VIII. Who Can Adopt?, Page 2

Race and Ethnicity

Your ethnic background is an important part of your identity and of your prospective child’s identity. Social workers will scour the country to find adoptive parents who match a child ethnically and can also offer the parenting skills she needs. So if you are not your bog-standard white British you will be asked about your ethnic background, how it expresses itself and how you may have experienced racism. If you show an interest in adopting a child of another race or culture you will be asked how you would be able to provide the child with the necessary cultural component to her upbringing. Do not expect to be offered a child from another culture except under unusual circumstances.

Factors which could help broaden the cultural or ethnic base of children available to you are:

Extended periods living abroad,
Mixed marriages,
Other successful trans-cultural adoptions in your family,
Close friends from other cultures,
Living in a racially mixed neighbourhood,
Close professional involvement with people from other cultures.

But none of these on its own will be very effective.

If you are a racially mixed couple your base of children is automatically much wider, although you are most likely to be offered a Black or racially mixed child, simply because there are so many more of them available for adoption. If you are Black or Asian rejoice! This is one of the few areas of life in today’s Britain where your ethnic background is a definite advantage. Black and mixed-race couples and single people are being actively recruited by adoption agencies, except for local authorities in rural areas. That doesn’t mean that their standards in other respects will be lowered in their eagerness to place Black children; what it does mean is that you are more likely to get a favourable initial response and possibly fast-track assessment, and should not have to wait as long for a placement.

In the past Black families applying to adopt often found that they were being interviewed and assessed by white social workers who had no idea about Black cultures and Black families, and who unconsciously discriminated against them for that reason, if not out of simple racism. You should not find this to be a problem in an urban area now. There are Black social workers now (not enough, but more than before), and white social workers should have been thoroughly trained to deal intelligently and sympathetically with Black clients. If you want, you can ask for a Black social worker to deal with you.

Trans-racial Adoption

This is the big one. This is where the “loony left social worker” articles in the press focus. Mixed-marriage Mr and Mrs X being turned down because they aren’t “Black enough” or they’re “too middle class”. Thousands of Black children languishing in children’s homes because social workers won’t place them in white families. Well, to an extent that’s true, but it’s nowhere as big a problem as some people think, and things should get better.

The History of Trans-racial Adoption

Trans-racial adoption is probably almost as old as adoption itself, if you count capturing children from another tribe and integrating them into your own tribe, instead of eating or enslaving them. The Jewish prophet Moses, adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, is the earliest such trans-racial adoptee I have been able to identify.

In Europe and America trans-racial adoption has been a political football for several decades. Only in the past 20 years have Black families been really seriously considered and recruited as adoptive parents. This was partly due to an almost total lack of Black social workers, but more due to the general racist supposition that Black families weren’t capable, for financial or social reasons, of adopting. This is no longer so seriously the case, and especially in urban areas great efforts are made to recruit Black adoptive families. But while the situation is a little better, there is still a serious shortage of Black families for Black children.

At one time Black babies were considered unadoptable; at other times they have been placed with white families by “liberal” social workers as part of a kind of grand social engineering project, to help make the whole world café-au-lait-coloured. Many of these adoptions were successful, but it has to be said that many other Black children suffered long-term emotional abuse from racist adoptive families or grew up unable to cope with racism because they had no Black mentors to teach them. There was then a period from the early 80s to the mid 90s when trans-racial placements were very rare indeed.

In the mid-80s we were told by a white social worker in an outer London borough, herself a trans-racial adopter, that we were unfit to be parents to the Black child we already had, that we would certainly not be allowed to adopt another Black child, and because we already had one Black child, we would not be allowed to adopt a white child, either.

Once we were matched by a social worker in an inner London borough with a Black toddler, went to London to visit her in her foster home, and told that her adoption panel would approve the placement with no problems. In fact the panel refused to approve the placement, because of the trans-racial aspect. It didn’t help any to find out later that the adoption panel had recently changed its racial-political make-up, our social worker had known all along that they would probably reject the match, and she had deliberately lied to us to keep us from pulling out, just in case it did go through.

The Philosophical Debate

There is a definite divide between those who feel that Black children are better off in carefully selected and prepared white families than in children’s homes, and those who feel the opposite. There is also a section of the social work profession which sees trans-racial placements as a form of social genocide: stealing Black babies to fulfil the parenting fantasies of the childless white middle class while depriving the Black community of its most precious resource in the process. While I don’t believe that these were ever the motives of the social workers who made such placements, it is certainly the effect they had. The same arguments about trans-racial placements have been and are taking place in other countries: in Australia, with regard to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, in New Zealand with regard to Maaori and Pacific Islander children, and in the USA with regard to Native American, Hispanic and Black children.

Current Practice in Trans-racial Placement

By 1998 the political position had changed significantly. There is still a definite and justifiable preference for same-race and same-religion placement, but there is now a more realistic acceptance of the fact that this is still not always feasible, and that after reasonable efforts have been made to match children with ethnically and religiously similar families, it is right to look further afield, at other families. But the point where “reasonable efforts” end and straining at gnats begins is hard to define. Consequently it has to be said that a number of local authority social services departments are still dragging their feet in implementing the change in policy. In any case, Black babies will not be placed with white families until after a thorough (and lengthy) search has been made to find a Black family. Any white family adopting a Black child now will be very carefully selected and thoroughly prepared.

Same-Race Placement: Inverse Racism or Common Sense?

Childless white couples often complain about what they claim is inverse racism in denying them access to Black or mixed-race children. But there is no doubt that in general, whites are not the right parents for Black or Asian children. White people have no real understanding of what it is to grow up Black in this country and no way to teach their children how to cope with the racism they will inevitably encounter from an early age.

Unless they grow up in racially mixed communities with Black adults as mentors, trans-racial adoptees will not easily learn “how to be Black”. Lack of these coping skills makes them vulnerable to racism from the Black community as well, as many trans-racial adoptees, raised in loving white families in tolerant white small towns and villages, have found out when they move to mixed urban areas.

White parents who claim to be colour-blind are fooling only themselves and are a real danger to the emotional health of Black children. They not only ignore the different practical needs of Black children mentioned above, but in their attempt to ignore or deny the significance of a major and fundamental fact about their children they deny their children’s wholeness. In an ideal world social workers wouldn’t need to consider such factors as white parents’ ability to prepare Black children to cope with discrimination, but we’re a long, long way from that, and it is wrong to try to use children in this way as an instrument in achieving an ideal world.

Speaking as someone who has experienced discrimination because of a physical handicap, I know what it is like to be unable to communicate the depth of pain it causes the victim to people who haven’t gone through it themselves, however much they love you and would understand if they could. I also know that the discrimination I experienced is not the same as that experienced by my children because of their colour, and I am not much better at helping them cope than my parents were at helping me.

However much we love our children and they love us, at the back of my mind I know that in some important ways we are not the best parents for them, even though at the time they needed new families we were thought to be the best available alternatives by experienced social workers. And I also know that two of our children, born to single white mothers, would probably have grown up in very similar circumstances to ours, with mothers who would have been little better at helping them deal with discrimination than we are.

For more about trans-racial placement, see the section on non-white children.

Previous Page Next Page