Race, Religion, Foster Care, Adoption, and Cultural Genocide 2



The way I understand the evolution of lower adoption fees for black children is that initially it was meant to encourage black families to adopt black child with the assumption that adoption fees were prohibitive for blacks.  Some may find that racist and offensive with in it’s self.



My experience tells me that there is more “adoption”, foster care, and kinship care going on in the black community informally than the record may show.  As the same (black) family that took me in and “adopted” me as a teen and young adult had also taken in and raised a boy from down the street.  A good friend of mine lived with a woman for 7 years and was never formerly in the system.  One of my “nieces” is now raising a child of an acquaintance, with out intervention from out side.  The assumption that the black community dose not adopt or take care of their own, would be unfair and inaccurate.  I also believe a long standing mistrust of government agents and the disturbing thought of paying for another human being could well explain the hesitancy of some black families to adopt formally.  



Going back to Malinda’s post at ADOPTIONTALK on Race-Based Adoption Fees, I assume she posted it and I was reading it from the perspective of how sad it is that our society thinks some humans are more valuable than others, and that it is outrageous!  But of course that is how I would take it, I was reading it from the perspective of the child.  



To some Perspective Adoptive Parents (PAPs), the outrage in the fee differences is not that it is offensive that some children are valued more than others, but that the children THEY value cost more to adopt and that is unfair to them, the PAPs.  Forcing some PAPs to chose international adoption instead, settling for their second choice in child styles, rather than settling for their 3 choice (a black child).  What ever the case when money is an object to PAPs and they chose to settle for the Ford Focus of children when they really wanted the Cadillac instead, well, it can’t be good for that poor kid to be raised by people who settled for them.    

It was this statement in one of the comments that made me shudder:



Anonymous said...  - “The people who complain most about this issue in my experience are white couples who are less wealthy then the average OR have "money issues" either real or psychological. Some will even tell you they resent that it forces them to adopt a child of color instead. So you have racists adopting children of color as a result.”

How scary is that thought?    

In my opinion no child should ever have to be raised by parents who didn’t really want them, let alone be adopted by them.

 

Fostering and adoption are not for everyone.  It is hard and sometimes thankless work, as all parenting situations can be.  But in the case of raising other people’s children, they come to you wounded and grieving for their natural families on some level, no matter how impossible that family situation may have been for them.  And it is going to take a whole lot more than love and Jesus alone to get them through.  

  

I see some trans-racial /trans-cultural adoptive parents I respect who seem aware of their added responsibilities they have to their children.  Some I have seen out here in blog-land as well in the real world seem generally clueless.

Some PAPs are just utterly clueless.  This was part of a comment that made my blood boil, left by a PAP on a post about whether their was coercion in adoption.

“I know that sometimes a birthmother can absolutely parent and do a wonderful job. And maybe I am just jaded. But as a court appointed child advocate who saw more heartbreaking cases than I care to remember, someone who has seen personally the devastation of children raised by women who were not ready to parent, and just a person who watches society, and hey, an avid Judge Judy watcher where 90% of the cases are a woman with 3 kids by 2-3 different dads suing one of their fathers for the rims she bought for his car or something similar, I very, very rarely see the moms who have a deadbeat boyfriend, little to know support, and no education who do it well. I know they are out there. But it is my opinion that they are not in the majority.”

 And then she says this:

“However. We have a CRISIS of children in poverty in this country. We have a CRISIS of child abuse and it is almost always the mother's boyfriend who is torturing her child. We have a CRISIS in our foster care system. We have a CRISIS of drug addicted babies. We have CRISIS of out of wedlock births which statistics prove is always the primary precursor to child abuse, poverty, dropouts, and repeating the cycle of out of wedlock, ie, unfathered, children. And all of these children were born to women who thought parenting their child was the right choice. I beg to differ."

First things first, if one wants to be viewed as having a valid opinion about society, or a segment of society maybe sighting “Judge Judy” a TV SHOW, as a source of your information isn’t they way to go.  TV shows are not real, dear, they are not a fair and accurate representation of anything other than what some programming director thinks people like you will find entertaining.  They are playing on your need to feel superior, and it is safe to say they have you pegged.

Apparently this PAP thinks “Poverty”, you know…the kind you see on Judge Judy.  American style “poverty” warrants putting ones children up for adoption.

Out of wedlock births…adoption!  If an unwed poor mother doesn’t love her children enough to put them up for adoption, those children just may be poor, drop out of high school and get pregnant.  According to this woman’s standard half of my friends should have relinquished at least one child to adoption, but none of those friend’s children experienced any of her dire predictions.  As a matter of fact most the children of my single mother friends are now in college.  Further more,  if we were to follow her guidelines as a society for what would warrant relinquishment there would be a CRISIS of a whole shit load of kids languishing in the foster care system waiting for some “good Christians” like her to save them.  

Maybe a better choice is to provide low income teens and women free birth control.

Don’t fret ya’ll, this crazy cracker isn’t going to adopt an African-American.   No, she is going to adopt a yet unborn female "orphan" from Ethiopia!

More on Religion and Cultural Genocide later.

 

 

* This post is a part of my National Adoption Awareness Month, a post every day in November campaign, to remind perspective adoptive parents that there are 140,000 kids for whom family preservation is not an option, who through no fault of their own are currently available for adoption in the U. S. foster care system, right here in our own back yard.  If you are considering adoption please consider adopting a foster child or becoming a foster parent.  It could change a child’s life.