On Christmas Eve, the Washington Post had an interesting article on transracial adoption. The headline I am sure, grabbed the attention of many readers.

Why Doesn’t White Adopt Black?

The author, David Nicholson starts off the article by questioning,

“Whenever I see a white couple with an Asian or Hispanic child, I can't help wondering whether adoption -- like the personal ads -- is one of the last areas of American life where naked expressions of racial preference are acceptable.”

Nicholson comments on how many white adoptive parents from the U.S. go oversees to adopt an Asian child or an Hispanic child, when there are hundreds of thousands of black children waiting for adoption here in the U.S.

And just as I started to formulate my response in my head as to how difficult it often is to adopt from foster care and how domestic newborn adoption is a risk some adoptive parents, especially ones who have ridden the roller coaster of infertility, aren’t willing to take…Nicholson pointed all of that out. He acknowledges the challenges of adopting from the U.S., and as a licensed foster parent who has currently been waiting over a year to adopt, he certainly has seen the frustrations first hand.

But then he says…

Still, I can't help thinking there's something else going on when whites go overseas, and I suspect that something is race. Why else would the Latin American doctor displaying a newborn in the video that a friend described to me assure the prospective American parents that the child was "very white"?

Nicholson goes on to share some quotes from adoptive parents that were not open to adopting black children and shares the following numbers…

Fewer children are adopted from African countries than, say, from China or Russia. Of the 27,000 children Americans adopted from overseas in fiscal 2005, only 441 came from Ethiopia, the African country with the largest number of international adoptions. Nearly 8,000 came from Russia and more than 4,500 from China, according to the National Council for Adoption.

Nicholson also acknowledges, and does not try to sugar coat, the issues involved with transracial adoption. They are real, and they are challenging, and they must not be ignored or down-played, but as I have said time and time again, I personally believe with all my heart that a black child is much better off in a loving, safe, secure, nurturing, permanent white family, then they would be in foster care or an orphanage. I parent all of my children with the knowledge and faith that in the world in which we live, that Josh and I were their best option in life.

Overall, I agree with a lot of what he is saying. I do however think that the “numbers” of international adoptions are going to start showing things to be somewhat more “even” fairly soon…Ethiopia is still a fairly new adoption program, and is one that is growing by leaps and bounds every day.

And while I do know that Asian adoption programs and the Russia adoption program ARE often chosen at least partly because of racial issues, it is also true that there aren’t a whole lot of options for adopting a black child internationally. Besides Ethiopia and Haiti, there are several other small adoption programs in Africa, but most of them are fairly difficult.

I have tackled this issue of being open to some races and not others before in this post. In a nutshell, while I feel strongly that no family should adopt a child that they are not one hundred percent ready, willing and desirous to love and parent, I also wish that more adoptive parents did not see black children are second (or third) best.

While the waiting lists to adopt from Ethiopia get longer all the time and white parents with black kids is becoming a more and more common site all the time, I can’t count how many times I have heard an adoptive parent say when asked about race that they would be open to SOME races, but not to black.

Nicholson ends his article by saying,

“It may not be the dictionary definition of racism, but it's one more piece of evidence of how, years after the civil rights movement, blacks and whites have failed to engage on that deeply human level that would allow more whites to say, "Yes, I'll take this child into my kitchen. And my heart."

Like with so many issues regarding race, progress has been made, but there is still a long way to go.

So to answer the question “Why Doesn’t White Adopt Black?” I would have to say that they do…just not often enough.