- Share This Post
- submit
- 7
-
Sparkle (0)
Hat tip to fellow Blogher CE Maria Niles.
A couple of weeks ago, I was riding the elevator in my building with a middle-aged woman and her daughter. The cute-as-a-button toddler looked up at me with huge brown eyes, her hair neatly cornrowed in the front, the ends adorned with multicolored beads. The rest of her tightly coiled afro was a little nappy, but I'd seen worse. As I bent down to coo at her, her mother visibly stiffened and pulled her away. I straightened back up and smiled at her mother, my eyes purposefully meeting her pale blue ones. When the elevater reached the lobby, I hesitated leaving, as I wanted to say, it's okay, I can relate.
Previously, I'd seen the pair at the local Starbucks and had observed how the older Portugese men hatefully glared at the white woman and her adopted daughter. And again, I could relate. Maybe if I hadn't been adopted myself, I wouldn't have paid attention, but the carefree little girl happily bounced around the coffee shop and said 'hi' to all the customers was so darned cute, I couldn't help but stare. Plus, it was more common to see white parents with their Asian children, so I was midly surprised to find out that the family lived in my neighbourhood, in my building.
I was happy that the beautiful little black girl had a home. Despite all the questions swirling in my head, like "how is that woman gonna do her hair? Is she growing up in a healthy home with people who respect her blackness? Will she be going to a culturally diverse school? and more importantly, flashbacks - some good, like weekends spent hanging out with my mom as a kid, were intermingled with bad memories about the stares, the glares and the rude remarks from strangers - stayed with me. I wanted to talk to the woman, to ask about her daughter but because of the woman's reaction, I decided that I simply needed to mind my business.
However, according to CNN, more single Black women are adopting. Black women are not finding suitable male partners, and with time comes fertility issues. As American (and Canadian, for that matter) foster homes are overrun with black kids and other children of color, it's a blessing that some woman are willing to take on the challenge. But are they just as discerning as others? Will they be as criticisized as white parents who adopt children of color, or do they have some additional racial baggage which can make their child choices even more contreversial?
Yet there are some single African-American women who are not emotionally ready to adopt an African-American child who is too dark, some adoption agency officials say.
Fair-skinned or biracial children stand a better chance of being adopted by single black women than darker-skinned children, some adoption officials say.
"They'll say, 'I want a baby to look like a Snickers bar, not dark chocolate,' " Caldwell, founder of Lifetime Adoption, says about some prospective parents.
"I had a family who turned a baby down because it was too dark," she says. "They said the baby wouldn't look good in family photographs."
Cicely, a Canadian sista from Van City (err, Vancouver), posted the link on her Friendfeed and got some interesting comments:
The adoption system is so broken, it makes me sad. We've gone through adoption counseling and they consistently try to deter us from adopting a black child...saying the emotional stress will be too hard on us and the child. Wouldn't you think that any GOOD family is better than system care? - Jess
This is ridiculous. This is why I'm bothered with the whole idea of adoption and I hope that I'll be able to avoid having to take this route to have children. - Kamilah Gill
really? *sigh* the color complex still holds i see. were they planning to lie to the child about being adopted? that's the only conceivable reason i can think of for rejecting a child because of the baby's skin color. and, you know, that's still a shitty ass reason. - tiffany
Jess, I'm of two minds on the transracial adoption front. While yes, I think any good home would be better than being in the foster system forever, I really want agencies to try harder to place black children - especially black *American* children - with black families. It's my own personal bugaboo, and I'm almost afraid of the backlash I'll get
