White Parents, Black Children: Transracial Adoption

"We had three children and we wanted one more. I was about to go off pills when I read an article about American Indian children and I thought, why not?" That, as Housewife Judy Meredith of Boston explains it, is how she and her husband--both white--came to adopt a 13-month-old Indian called Tommy and a two-week-old black baby named Jackie. The Merediths' decision is part of a growing phenomenon known in sociologist's jargon as transracial adoption. Last year 2,200 black babies were adopted by white U.S. families, compared with only 700 in 1968. Today there are more than 10,000 "T.R.A. families" in all 50 states and in the ten Canadian provinces.

Today's Child. The trend is due partly to changing racial attitudes, but even more to an acute shortage of white babies brought about by the pill, easier abortion laws, and an increasing number of unwed mothers who keep their offspring. Because of the shortage, adoption agencies have changed their tactics. Instead of catering to childless parents in search of "perfect" white infants, many now concentrate on the needs of hard-to-place youngsters who are beyond infancy, physically or emotionally handicapped, black--or even all three. One such is Cindy Skilton, a seven-year-old black girl who wore braces on her legs until last month. She is now the adoptive daughter of Dave and Audrey Skilton of Los Angeles. To get such children out of temporary foster homes and mind-withering institutions, some agencies even cooperate in efforts to adverttse them. Generally this is done by picturing particular children in columns such as "Today's Child," which appears in the Toronto Telegram and is syndicated in 130 Ontario newspapers, or on TV programs like the Ben Hunter Matinee in Los Angeles and its imitators across the country.

As another spur to adoption of "special-needs children," agencies have relaxed eligibility rules for prospective parents. A capacity to understand youngsters who are "different" has become more important than marital status, youth, education, income, race or religion. Instead of charging fees, private agencies--and public ones in seven states --sometimes offer subsidies to families. Despite such changes, average T.R.A. parents are still much like conventional adoptive parents: 98% are married; most are under 40; well over half are college educated; two-thirds earn at least $10,000 a year; and a majority go to church regularly. Psychologically, Los Angeles Psychoanalyst Judd Marmor told the National Conference on Social Welfare, T.R.A. families are likely to be self-confident, self-aware, and given to judging people as individuals.

Not that T.R.A, parents are without prejudice. Families in the West or Southwest, for example, have more readily adopted blacks than Indian or Mexican kids. Asian children are often welcomed in the South, though blacks are usually not. A study in Britain recently found that some T.R.A. parents tended "to deny their child's color, or to say he was growing lighter, or that other people thought he was suntanned and did not recognize him as colored. Sometimes the reality was fully accepted only after the very light child had grown noticeably darker after being exposed to bright sunlight on holiday."

Though parents may try to ignore a child's blackness, the child himself cannot. Establishing a sense of identity, hard for many adopted children, is even harder for the T.R.A. youngster. One black Montreal teenager, brought up by whites, refers to Negroes as "them" and to whites as "us." Similarly, Bill Kirk, who was adopted at age three by Ontario Sociologist H. David Kirk and is now 17, reports that "I think like a white man, and when I get out into the world, that is maybe going to hang me up a bit."

Common Fear. To deal with these problems, adoptive parents--most notably those in Montreal's Open Door Society, a pioneering organization in transracial adoption--sometimes sponsor seminars on black history or meet to discuss mutual difficulties They may encourage their children to get together regularly with black youngsters, to study their heritage and to remember their natural parents. For example, Kirk's 18-year-old daughter Debbie, a Puerto Rican, spent a month working at a day-care center in Puerto Rico. She explains: "I wanted to see the people that I was from--the culture, the language and society."

Besides the special problems of mixed adoptions, interracial families must face all the other dilemmas common to conventional adoption. How and when should they tell a child about his origins? How can a youngster learn to master what psychiatrists say is a common fear --that his natural parents abandoned him because there was something wrong with him? How should adoptive parents respond to a youngster's curiosity about his biological family?

Psychoanalyst J. Cotter Hirschberg of the Menninger Foundation favors telling kids the facts between ages four and seven, "when the strength of the family is at its greatest" for the child. He urges mothers to tell about adoption only when they feel comfortable and do not see it as a guilty secret. In addition, he advocates letting children express their feelings freely, especially "their anger at having been separated," and he believes they should be helped to understand that their natural parents gave them up because they could not look after them. As for the common longing to seek out natural parents, American experts are shifting from the old view that reunion is always bad to the idea that it can be helpful in some instances. In other cases, it helps children just to be reminded of their natural parents. Judy Meredith, for example, tells her youngsters on their birthdays, "I bet your mommy is thinking of you today."

Between Worlds. Most whites who adopt children of other races are managing the problems remarkably well. But there are opponents of mixed adoption. Most vocal among them are the black separatists, who fear loss of the Negro's heritage through assimilation. Even integrationist blacks and whites worry about the ability of white parents to equip black youngsters for survival in a prejudiced world. They are concerned over all sorts of seemingly minor problems, such as a white parent's lack of experience in combing a black child's kinky hair ("There's just no way to do it gently," says Urban Planner Thomas Nutt). Another danger: stereotyped ideas of black intelligence that may crop up when an adopted child is the only black in his school and neither his teacher nor his classmates expect him to do well. Both blacks and whites are wary of civil rights crusaders willing to sacrifice a child to prove a point or to promote integration. "A child should be loved for himself, not as a symbol," observes an official of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

T.R.A. youngsters, says Sociologist Kirk, can become "people between worlds." Other things being equal, Montreal's Open Door Society concedes, placing black children with black parents is best. The trouble is that other things rarely are equal; too few black families can afford adoption, and most are reluctant to apply for children because they are afraid of being rejected by white adoption agencies. But given a choice between leaving black kids (or children of other racial minorities) in institutions or placing them with willing white families, most experts would vote for the latter. Says Clayton Hagen of the Lutheran Social Service in Minnesota: because children need homes, "we cannot wait until society is prepared. A person who finds his identity in his race cannot bring up a child of another color. But a person who finds his identity as a human being can well be a parent to another human being."

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