Many adoption agencies have shied away from placing black children with white families since a group of black social workers condemned the practice 20 years ago. Now a vocal group is arguing that current policies are harmful and illegal.
“There is not a shred of research evidence to support that kids do better on racial identity if they are raised in a same-race home,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard University law professor and the adoptive mother of two Peruvian children. She has written extensively on the issue. “We are holding black children for years in foster care because we won’t place them for adoption with white families.”
Until the 1960s, transracial adoptions were discouraged by child-welfare workers, who tried to match children and families with similar racial and cultural backgrounds, said Bartholet, who has written extensively on the issue. But white families began to adopt black children in the wake of the civil rights movement.
But in 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers issued a policy statement that said black children should be placed in black foster and adoptive homes.
The group compared transracial adoption to “cultural genocide,” saying that these children would not develop a sense of black heritage and identity.
Since then, public and private adoption agencies have emphasized racial matching when placing children in homes, Bartholet said. Every state has written or unwritten policies that recommend racial matching in adoption, Bartholet said.
From 1980 to 1985, Illinois policy said every diligent effort should be made to place a child with parents of the same race, said Gary Morgan, of the Department of Children and Family Services.
The policy was dropped in 1985 after a lawsuit was filed by a family that charged the previous was discriminatory. Current policy is that placement should be made in the best interests of the child, he said.
Recently, transracial adoption advocates say, there has been an increase in the number of such adoptions.
Bill Pierce, president of the National Council for Adoption, estimates that almost 12,000 children were adopted by parents of a different race last year. “I think the numbers have doubled in the last 10 to 15 years, despite official opposition,” Pierce said.
In Illinois, the number of transracial adoptions of wards of the state have about doubled over the last five years, to 61 in 1992 from 32 in 1988. That marks an increase to 7 percent of the 835 adoptions from 4 percent of the 718 state adoptions, according to Gary Morgan, chief of adoption and guardianship services for the state.
Some believe the reason transracial adoptions are on the rise is the increase in the number of children who in foster care who may need adoptive homes, Bartholet said.
Nationally, the number of children in foster or institutional care rose to 429,000 from 280,000 in 1991, according to the American Public Welfare Association, which represents state and local human-services agencies.
In 1989, the latest year for which figures are available, 42 percent of the 20,000 children in care but available for adoption were black.
Many transracial adoptions occur when white foster parents want to adopt minority children already in their care. But some opponents of transracial adoption say the question of whether transracial adoption was a good thing would not arise if the children were kept out of those homes in the first place.
“If you had (black) children in black foster care, you wouldn’t have to go back and hassle white families (to give up black children),” said Zena F. Oglesby Jr., executive director and founder of the Institute for Black Parenting, a California non-profit group that has recruited black families for foster and adoptive care.
High-profile lawsuits in several states have challenged prohibitions of transracial adoptions as a violation of civil rights laws. A Texas couple sued the state child welfare agency for discrimination in 1991 when the agency would not allow them to adopt a black child who had lived with them in foster care for two years. The couple won their suit in state court; a federal suit is still pending.
Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) has introduced a bill that would allow same-race placement when possible but prohibit denying adoption across racial lines.
“The idea that an African-American child should be denied the opportunity to grow up in a home with loving parents because of the preconceived notions of a group of social workers to me is just repugnant,” Metzenbaum said in a telephone interview, adding that many black leaders and organizations support his position.
Oglesby said that the whole question of transracial adoption could be moot: “As far as I know, no one is saying if black families are available, don’t place children with black families. They’re saying there aren’t any. I’m saying balderdash. I cannot tell you how terribly insulting it is to have people say we don’t care about our kids.”
The NABSW agrees there are black families available, said Alice G. Thompson, co-chair of the organization’s task force on foster care and adoption. High adoption fees-from $3,000 to $10,000-and social workers who refuse or do not know how to recruit black families are responsible for the low numbers of black adoptive and foster families, she said.
The group maintains its opposition to transracial adoption, Thompson said, but has switched its focus to family preservation, which would help decrease the need for foster and adoptive care.
But some proponents of transracial adoption worry that heavier recruitment means lower standards.
“A social worker told me that his agency had two separate lists of (minority) foster homes, and some were marked `Use with caution,’ ” said Carol Coccia, president of the National Coalition to End Racism in America’s Child Care System.
Long-term studies of adoptive children found that black children placed in white homes have no problems with cultural identity or self-esteem. One of these, conducted by the Chicago Child Care Society, has followed several families for 20 years and found “no consistent pattern that suggested children placed in white families had variations from children in other groups,” said Ken Watson, assistant director of the agency.
