Accounting For Race

[Kay]

There is a WaPo article today about a study released on a 1994 adoption law that was designed to increase adoption of black children. The problem is that the law didn't really work; adoption of black children increased, but only marginally. The law forbids discussing race during the adoption process, and social parents can't specifically address the issues of white parents raising a black child.

The law had not significantly changed the situation, the new report found. In 2006, black children represented 15 percent of the nation's children yet made up 32 percent of the half a million in foster care. Black children still waited longer for adoption than white children, and the adoption rate for black children barely rose from 17 percent of those awaiting adoption in 1996 to 20 percent in 2003.

It seems to me that the main problem with the law is that it's the same kind of erroneous thinking that's been applied to affirmative action for years. The thinking seems to be that people don't want to take race into account so in the end it is non-white people that end up losing out.

Comments

The first HHS decision enforcing this policy was from 2003--the change that should have taken place in 1994 has only taken place over the last five years, and there has in fact been a marginal improvement. The policy has the effect of expanding the pool of parents for whom adoption of a black child is an option. Instaed of criticizing it based on some vague analogy to affirmative action and critical race theory; in practice, once implemented, the policy will almost certainly increase the number of black children put into good homes.

Posted by NsinNY | May 27, 2008 6:26 PM

The first HHS decision enforcing this policy was from 2003--the change that should have taken place in 1994 has only taken place over the last five years, and there has in fact been a marginal improvement. The policy has the effect of expanding the pool of parents for whom adoption of a black child is an option. Instead of criticizing it based on some vague analogy to affirmative action and critical race theory, you should look at what the law actually says--only that race will not be a consideration on the part of the agency once a family chooses to adopt a child. In practice, once implemented, the policy will almost certainly increase the number of black children put into good homes.

Posted by NSinNY | May 27, 2008 6:28 PM

"... the same kind of erroneous thinking that's been applied to affirmative action for years."

Except that, you know, affirmative action, you know, WORKED.

Posted by sherifffruitfly | May 27, 2008 6:34 PM

And, matthew, is a racist society, what exactly IS the error in thinking that "people don't want to take race into account so in the end it is non-white people that end up losing out"?

Posted by Miande | May 27, 2008 6:37 PM

Miande, this is a post by Kay Steiger, not Matthew Yglesias.

What does the law do? It means that social workers can't tell white parents, "It's a bad decision to adopt a non-white child"? If so, I think that you could make the argument that it's a good law regardless of whether it significantly affects the adoption rate of black children. Do we really want government workers telling people that race should stand in the way of a good match between adoptive parents and children?

Posted by Michael B Sullivan | May 27, 2008 7:45 PM

Michael, the impression I get is that they can't tell adoptive parents that adopting a child of another race will present some unique challenges. The fact is, interracial adoption is not easy, and to send parents into that choice pretty well blind is IMO irresponsible and will lead to bad outcomes (as it seems to have).

Posted by Persia | May 27, 2008 7:59 PM

Isn't the real solution to work harder to promote adoption in the black community? If black children were readily being adopted by black parents wouldn't this discussion be mute? There are currently 60,000 kids in need of parents in my county alone (Los Angeles). Not children just in foster care (that number is much higher), but rather these are children the court has said are not going back to their birth families and need to be adopted. Do you know what happens to children who "graduate" foster care at 18? You think interracial adoption causes problems? Well it is nothing compared to a child who lives their life as a minor in the foster care system. Seems to me that as long as you have that backlog of children stuck in the system without families to call their own this discussion is rather silly. Same advice for people against gays adopting. Ditto for my right wing Christian friends telling people to give up their babies for adoption rather than think about abortion. You have a problem with whomever adopting children, then get your communities out there to take care of the problem and adopt those kids. End of problem. Otherwise you support those people willing to take these children as their own. You support those families in anyway that you can and keep the criticizing to those communities that have not step up to the challenge of adoption and finding a way to promote it.

Posted by mmhurst | May 27, 2008 8:41 PM

Seems to me like it would be helpful for all parents to know the looks and personality of the children they are considering adopting; parents and children bond more closely when they have similar appearance and personality - and others will percieve them as more of a family - that's true whether a white family has a white kid who looks like "the postman's child" or whether a black family has a hispanic looking kid.

