III. More About the Children Available for Adoption, Page 3
Non-White Children
As I mentioned above, non-white babies have a little more difficult time in finding new families than do school-aged Black children. This creates a problem for social workers, who of course want to place them as soon as possible with Black families. Sometimes this can be very difficult if they try to match too closely: where would you place a Tibetan-Moroccan child? They may be forced to compromise, but these children are not available for adoption by white families except in exceptional circumstances, even if they are as much as three-quarters white. Consequently there is no point in a white couple entertaining any expectation of having an otherwise healthy Black or mixed-heritage baby placed with them. It would be considered suspicious for a white family to deliberately ask for a Black baby to be placed with them, unless they lived in a racially mixed area, there were Black people in their close extended family, or there were already Black children in the family (by adoption, previous relationships, etc.), and the prospective parents were actively involved in the Black community.
But sometimes wild coincidences do happen. You may get offered a Black or mixed-race child for the apparently slimmest of reasons.
We had already adopted a part-Aboriginal baby and an Afro-Caribbean toddler and were hoping for a third child. One day the telephone rang. The person on the other end of the line was someone we knew who was involved with a clearing house for hard-to-place children. She told us she knew of a baby waiting for adoption whose social worker had phoned her in despair of finding an appropriate family for her, because she was an unheard-of ethnic mix: Aboriginal-Afro-Caribbean. Were we interested? Eight weeks later she was ours. On the other hand, once we learned about a part-Native American baby waiting for adoption in England and thought: “He’s ours for the asking. Where are they going to find another Native American family for him?” We applied immediately. Where indeed! The baby went to a Native American soldier, married to an English woman, stationed much closer to where the baby was.
If you do adopt a child of a different ethnic background you will face special challenges, particularly if you are white and the child is not. You owe it to your child to learn as much as possible about his ethnic homeland and to try to help him develop pride in his ethnicity. It opens up a whole exciting new world for you of history, languages, art, literature, food, new friends, ways of living. It can be expensive, too, in terms of books and records, trips abroad, etc. And it doesn’t always bear fruit. However hard we try, our children are ultimately their own people and will make their own decisions about such matters.
My Tongan son, in spite of all my efforts, and as proud as he is of his background, insists on identifying with African-Americans, possibly in his case because the only other Tongans he meets here are rugby players on exchange and he has no interest in sports. It was some consolation to find out recently that even in Tonga many of the young people look to African-American role models.
There is a special association for adults who were trans-racially adopted, ATRAP (The Association for Transracially Adopted People) and there are ethnic awareness activities and counselling opportunities available through post-adoption services for Black children growing up in white families.
See also the section on trans-racial placement.
© Roger Ridley Fenton
