Quote:
Originally Posted by Munchkin03
I vividly remember the "black backlash" about White parents adopting Black babies, and I ignored it back then too. People who complain about a problem without offering a solution suck. I know of a handful of black families who have adopted; most often it tends to be within the family or the community, or even within a church.
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Yep.
deepimpact, when I type about Blacks and the Black community, I am speaking generally. It doesn't matter what's going on at the individual-level in terms of some people's jobs, some people's neighborhoods, and among some people's friends and families. These are the exceptions. The "rule" is that adoption is more uncommon (and tends to hold a stigma) among Blacks and that is definitely correlated with the higher fertility rate and disproportionate poverty of Blacks.
There are Black adoption agencies and Homes for Black Children has a 2005 article online (I doubt much has changed since 2005) where they think they are disspelling myths about Blacks and adoption. I won't get into the other stuff, but:
"Reality: African American families are willing and able to adopt
At the time Homes for Black Children was formed, the prevailing belief in child welfare was that African American families were poor and already had as many or more children than they could afford. For some, that belief remains. We, however, knew that there were black families who were financially, emotionally, and spiritually capable of adopting. We knew about families who postponed having children to build a solid economic foundation for their lives, and then found they could not give birth.
In our first six months of operation, more than 700 families from across the U.S. called or wrote to us about adopting. In our first year, with a staff of six, Homes for Black Children placed 135 African American children in adoptive homes—more than the other 13 metro Detroit child welfare agencies combined."
Source: http://www.nacac.org/adoptalk/blackadoptionmyths.html
Sure, this may be true, but that doesn't translate to "many" Black families in comparison to the total pool of Black families. It also doesn't mean that adoption is a common (non-stigmatized and non-secretive) practice in the larger Black community. Moreover, having 700 families inquire about adoption (for whatever reasons) doesn't mean that the majority of those families would make it past the first two rounds of screening (hopefully, there is rigorous screening) and be found suitable.
This doesn't mean that the majority of white inquirers are suitable, but the pool and probability are larger due to the larger population size of whites (white families) as compared to Blacks.
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