The National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) issued a statement against transracial adoption in 1972, excerpted below.
“Black children belong physically and psychologically and culturally in black families where they can receive the total sense of themselves and develop a sound projection of their future. Only a black family can transmit the emotional and sensitive subtleties of perceptions and reactions essential for a black child’s survival in a racist society. Human beings are products of their environment and develop their sense of values, attitudes, and self-concept within their own family structures. Black children in white homes are cut off from the healthy development of themselves as black people.”
The NABSW has since publicly retreated from such adamant opposition, but many people still argue that same-race placements should be the goal.
Leslie Doty Hollingsworth, writing in 1998, and published in the Opposing Viewpoints Series: Adoption, (see my review here) doesn’t exactly argue against transracial adoption, but she seems to come close. Rather she insists transracial adoption is unnecessary because the numbers of children of color in the child welfare system can be dealt with in other ways.
One way of improving the statistics, Hollingsworth says, is to stop counting children in kinship placements (formal placements of children in the homes of relatives such as grandparents who are trained as foster parents and receive foster care subsidies to assist them in caring for the children) the same as children in non-relative foster care. Hollingsworth argues that kinship placements are often permanent placements and counting them exaggerates the numbers of children of color reported to be in out-of-home care.
Other steps Hollingsworth says would encourage same-race adoptive placements are:
1. Recruiting foster families of color. The trend to foster-adoption has resulted in more transracial adoptions by white foster parents.
2. Removing barriers to adoption by families of color. Hollingsworth believes there are enough adoptive families of color for at least all healthy infants of color needing adoption, but organizational barriers which discourage families of color are: lack of people of color in managerial positions, negative perceptions of adoption agencies and of the “business” of adoption by families of color; fees; inflexible standards, lack of recruitment activity, institutional racism.
Hollingsworth states that 17 agencies specializing in same-race placements placed 94 percent of their African-American children and 66 percent of their Hispanic children in same-race placements, as opposed to non-specializing agency averages of 51 percent of African-American children and 30 percent of Hispanic children in same-race placements.
3. Addressing the problems of poverty which disproportionately affects families of color, and ensuring that family preservation services are equally available to families of color.
Please see these related blogs:
African American Support of Transracial Adoption
Group Apologies and Ethnic Shame Part Two: Can We Understand Each Other?
Choosing Whether and How to Adopt Transracially–Our Decision”