It looks like a happy ending this week for the battle Scott and Lou Ann Mullen have been fighting in Texas and in Washington to adopt two black foster children they take care of.
And maybe, with the help of some fine print in the welfare reform bill that the U.S. House passed, the Mullen decision will help mark the end of a misguided, racist, social policy that has cost tens of thousands of minority children their best chance for a permanent home and parents to call their own.
At issue is interracial adoption and whether people will be allowed to adopt children who are not of the same race. The question haunts the new movie, “Losing Isaiah,” and has now become a small but significant part of the national debate about welfare reform.
Scott Mullen is white. Lou Ann Mullen is a Native American. Joseph, 6, and Matthew, 2, are black. The boys have lived with the Mullens for most of their lives. Matthew was born addicted to crack. Lou Ann, who took over his care when he was 9 days old, helped him recover.
But when the Mullens tried to adopt the boys, they were told it was impossible because of their race. Black children should have black parents, social work doctrine and policies in most states insist. Social workers have dogmatically held to that practice even when not enough same-race adoptive couples can be found, even in cases where children are already living happily in foster care with parents of a different race who want to adopt them.
Interracial adoption seemed like an idea whose time had come in the 1960s. It was racial integration at the most loving, basic level-in the family itself. It was an everyday, lifelong, irrevocable commitment to love across racial lines, to live racial and color-blind equality, to show how little race matters in the myriad, daily details of child care.
Most of the parents who adopted youngsters of another race did make respectful efforts to acquaint them with their cultural heritage, to share interracial friendships, to help their children grow up comfortable with their own identity.
Generally, these parents succeeded. Studies comparing transracial adoption to same-race adoption show no evidence of harm.
But as blacks turned their energies to fighting for political and economic empowerment and to emphasizing black pride and culture, interracial adoption became an easy target.
White parents can’t possibly raise a black child well, social workers and others began saying. Only blacks can give a black youngster the sense of self he must have, help him develop his racial identity and teach him to deal with a racist, white society.
Blacks also began accusing white couples of trying to steal away black babies because so few white children are available for adoption.
These positions hardened rapidly when, in 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers denounced transracial adoption. Eventually, 43 states stopped it, either by legislation or by state policy or by practices that allow social workers to keep minority children in foster care indefinitely while they search for same-race parents.
But when this bitter policy clashes with racial realities, it has done great harm to the black children who are legally available for adoption but for whom no black parents can be found.
Estimates are imprecise. But of all the children waiting to be adopted, a disproportionate number are black-in part because drug addiction, poverty, unintended pregnancy, out-of-wedlock births and disadvantage impact blacks harder than whites.
Great efforts have been made by private and public child welfare agencies to recruit black adoptive parents, to relax restrictive requirements and to ease financial costs. The black community has responded well. But even so, permanent black homes can not be found for all the black children who need them.
Surely it makes loving, non-racist sense to allow white families to adopt these waiting youngsters when same-race parents can’t be found. It is especially cruel and racist to deny adoption to black foster kids who are already living in loving homes with caring foster parents, such as Joseph and Matthew.
An unusual alliance of liberal and conservative lawyers who have disagreed in the past over racial issues have been helping the Mullens in their fight for Joseph and Matthew and worked together on a lawsuit demanding that race matching in adoption be declared unconstitutional.
What should also help is the little-noticed provision in the welfare reform bill passed by the House. It says that any agency getting federal money can not discriminate-or delay-placing children in foster care or for adoption on the basis of race or nationality.
Including “delay” in the legislation is important. Too often, social workers keep black children waiting in limbo for years looking for black adoptive parents, rather than allowing white couples to adopt them. The Senate should make sure the provision stays in the welfare reform bill it passes.
If all goes well, Joseph and Matthew will now have permanent parents. They will officially join the Mullens’ interracial family, which already includes their biological daughter, 11; a bi-racial daughter, 8, adopted through a private agency; and two black foster children, 11 and 9 (the Mullens have cared for 22 foster kids).
And if all goes well, the Mullen case, the new legislation in Congress and a fresh look at how racist attitudes are hurting at-risk minority children should write a happy ending for tens of thousands of other kids in the future.
It should also be one more positive step on the slow, rocky toward becoming a truly integrated, non-racist society.