Posted by Anna | May 27, 2008 8:42 PM

Hey, wait a second. Isn't this law more like the OPPOSITE of affirmative action? Conservative critics of affirmative action are always claiming that want government agencies, schools etc. to be "color blind," and the law supposedly forbids discussion or consideration of race--which is the definition of colorblindness, no? So how on earth can you use this law as a stick with which to beat (yet again) on affirmative action?

Posted by Karl Weber | May 27, 2008 8:44 PM

Hey, wait a second. Isn't this law more like the OPPOSITE of affirmative action? Conservative critics of affirmative action are always claiming they want government agencies, schools etc. to be "color blind," and the law supposedly forbids discussion or consideration of race--which is the definition of colorblindness, no? So how on earth can you use this law as a stick with which to beat (yet again) on affirmative action?

Posted by Karl Weber | May 27, 2008 8:44 PM

Hey, wait a second. Isn't this law more like the OPPOSITE of affirmative action? Conservative critics of affirmative action are always claiming they want government agencies, schools etc. to be "color blind," and the law supposedly forbids discussion or consideration of race--which is the definition of colorblindness, no? So how on earth can you use this law as a stick with which to beat (yet again) on affirmative action?

Posted by Karl Weber | May 27, 2008 8:45 PM

Persia, the impression you get is wrong, for two reasons. First, the law says nothing about what federally funded adoption agencies can tell white parents looking to adopt black kids--they can still offer training, explain the difficulties of biracial families, etc. What they cannot do is make their ultimate decision about placement based in any way on race.

Second, what is your evidence that this humble policy has led to bad outcomes? At the very worst, the article shows evidence that it has led to continuation of the status quo (not surprisingly, since the policy has only been enforced recently).

What the legislation is attempting to remedy is the fact that black kids sit in foster care on average much longer than white kids. I think it's beyond dispute that placement in an interracial, potentially confusing home is better than being shuffled from black foster house to black foster house.

Anna, of course parents will know the race of the kids they are adopting. The law doesn't say that you just pick a kid from door number one and are stuck with him/her. The law says that if you are looking to adopt a particular child, an agency cannot prevent you from doing so because you do not match the child's race.

This whole conversation is suffering from serious lack of knowledge.

Posted by NSinNY | May 27, 2008 8:53 PM

"This whole conversation is suffering from serious lack of knowledge."

I hate to say this, but this statement can apply to just about any discussion on a Matthew Yglesias thread.

Posted by Frequent MY Reader | May 27, 2008 9:33 PM

Black children still waited longer for adoption than white children, and the adoption rate for black children barely rose from 17 percent of those awaiting adoption in 1996 to 20 percent in 2003.

If black children awaiting adoption tend to be older than those of other races, or more likely to have physical/psychological problems, it would not be surprising that they wait longer to be adopted.

Posted by Peter | May 27, 2008 10:53 PM

The article didn't provide the historical context for the 1994 law, which wasn't implemented until 2003. You can find the back story in Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy's 2003 book "Interracial Intimacies."

Kennedy denounces the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW), which, beginning in the Black Pride era of the late 1960s, condemned as "cultural genocide" all laws that allowed whites to adopt black children. As a result of this NABSW edict, from 1970 to 1974 the number of black kids placed in white homes fell by 67 percent.

I have a certain sympathy with the NABSW. All else being equal, it's beneficial for adopted children to look more or less like their adoptive parents, so that they don't get pestered about their paternity by random people.

But after 1972, African-American nuclear families collapsed. The number of parentless older black children skyrocketed. With the decline in married black households, the chance for a black child to find a black two-parent adoptive home dropped dramatically. More and more black kids were dumped on the temporary foster care system.

As Kennedy notes:

"Political pressures have mounted to recruit more black adults to serve as foster (and adoptive) parents. … Local governments have been reaching out to marginal or even high-risk families to care for juvenile wards, whose number has burgeoned … Child-welfare bureaucracies have been hurting the very youngsters they are attempting to help, by placing them in foster homes that are little better and sometimes worse than their homes of origin."

