Overcoming adoption’s racial barriers
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON and RON NIXON
The New York Times
August 17, 2006
When Martina Brockway and Mike
Timble, a white couple in Chicago, decided to adopt a child, Ms.
Brockway went to an adoption agency presentation at a black church to
make it clear they wanted an African-American baby.
Their biological daughter, Rumeur, 3, is accumulating black dolls in
preparation for her new brother or sister. Black-themed children’s
books like “Please, Baby, Please” by the filmmaker Spike Lee and his
wife, Tonya Lewis Lee, share shelf space with Elmo and Dr. Seuss.
But the couple’s decision provoked some uneasy responses. One of Mr.
Timble’s white friends asked, “Aren’t there any white kids available?”
Ms. Brockway’s black friends were supportive. “But,” she said, “I also
sensed that there was maybe something they weren’t saying.”
Mr. Timble cut in. “Like maybe they were thinking, ‘What do these
people think they are doing?’ ”
Ms. Brockway and Mr. Timble are among a growing number of white couples
pushing past longtime cultural resistance to adopt black children. In
2004, 26 percent of black children adopted from foster care, about
4,200, were adopted transracially, nearly all by whites. That is up
from roughly 14 percent, or 2,200, in 1998, according to a New York
Times analysis of data from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse
and Neglect at Cornell University and from the Department of Health and
Human Services.
“It is a significant increase,” said Rita Simon, a sociologist at
American University, who has written several books on transracial
adoption. “It is getting easier, bureaucratically and socially. With so
many people going overseas, people are also increasingly saying, Wait a
minute, there are children here who need to be adopted, too.”
The 2000 census — the first in which information on adoptions was
collected — showed that just over 16,000 white households included
adopted black children. Adoption experts say there has been a notable
increase since 2000.
The reasons for the increase are varied. The Multiethnic Placement Act
and its amendments prohibited federally financed agencies from denying
adoption based on race. The foster care system has sharply changed in
recent years and now includes financial incentives for finding more
adoptive families.
The combination of legal changes and greater embracing of multicultural
families — Americans have adopted more than 200,000 children from
overseas in the past 15 years — have lessened resistance from both
blacks and whites. The long wait for white children and the high costs
of international adoptions — typically $15,000 to $35,000 — also play a
role.
And agencies are offering courses to help adoptive parents enter the
process with more cultural openness and awareness.
Ms. Brockway and Mr. Timble decided to adopt after a physically and
emotionally wrenching first pregnancy — their daughter was delivered at
25 weeks. They did not want to deal with the long wait for a white
infant, and adopting from overseas did not appeal to them.
“Some people see Asian or other ethnicities as closer to white, more
acceptable, easier,” said Ms. Brockway, a teacher. “That’s just not us.
We feel like we have the open arms and minds to be a good match to an
African-American child.”
In practice, however, decisions about adoption placements are still
influenced by racial considerations, many families say. Since 1994,
white prospective parents have filed, and largely won, more than two
dozen discrimination lawsuits, according to state and federal court
records. Many more disputes have been settled in arbitration.
The loaded jumble of viewpoints and anxieties related to transracial
adoptions of black children are complex and often contradictory.
Rhetoric around the issue has softened considerably since the National
Association of Black Social Workers, in 1972, likened whites adopting
black children to “cultural genocide.” The group removed the genocide
reference from its policy statement in 1994, but it still recommends
same-race placements. And organizations like the Child Welfare League
have argued in recent years that while race need not be the primary
consideration in placements, it should not be disregarded.
Many blacks still worry that white families cannot equip black children
to navigate the country’s complicated racial landscape.
“Adoption, like everything else in this country, gets filtered through
the lens of race,” said Joseph Crumbley, a black social worker in
Philadelphia and a consultant on transracial adoptions. “For blacks, it
is about how comfortable can whites be in dealing with the issue of
race when their race is in conflict with the race of the child.”
At the same time, some blacks view international adoptions by whites as
a slight to black children in need of permanent and stable homes. “I
can’t help but wonder why Angelina and Brad can’t adopt an
African-American baby here with so many in need,” said Ishia Granger,
36, a black friend of Ms. Brockway.
More than 45,000 black children were waiting to be adopted from foster
care in 2004. There are no reliable national figures for private
adoptions.
Advocates of black adoption criticize adoption agencies as not doing
enough to recruit black families. But one strategy agencies use, in
part, to recruit black families — reducing fees for African-American
adoptions — seems to some critics like a literal devaluing of black
children. And while current adoption laws impose penalties on federally
financed agencies that discriminate, there are no penalties for failure
to identify black adoptive families.
Both black and white families, at times, feel discriminated against.
Charlene White, a black adoptive mother in Richmond, Va., said that
when she and her husband, Malachi, began the process in 1997, a
counselor asked them about drug and criminal records — questions a
white couple they knew who were also adopting were not asked.
“It was definitely because we were black,” Ms. White said.
A white judge initially denied Nick and Emily Mebruer’s petition to
adopt a black child, ruling that the Mebruers, a white couple who live
in rural Lebanon, Mo., were “uniquely unqualified” to parent a black
child because of their limited interaction with black people and
culture. The ruling was overturned, and their daughter, Maggie, is now
3.
