The Adoption History Project ( http://www.uoregon.edu/~adoption/index.html ) is full of some really interesting articles.
One of the articles is about Transracial Adoptions ( http://www.uoregon.edu/~adoption/top...aladoption.htm ). A section of the article was particularly interesting to me and I wonder how others - particularly people who have adopted transnationally and/or transracially might respond to it. Here is the section (I bolded some sections):
One of the articles is about Transracial Adoptions ( http://www.uoregon.edu/~adoption/top...aladoption.htm ). A section of the article was particularly interesting to me and I wonder how others - particularly people who have adopted transnationally and/or transracially might respond to it. Here is the section (I bolded some sections):
Quote:
| The debate about transracial adoption changed course in 1972, when the National Association of Black Social Workers issued a statement that took “a vehement stand against the placements of black children in white homes for any reason,” calling transracial adoption “unnatural,” “artificial,” “unnecessary,” and proof that African-Americans continued to be assigned to “chattel status.” The organization was so committed to the position that black children’s healthy development depended on having black parents that its President, Cenie J. Williams, argued that temporary foster and even institutional placements were preferable to adoption by white families. This opposition slowed black-white adoptions to a trickle. In 1973, the Child Welfare League of America adoption standards, which had been revised in 1968 to make them slightly friendlier to transracial adoption, were rewritten to clarify that same-race placements were always better. The child welfare establishment never supported transracial adoptions. A number of new agencies, staffed almost entirely by African Americans, such as Homes for Black Children in Detroit and Harlem-Dowling Children’s Service in New York, renewed the effort that had started in the late 1940s and 1950s to find black homes for black children. In spite of successful efforts to boost the numbers of black adoptive families, objections to whites adopting African-American children were never translated into law. Minority group rights to children were legally enforceable only in the case of Native American children, and only after the 1978 passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act. Since 1972, the numbers of black-white adoptions have declined, but this may have as much to do with stubborn private preferences and prejudices among white adopters as with organized opposition or public policies that created new barriers to transracial placements. International adoptions, after all, increased quite dramatically at just the moment when the transracial adoption of African-American children was becoming controversial. They continued to accelerate throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, when Americans adopted more than a quarter of a million foreign children. International placements have increased much more dramatically than domestic transracial adoptions. Why? There are many reasons, but a simple one stands out. Most children have come from Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. They did not represent the specific kind of difference that had bothered Americans and had tortured their history most. Children adopted from overseas were not black. |
That is appalling. I hope that organization and its ethically impaired leadership get exposed and prosecuted at some point. It's one thing to disagree with MEPA - but if you don't plan to follow federal adoption law, then a career with a public adoption agency is probably not the best life plan, KWIM? 
