Angelina Jolie did it. As did
Steven Spielberg. So did Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman when they were married.
Celebrity aside, what the above individuals have in common is that they are white and adopted black children. Though images of
Jolie and her multi-cultural brood are common, statistically, the rate of children being adopted outside of their race is small (only one percent of white women adopt black children.)
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, tens of thousands of nonwhite children are waiting for adoptive families, and many have remained in foster care for at least two years. Of the 525,000 children in foster care, 45 percent are African American.
These mostly black or biracial children are considered "special needs" by adoption professionals -- meaning the children are hard to place. The designation has nothing to do with their mental or physical health or their emotional temperament. The majority of children who need to be adopted are black; most are teens languishing in foster care until they age out at 18.
"The crisis in foster care and adoption today are teenagers needing families," says Gloria Hochman, Director of Communication for the
National Adoption Center. "Regardless of race, people think they're too hard to care for."
Since 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) has taken the position that black children are best served by being placed with black families. After that point, rates of "transracial" adoption declined (children whose race differs from their parents).
The Federal government views this as discriminatory, and in 1994, passed the Multiethnic Placement Act (MEPA), which prohibits any agency from delaying or denying the placement of a child on the basis of the race, color, or national origin of the adoptive parent or the child. In 1996, MEPA was amended, forbidding any agency from denying or delaying placement of a child for adoption solely on the basis of race or national origin.
"This has been a hotly charged issue since the '60s," says Hochman. "So agencies stepped back and said we should look at this and prompted a spate of studies almost all of which showed -- based on the measurements they were using -- that [kids transracially adopted] were doing just fine. On the other hand, some of these children said if I had my preference, I would have preferred to live with same race family."
The NABSW notes that of the two million Black children who are being reared by relatives (without the presence of either parent), 20 percent are in foster care, and the other 80 percent are in informal adoptive families.
Though the NABSW declined to speak with Black Voices directly, they did point us to their website. The group says it advocates kinship adoption or "the rearing of children by relatives," which it says has existed in the black community since slavery. Kinship foster care exists under the auspices of the child welfare system wherein the child is placed with family members, but is still overseen by the state.
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