Sorry about that.
I think I’ll just let that stand by itself, without comment. 'Cause it’s right on the money.
Regards,
Shodan
siddhartha, here in Canada, we have the same arguments going on, except substitute “Native” for “Black”. Somehow all the Native kids that are taken from bad homes or given up for adoption are supposed to be adopted by good, Native families, not non-Native folk who want them. Best of luck with that, Natives being around 4% of the population of Canada.
I still believe that a loving, stable home is the best thing for any kid, regardless of ethnicity. If I were giving a baby up, that’s what I would want for it. The colour of the people adopting it would not be a concern, I believe, as long as I knew they would look after it.
(Just for the record, shodan, the term is “Inuit”, not “Eskimo”. 
)
I think that adopting who needs adopting is great irregardless of the race or ethnicity of the adpoters or adoptees. I don’t believe that you have to go out of your way to expose an adoptee to his appropriate race/ethnicity/cultural identity. Just raise them as your own and love them as your own.
Are people who are against interracial adoption also against interracial marriage/procreation? Many arguments against one can be used for the other, especially in a lily white neighbourhood. But wouldn’t a white single mother with a biracial child have to teach him about racism, his roots, deal with insensitive comments, (I know a Latina who takes her blond baby to the park, where the nannies think she’s lying when she says he’s her own) etc.? And what if she (re)married to a white man or woman? Would naysayers advocate removing the biological child and place it with parents whose skin features are more similar to its own?
I know of a website where some people of color who have been adopted by white folks talk about how they resent it:
http://www.transracialabductees.org/politics/
I was preparing a reply in my head but it would basically be a re-hash of what UrbanChic said.
Oh, and…
And I know of a website that states we never landed on the moon. I stopped reading your link here:
If I attempted to roll my eyes enough to convey what I’m feeling I’m sure I would rupture something in my head.
Hey, people were all like “but who the hell would be against and why??”, so I provided a link to the page where there have several texts from such folks; I don’t care much for their faq.
After about 50 years (we’ve been doing this since the Korean war), what we’ve discovered is that when adoptive parents make an effort to expose their children to race/ethnicity/cultural identity, the adoptees are better adjusted. Some of the people who post to a place like transracialabductees might feel less like their identity was stolen from them had their adoptive parents enrolled them in culture camps, made sure they lived in an environment that was multiracial, etc.
Not all children appreciate the effort - and most don’t do culture camps for long (we had our kids - both of them - in a Korean school for several months this year). I’ve heard adult adoptees whose parents didn’t make any effort claim their culture was “stolen.” And I’ve heard adult adoptees whose parents made the effort, but they didn’t choose to participate say “I can’t fault my parents.”
I’m always filled with the urge to smack people upside the haid when they start off on the transracial abductee pathway. It always displays such a profound level of ignorance.
I understand being concerned with raising children in a culture other than the one they were born in. It’s a real, valid concern. It needs to be dealt with by the children and their parents. I also understand the need to deal with your inner feelings about racism and parenting (Why do you want to be a parent?). That’s vitally important as well.
It’s a concern for the children and their parents. Possibly for one of the many, many governmental and/or organizational officers charged with the responsibility of ensuring adopted children are integrating and being treated as they should be in their new family situation. Not for random bystanders. If random bystanders are concerned - or think the adoptive parents cannot possibly help the child be a part of their hereditary culture - I encourage them to take a stab at it themselves. There are always more kids needing families than families willing (or able) to adopt them.
It’s HARD to adopt a child. It’s hard work. They don’t hand kids out like kewpie dolls at a country fair. There are home studies and investigations into your life and your past. There is a detailed analysis of your work, finances, family, home and every part of your life. Background checks. Counseling. You have to demonstrate to the satisfaction of a disinterested third party that you’re willing, able, and (above all) desirous of having a child to raise.
Speaking of having a child to raise, children in the U.S. are placed up for adoption under rigidly and highly controlled circumstances. Those circumstances are inevitably either a) that the parents have demonstrated repeatedly that they are totally unfit to have a kid or b) that the parents have forsworn any ties to the child. There are quite a few Movie-Of-The-Week heartstring pullers out there suggesting that people are pressured into giving up their kids to rich privileged people, but that’s basically hooey. There are a lot of parents who voluntarily give up their children who feel remorse later, but at the time every precaution is taken to be sure this is what they want.
In short, kids are adopted in this country (I can’t speak for the legal requirements of other nation’s adoption policies - except Brazil. That one I know about.) only when their parents are sufficiently abusive and neglectful that their parental rights are terminated involuntarily (using the essentially the same scrutiny involved in revoking any other Constitutionally-protected civil liberty) or the parents willfully and knowingly and deliberately relinquish their rights.
Even then, adoption officials make every effort to place children with families that are of the same (or similiar) ethnic extraction - as this makes for less turmoil in general with the acclimatization process (for the kid and their parents). Problem is there are more adoptable-kids-of-color than their are families-of-color willing and able to take them.
Faugh. Nobody abducted these kids. Better that they were raised in families that love them and want them than raised by parents who either didn’t want them (or were in circumstances such that they knew they weren’t the best choice for their child) or who were systematically abusing or neglecting them. One of my cousins periodically sulks that she wasn’t raised by a black (or Korean) family and she was “robbed” of her heritage. It always pisses me off. She was placed for adoption because she was found working in a child brothel in South Korea. At age 4. The result of an American serviceman lying to a South Korean girl to get in her pants and then abandoning her the second she turned up pregnant. Her mother killed herself in shame and depression when my cousin was two, leaving her child to be taken in by the kindly child-madam next door. Yup, her life with my aunt, the upper-middle-class white lady, was a terrible terrible thing :rolleyes:
It’s not like there are gangs of roving covert-ops people breaking down the doors of pregnant or recently delivered women of color stealing their babies. Geez.
