Columbia, Maryland and Virginia awaiting adoption.
One person at a state agency I talked to said one
word -- "Madonna" -- when I asked why more people don't adopt black
children in the United States.
The well-publicized examples of Madonna and
Angelina Jolie to the contrary, however, fewer children are adopted from
African countries than, say, from China or Russia. Of the 27,000 children
Americans adopted from overseas in fiscal 2005, only 441 came from Ethiopia,
the African country with the largest number of international adoptions. Nearly
8,000 came from Russia and more than 4,500 from China, according to the
National Council for Adoption.
I know, of course, that it can be difficult to
adopt through local agencies. My wife and I had been licensed foster parents
for nearly four years, but we still had to start at the beginning when we
applied to adopt through the District's Child and Family Services agency. It's
been a year. We're still waiting.
Then, too, many couples want newborns or infants,
the children most in demand. Older children are often part of sibling groups
that can't be broken up, or they have physical or emotional problems that can
try the most committed parents.
And even if prospective parents can deal with these
issues, birth parents can decide at the last minute not to terminate their
parental rights, meaning adoptive parents can't be certain they'll get the
child they want to include in their families.
Still, I can't help thinking there's something else
going on when whites go overseas, and I suspect that something is race. Why
else would the Latin American doctor displaying a newborn in the video that a
friend described to me assure the prospective American parents that the child
was "very white"?
As with most matters concerning race, it's hard to
get people to talk about these things. But when I've discussed transracial
adoption with white acquaintances, their explanations reveal the persistence of
the racial chasm.
One woman who adopted a Chinese infant told me she
and her husband had "thought about adopting a black boy, but we weren't
sure if we could deal with it when he became a teenager."
Then there was the woman who told me how much she
admired my wife and me for taking in my 14-year-old godson. As for herself, she
said, "I'd rather pay later for the criminal justice and social work
systems than pay personally now."
I didn't know how to respond. What can you say to
people who think the truculent misbehavior of rap "heroes" such as 50
Cent or Snoop Dogg is part of a child's genetic inheritance, like the shape of
his nose or his skin color?
Another acquaintance said in an e-mail conversation
that he didn't think it "necessarily racist for a pair of white adoptive
parents to say to themselves, 'It's hard enough just raising a kid, I don't
feel prepared to take on at the same time, in my own kitchen, American original
sin and the tangled issue of racial identity.' . . . I don't think you can
expect most, or even many, to show that level of personal commitment."
I understand what he meant. It is hard, of course,
raising any child. And black children might pose a special problem for white
families, especially with attitudes from quarters such as the National
Association of Black Social Workers, which, despite federal law barring
consideration of race in adoption, still thinks black adoptees should go only
to black families.
All the same, I can't help wondering how much
racism -- in the form of an inability to see blacks as human in the same way
they see themselves -- is at the heart of white couples' decision to adopt
overseas.
It may not be the dictionary definition of racism,
but it's one more piece of evidence of how, years after the civil rights
movement, blacks and whites have failed to engage on that deeply human level
that would allow more whites to say, "Yes, I'll take this child into my
kitchen. And my heart."
David Nicholson is a Washington writer. His
e-mail address isdnicholson6@excite.com.
