Adoption, Transracial

Transracial adoption (also known as inter-racial adoption) refers to adoptions that occur across racial boundaries. At the level of biology, no adoption is transracial because race is a meaningless category; [Page 27]however, because race is socially significant, transra-cial adoption remains a controversial method of family formation.

In the United States, much of this controversy centers on the two streams that feed transracial adoption. Adoption itself is one such stream: Why are children placed for adoption? Adoption solves the problem of infertility for so many people, yet it is not just a solution but also an indicator of a larger social problem, for its need results from forces and policies that push women into giving birth to babies that they cannot rear. Consequently, countries with good social services, readily available and culturally accepted contraception means, safe and legal abortion, and support for single mothers have the lowest adoption rates. For example, in 2005, only 48 domestic nonstepchild adoptions took place in Norway.

Racism is the other stream: More women of color than white women are forced to relinquish their children. This is best illustrated by the over-representation of children of color in the U.S. foster care system: In 2005, almost 60 percent of U.S. children served in foster care were minorities. One driving force for this is poverty, specifically a lack of access to contraception, abortion, and the resources to rear children. However, it is not just that people of color are more likely to be poor. Many still face the remnants of institutionalized discrimination and lack the resources to overcome the resultant disadvantages, and thus a much greater percentage are found living in poverty than is the case among whites. In fact, U.S. Census data indicate that, whereas approximately 8 percent of whites are poor, more than 20 percent of both the black and Hispanic communities are similarly impoverished. Consequently, race and poverty work together to push and pull children of color out of their families of origin and to limit the number of racially similar families able to absorb them. As such, children of color are disproportionately available for adoption, and white middle-class families disproportionately have the wherewithal to adopt.

This phenomenon also operates at the global level, with the children of greatest poverty disproportionately found among the darker children of the world. Among families formed by adoption that crosses any color line, it is almost always children of darker skin going to lighter-skinned parents. For example, in 2006, children of color represented approximately 80 percent of the “orphans” relinquished by the top five sending nations (China, Guatemala, Russia, South Korea, and Ethiopia, respectively) and adopted by (mostly white) U.S. families. Yet, unlike the domestic adoption of black children by white families, in most cases of international adoption, the children are perhaps less valued but not racially disvalued. In other words, while international adoptees are not white, they usually are not black either. Oftentimes, it is this almost-whiteness that makes international adoption, particularly the adoption of children from Asian nations, so appealing for American would-be adopters.

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