hardboiled

discount babies: the racial dynamics of adoption

It seems impossible to pick up a celebrity magazine without seeing pictures of your typical Angelina Jolies, Meg Ryans, or Madonnas touting their "ethnic" children around parks and playgrounds like some made-for-TV, "We Are the World," racial-harmony Christmas special. How picturesque these scenes are with the noble white woman graciously taking the impoverished and degraded child of the third world into her arms to be raised in Hollywood?which, with its culture of substance abuse, mental health problems and anorexia, is the perfect environment in which to raise a child.

Don't get me wrong; there are many well-meaning parents of transracially-adopted children out there. One could also point to the fact that adopted children of color (this writer included) have undoubtedly benefited from the privileges of growing up in the United States and the privileges that come from being raised by direct beneficiaries of whiteness. However, this does not mean that we cannot examine the ways in which these well-intentioned parents play into the often-discriminatory process of adoption. While traditional discourse has celebrated adoptees as symbols of interethnic harmony and multiculturalism, there is a significant lack of critical analysis on the topic of transracial adoption. It is necessary to examine how adoption, as a process, frequently plays out in prejudiced, racist ways.

First, let's talk history. The roots of transracial adoption ? Arnold Silverman, who has conducted extensive social analysis of the effects of transracial adoption, defines it as the "the joining of racially different parents and children together in adoptive families"? can be traced to the years following World War II. Orphaned children from war-torn countries were often adopted by white families in the United States. In particular, conflicts in Asia, namely the Korean War and Vietnam War, led to a boom in transracial adoptions. During this same time, increasing poverty and inequality in the United States left more and more children of color within the United States without families. Consequently, US-based adoption agencies began to put African American, Native American, and Latinos children with white families. However, in 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers, concerned with the increasing numbers of African American children being paired with white families, publicly condemned the practice of transracial adoption. They noted "psychological maladjustment, poor racial identity, the inability to cope with racism and discrimination, and cultural genocide" as likely outcomes of transracial adoption. Though they lacked studies to backup their claims, they sparked an intense scientific and moral debate about the potential negative consequences of adoption.

Admist concernts that racial matching adoption policies were leaving minority children without adoptive families, Congress passed the Multiethnic Placement Act (MEPA) in 1994. The act was designed to "prevent discrimination on the basis of race, color and/or national origin when making foster care and adoptive placements." Albeit vague, this bill supposedly ended discrimination in the adoption process by prohibiting racial matching preferences. And it appeared to have had a positive effect on transracial adoption. Since 1994 (and preceding it, to some extent) the number of transracial adoptees has soared. From 1997 to 1999 alone, the number of transracial children adopted annually increased by over 2,000. The numbers today stand even higher. So does this mean that racism in the adoption process is a thing of the past?

This couldn't be farther from the truth. Despite anti-discrimination legislation, there continues to be a form of de facto racism within the system. Many adoption agencies, including some well-established, licensed agencies, openly charge significantly higher fees for white infants than for children of color. Some agencies even go as far as to have separate fee structures for white, Asian, Latino, and African children. These fee structures are in fact economic reproductions of a racial hierarchy: white children are the most expensive, followed by Asians, who are seen as the "model minority" -- the next best thing to whites and statistically proven to do better on tests. In accordance with US racial hierarchies, this list is rounded off by Latinos, and lastly African Americans. Following this same trend, the qualifications for adoptive parents also slide downward in correlation with the fee schedules ("less qualified" referring to non-nuclear families, lower income parents, or gay couples). Illinois' largest infant-adoption agency, the Cradle, charges $9,200 to handle the placement of an African American infant but $25,000 for the adoption of a white baby. Another website, Adoption Access Incorporated, reminds potential parents that you can generally expect to pay less for a "Hispanic" child and less still for a "biracial (African American/Caucasian) child" and even less for a "full African American child."

Beth Hall, the executive director of Pact, An Adoption Alliance, an Oakland-based organization that works on minority-infant adoptions, says that even programs without explicit racial policies "have a casual tradition of discounting fees for [minority] babies." She estimates that half of all adoption agencies base their fees off of the race of the child.

For a moment let's table the hot debate that adoption is, in itself, morally or intrinsically problematic. Even when ignoring these factors, the adoption process is still systematically flawed and discriminatory?prices predicated on race recreate a system in which whiteness is valued over all other races. It is a system that promotes a hierarchical, racial spectrum with whites on top and blacks on the bottom. In this way, the adoption process functions as a microcosm for the larger pattern of marginalization and devaluation of peoples of color. It doesn't save minority communities; it devalues them. It doesn't break down racial barriers; it only reproduces these unequal differences. It recreates hierarchy and ultimately sends the message that the lives of children of color are worth less than the life of a white baby.

Many agencies attempt to justify the separate fee structures using supply and demand economics. There are simply more white couples wanting to adopt than minority couples, and generally white couples will want to adopt children that look like themselves. Furthermore, babies of color are "discounted" to encourage adoption of these less-desired babies and so that minority couples (more likely to be impoverished due to structural racism) can afford the expensive fees of adoption. Additionally, many point to the many government subsidies for adopting children of color as responsible for the reduced prices.

Nevertheless, these arguments all apply a form of supply and demand economics to human lives. Has capitalism bought out our sense of morality too? To adopt a child of a different race is a huge commitment and a life-altering decision. It is not, let me repeat, NOT an economic decision that should be made to save money. It is a long and difficult process that will include trials, misunderstandings, racial-tensions, and failures. Think of the impact that a financially-based misjudgment could have on minority-adopted communities. What if the only reason a child of color was adopted in the first place was because their parents couldn't afford a white child?

If the goal of such subsidies was really to expedite the adoption of minority babies we would instead see a system with fixed prices, based exclusively on the actual fees and expenses incurred by the lengthy bureaucratic process?not a system that places a lower price on the life of a minority child. Subsidies instead would be applied to those parents who fall below a certain income level in order to help them cover some of the adoption costs. In this way, subsidies are determined by the parents' ability to pay the adoption fees rather than the race of the baby. Such a system simultaneously addresses issues of systematic inequality in communities of color as well as eliminates the structure in which yellow, brown, and black bodies are devalued.

So remember this next time you pick up a People magazine: adoption is not just about saving the world one brown, black, or yellow baby at a time. While adoption can provide opportunities that would otherwise be impossible to minority children, it is also important to examine the negative aspects of it as well. The devaluation of a life, like some supermarket, "Blue Light Special" discount item, can end up harming the very communities that we seek to help.