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Somebody's CHILDREN

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................................................................ixIntroduction.......................................................................................1ONE African American Children and Adoption, 1950–1975........................................27TWO The Making of the Indian Child Welfare Act, 1922–1978....................................59THREE "Crack Babies," Race, and Adoption Reform, 1975–2000...................................94FOUR From Refugees to Madonnas of the Cold War.....................................................129FIVE Uncivil Wars..................................................................................160SIX Latin American Family Values...................................................................197SEVEN Gay and Lesbian Adoption in the United States................................................241EPILOGUE U.S. Immigrants: The Next Fight over Race, Adoption, and Foster Care?.....................269Notes..............................................................................................285Bibliography.......................................................................................319Index..............................................................................................353

Chapter One

When we talk about "transracial" adoption, what we usually turn to is the controversy over "where black children belong," which followed on the National Association of Black Social Workers' (NABSW) statement of 1972. For example, in his book Interracial Intimacies, published in 2003, Randall Kennedy makes the NABSW statement the origin point and the site of continued resistance to placing black children with white families in order to set up a positive argument about the capacity of white parents to raise black children: "The late 1960s witnessed a small but significant upturn in the number of whites adopting blacks.... Then the NABSW announced its opposition and mobilized resistance. It got results, and almost immediately: in 1973 the number of black children adopted by whites declined, to 1,091 [from a high of 2,284]. In 1974 the total fell to 747." In the present, he writes, "although the NABSW statement condemning virtually all transracial adoptions has never been formally embraced by any jurisdiction in the post–Jim Crow United States, it has been and remains influential." As the reference to Jim Crow would suggest, Kennedy goes on to argue that racial separatism in how we think about families does not lead to racial justice and that white parents can make outstanding and loving parents for black children. As an aside, though, it bears noting that the numbers alone might cast doubt on the continuing power of the NABSW statement: in 2003, when Kennedy wrote this, more than 3,310 black children were adopted by white families—a higher number than before the NABSW statement. Similarly, Margaret Howard argued in an article published in 1984 that the NABSW in 1972 had "condemned transracial adoption in terms so militant that transracial adoption fell by 39 percent in a single year." These moves are characteristic of most scholarship on transracial adoption in the post–civil rights era: the NABSW was aggressively unreasonable and attacked well-meaning white parents as incapable of raising black children, and that move was detrimental to black children who were therefore denied loving homes with white families.

In contrast, Leora Neal, executive director of the NABSW chapter in New York City wrote in 1996 that

The resolution was not based on racial hatred or bigotry, nor was it an attack on White parents. The resolution was not based on any belief that White families could not love Black children, nor did we want African-American children to languish in foster care rather than be placed in White adoptive homes. Our resolution, and the position paper that followed, was directed at the child welfare system that has systematically separated Black children from their birth families. Child welfare workers have historically undertaken little effort to rehabilitate African-American parents, to work with extended families, or to reunite children in foster care with their families.

In a position paper in 1994 titled Preserving Families of African Ancestry, the NABSW suggested that the statement of 1972 had been widely misread, "Many thought that the organization's position focused exclusively on transracial adoption. Yet, this was one component of the position statement, which instead emphasized the importance of and barriers to preserving families of African ancestry." In these NABSW accounts, questions related to white families were effectively an afterthought, and references to Jim Crow are misplaced; the goal of the statement was to keep black families together.

Who is right? Should we understand the NABSW statement as primarily an attack on white parents' skills or an effort to keep black families together in the context of coercive separation of black children from their families dating back to slavery? The plainest reading of the statement is that it is a set of criticisms of white families. It reads, in part

The National Association of Black Social Workers has taken a vehement stand against the placement of black children in white homes for any reason.... In our society, the developmental needs of Black children are significantly different from those of white children. Black children [in Black families] are taught, from an early age, highly sophisticated coping techniques to deal with racist practices perpetrated by individuals and institutions.... Only a black family can transmit the emotional and sensitive subtleties of perception and reaction essential for a black child's survival in a racist society.... We fully recognize the phenomenon of transracial adoption as an expedient for white folk, not as an altruistic humane concern for black children. The supply of white children for adoption has all but vanished and adoption agencies, having always catered to middle class whites developed an answer to their desire for parenthood by motivating them to consider black children.

This is strong language, and white parents raising children of color could surely be forgiven for believing that they were being criticized in harsh terms.

Yet if that point seems obvious, this chapter lays out a counterargument. Social workers had good reason to believe that a statement like this one—and perhaps only a statement like this one—could keep black families together. It also reads: "We affirm the inviolable position of black children in black families where they belong." In 1972 black parents—single mothers, really—were losing their children in ways that were political. My contention here is that it was so self-evident to most observers that black or mixed-race children would be better off away from their unwed mothers and with white parents—for reasons of economic advantage, schools, housing, and the supposed "tangle of pathology" that the Moynihan Report and even President Johnson had identified as haunting the black family—that...