You can read about the results of these wonderful policies in your major urban newspapers - as they compete to win Pulitzer Prizes with heartbreaking investigative series on the local foster care disasters.

This preference among black social workers for temporary foster care over adoption sounds bizarre. Kennedy blames it on paranoid racial theories among educated blacks.

But let's be honest. The number of whites willing to adopt older black children isn't big enough to make a huge dent in the problem.

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/randall_kennedy.htm

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 28, 2008 1:55 AM

Second, what is your evidence that this humble policy has led to bad outcomes? At the very worst, the article shows evidence that it has led to continuation of the status quo (not surprisingly, since the policy has only been enforced recently).

My apologies-- that was badly worded. I meant that the policy didn't have the desired effect, which IMO is a bad outcome.

Posted by Persia | May 28, 2008 9:05 AM

To the degree that the law was intended to limit the ability of social workers to thwart transracial adoption, the law was clearly well-intended and probably a good thing. We can't make informed judgments about the impact of the law without knowing more about the number of black children awaiting adoption (if it's risen, then higher placement might be a big success), the supply of people seeking to adopt children (especially transnationally or transracially), and the timing of enforcement. It's not clear that a 3% change in so few years is a failure.

Look, for a variety of reasons there is a large population of black kids in need of adoption. This has been the case for many years, so resorting to the old focus on intraracial adoption emphasis/approach is unlikely to solve this problem. Whatever the challenges of kids adopted transracially (and I'm sure they are substantial), they surely can not be as problematic as the challenges of growing up in foster care, group homes, etc. I agree with Kennedy; those who view adoption through the lens of racial pride and ideology are doing these kids a huge disservice. As a black man, it pains me to see kids who want a loving family and home denied because of others' overemphasis on race in evaluating the best interests of children.

Are there enough whites willing to adopt black children to address this? I think that's to be determined. However, purveying the message that it's too hard and that the children suffer some long-term identity issues (as if all adoptees don't have identity issues) certainly discourages it. In general, we make adoption hard in this country, perhaps explaining the frequency of cross-racial adoption, including the adoption of Asians (which is also wrapped up in China's family policy).

The affirmative action comment in the initial post was inapposite at best.

Posted by HW | May 28, 2008 10:27 AM

Transracial adoption = bad.

Homosexual adoption = good.

I am figuring out liberal calculus

Posted by danceswithgoats | May 28, 2008 11:46 AM

I bet when Steve Sailer sees young black children, he starts screaming like a little girl and throwing a hissy fit like the monsters in "Monsters, Inc."

"OH NOES TEH FUTUR AND ITS DARK!"

Posted by Reality Man | May 28, 2008 12:13 PM

People seem awfully comfortable with suggesting that interracial adoption is problematic or a second-best scenario. I do understand that, practically, it may be hard on the kids or parents to not look like each other, and that they may draw chaff from racist people.

On the other hand, interracial couples certainly draw similar chaff from the racists, and to a certain degree will have similar problems with not looking like their family. I presume that nobody here would feel okay discouraging interracial couples? It's not a precise parallel, but it seems to me that we should be the kind of people working to minimize the harm that people cause interracial families, not minimizing the number of interracial families because they might get hurt some day.

(Incidentally, I know a fair number of people who are non-white, adopted by white parents, and they by and large strike me as well-adjusted, happy, and considering themselves lucky to have been adopted into loving homes.)

Posted by Michael B Sullivan | May 28, 2008 2:27 PM

I wonder if social workers oppose interracial adoptions because it would take kids out of the foster care system and there would be less work for them. Self interest?

Posted by h | May 28, 2008 3:39 PM

h: I doubt it. It's a government job, the payout scheme is almost certainly very traditional (show up, work, get paid, raises likely mostly seniority-based), and I don't think you ever hear about layoffs of social workers. I suspect that if they had 75% less work, they'd just have 75% less work, with no reduction in compensation. In contrast, if they had 125% more work, they'd just have 125% more work, with no increase in compensation.

So their economic incentive would be to minimize the work they do, not maximize it.

Posted by Michael B Sullivan | May 28, 2008 3:51 PM