“We felt like it was an indictment of us and our entire community,”
said Mrs. Mebruer, a family doctor, as Maggie played with a black doll
in the center of the living room and danced to the Australian
children’s group the Wiggles. “It was assuming that we didn’t have the
desire or the capacity to learn.”
The Mebruers did not explicitly set out to adopt a black child. But
when the Kansas City office of Catholic Charities called one spring
afternoon to say that an infant was available and that they needed the
couple’s decision within hours, the race of the child, Mr. Mebruer
said, was secondary.
White families adopting black children are increasingly learning that
the “love is enough” approach to adoption that families bring to the
process is often met with skepticism.
Psychologists, researchers and adoptees themselves say many children
adopted transracially in past decades suffered from philosophies
focused on assimilation, with little or no acknowledgment of racial and
cultural conflict.
Robert O’Connor, 39, who was raised by a white family in Rush City,
Minn., recalled his struggles growing up in a small town with few other
blacks. Throughout his youth, he said, he felt awkward around other
blacks. He did not understand black trends in fashion or music or
little things like playing the dozens, the oral tradition of dueling
insults.
“I always felt like I had this ‘A’ on my forehead, this adoptee, that
people could see from a far distance that I was different,” said Mr.
O’Connor, who now researches transracial adoptions as assistant
professor of social work at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul.
Today, some agencies are working to avoid mistakes of the past. Ms.
Brockway and Mr. Timble are adopting through the Cradle, a Chicago
agency that gives transracial adoptive parents extensive counseling as
well as a course on “conspicuous families.”
One exercise meant to assess parents’ comfort level in confronting
racial issues lists a roster of stereotypes including, “lazy,”
“passive” and “athletic,” and asks parents to assign them to the race
or ethnic group to which they are often applied.
Judy Stigger, a counselor at the Cradle and herself a white adoptive
mother of two black children, now adults, makes the issues tangible to
prospective parents by relating personal stories. She tells about the
time when her son, then a teenager, reached into her purse at a
McDonald’s and a clerk called security; and the time when her daughter
began crying while looking through congratulatory cards sent by family
and friends when they took her home.
“Was I supposed to have been white?” her daughter, then in the third
grade, asked. Ms. Stigger had never noticed that the children on all of
the cards were white.
“It’s about getting people to realize that they should not be thinking
about being, as one 8-year-old put it to me, ‘a white family with a
weird child,’ but a multiracial family,” Ms. Stigger said. “The way
most white people use the term ‘colorblind’ is just silly. We want to
create color aware families, not colorblind families.”
Ms. Brockway worked for years in predominantly black schools and now
tutors children in foster care. Mr. Timble, who owns a promotional
printing business, has a cousin who has adopted four black children.
They live in an ethnically diverse section of northwest Chicago.
But after working through the adoption process, Ms. Brockway said, they
are considering moving to a neighborhood with more black professionals
and finding a more diverse church.
For some adopting families, public reaction defies assumptions.
Katherine and Ryan Liebl were dining recently in the Oak Park
neighborhood of Chicago, where they live, when a black family asked
them where they had adopted their son, Matthew, now 8 months old.
They responded that he was from Chicago and steeled for disapproval.
Instead, they said, the family cheered: “Yeah, domestic baby. Good for
you!”
The Liebls, who adopted through the Cradle, were chosen by black birth
parents from profiles submitted by black and white adoptive families.
The same birth parents had previously chosen a black couple, Dana and
Drayden Hilliard, to adopt two older children. So the Liebls’ son
Matthew has two biological siblings being raised by a black family in a
nearby suburb.
The two families have become friends and are raising the children as
siblings, getting them together about once a month.
The Hilliards said they were surprised that the birth mother chose a
white family. “But wherever a child can find love, black, white or
purple, that is all right with me,” said Ms. Hilliard, 39, a program
analyst. “I do feel that if parents adopt transracially they owe it to
their child to keep them connected with their heritage. But we are
happy to be a resource for that.”
The two families do not know for sure what attracted the birth mother
to them, but they said worldliness seemed to have trumped race. The
birth mother commented to each that their expressed love for travel
would offer her children a chance to explore the world that she never
had.
“We feel like we struck gold,” said Mr. Liebl, 31, a lawyer. “Matthew
has these siblings that he will know and this level of contact between
us that is authentic and not forced.”
In the personal letters that the Cradle requires adoptive parents to
submit to birth parents, those adopting transracially are asked to
include examples of how they would bring diversity to a child’s life.
Ms. Brockway said it had been a difficult exercise. She wants to
include pictures with black friends, but not too many. She wants to
write about her black students, Mike’s black relatives and co-workers,
their activities in black communities — but not too much.
“I don’t want to appear over the top, trying too hard, like we think
we’re cool because we have black friends.” she said. “And who is to say
what any birth mother will think is important or how any one views or
defines diversity and culture. These things are different for everyone.”
Sabrina I. Pacifici contributed additional reporting.