If you’re concerned about your disconnection with your cultural heritage, then connect yourself. There are a number of ways a person can go about it. Read the literature. Listen to the music. Learn the language. Join community groups and be active in them. But don’t heap up your resentment on the back of people who loved you and wanted you and cared for you - or the organizations that helped them find you. Be grateful someone did it at all. God knows I’m grateful for my parents every single day.
IMO, subtle unconcious racism is a more compelling reason to be iffy on interracial adoption than the talk about culture. Every white person has ingrained ideas about other races that will never be totally expunged. There was a study mentioned in the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell where they showed white people a video screen that flashed pictures of black and white faces that had words like “kindness” and “violence” written on the bottom of them. You were supposed to press one button for positive words and one for negative words. The subjects all had a harder time pressing the positive button when they saw a black face combined with a positive word and an easier time when it was a white face with a positive word (same vice versa, too). This correlation was evident even in people who were college eduated or otherwise “enlightened.” Clearly, racism is ingrained in society to a near-intractable degree and I find it hard to believe that these attitudes don’t rub off on black (or other) adoptees at all. It’s unconscious, but if a person truly does have negative associations, however unwanted, toward black people the kid is going to pick up on it.
That said, I think it’s better for a kid to have any kind of family at all than to be bounced around foster homes or put in orphanages. I just think that considering how far white people still have to go wrt eradicating our unconscious prejudices against other races that interracial adoption should be looked at with a critical eye. Just because we all say we treat everyone the same regardless of race doesn’t mean we actually do, and racism isn’t just slanting your eyes at Asian people or burning black churches. It’s in the little reflex things: clutching your purse a little harder when you see a black person, focusing a little more intently when a white person is speaking. It is very hard to control those reflexes, but they can affect a kid a lot. I don’t think that means we shouldn’t have interracial adoption, but I do think it’s a point to be considered.
Which is why our children have attended the Mu Ji Gae Camp in Albany every summer and have since they were in pre-school. I cannot provide that which I do not know. However, I can provide a situation where they can learn that which I do not know. To me, that is a part of being an adoptive parent.
–Rubs hands together gleefully-- Gonna get myself to the Twin Cities, and visit Korean Adoptive Dopers. ( boy, there’s a sub-sub-sub group 
).
Just DON’T let Shodan and Brainiac4 start talking politics. I think they have polar opposite political beliefs. But if you get out here, we’d love to see you.
As would I. And I absolutely promise not to talk politics or religion.
:heavy sigh: For the first time in sixteen years, nobody at my house is going to Korean Culture Camp this year.
Regards,
Shodan
God I hate white people. When are we going to teach them how not to be racist, you know, like everyone else?
This is really a reply to all the responders; Won’t it be great when we realize there is only one race, and different colored skins etc. shapes and sizes? We are all just humans, who belong to the human race.
Monavis
Yes, it will be great, and on that day, I’d like to buy the world a Coke. But as a parent, we have to prepare our children for the way things are now, while showing them everything we and they can do to change it.
In other words, what does your post have to do with considerations prior to inter-racial adoption?
My point is there is only one race…The Human race…color should have nothing to do with it. Thae fact that is does is a sad state of affairs. Our differences should be celebrated, not cause conflict.
Monavis
Forgive the typo…if you can!
Right. I agree with you. What I’m asking is what that has to do with interracial adoption. Are you advising the OP to ignore all racial history and perceived differences between himself and his child? Should he not teach the child about this history of people that look like him? Not address the fact that the child will likely be a victim of racism at some point?
If this is what you’re advocating, it’s quite different from the rest of the advice in the thread, and I, for one, would like to hear more about this stance. In addition, it would be helpful to know what point of view you are bringing to the table. Are you the parent of a child of a different skin tone? An adopted child? An educator working in a mixed skin-color environment? A social worker working with adoptees? Tell us more!
Of course! (My own posts are full of them!) 
I can relate all too well!
You see, I’m 100% Irish-American (all four of my grandparents were born in Ireland), but my siblings and I all married Hispanic women of one kind or another (my wife is Mexican-American, and my sisters-in-law are Puerto Rican and Venezuelan, respectively). So, my extended family on both sides is heavily Latin and largely dark brown-skinned.
But even though both sides of the family ARE largely Hispanic in terms on ancestry and skin tone, no one in the family has really embraced Mexican, Puerto Rican or Venezuelan culture. My dark-skinned nieces and nephews all seem to think of themselves as Irish (they sing all the old weepy Clancy Brothers songs on St. Patrick’s Day, have taken Irish dancing lessons, etc.).
And my wife’s family is filled with “coconuts,” too. They ARE Mexican, but wouldn’t know how to ACT Mexican if you asked them to!
Why is this an issue? Well, a few years ago, when my wife and I were looking into adoption, we were definitely open to a child of any race. And in Texas, of course, there was a very strong chance that the child we’d get would be Hispanic.
Well, that obviously wasn’t a problem for us! A brown-skinned Hispanic child would fit right in, with our family. He/she would have a grandfather and loads of aunts, uncles and cousins who looked like him, so the child would never feel for a moment as if he/she didn’t belong in our family.
However, during the interview phase with the social worker and the adoption agency, we started feeling insufficiently Hispanic! Because the social worker (a wonderful person in most respects) kept asking us questions about different Mexican rituals and customs we’d share with our child… and the truth is, my Mexican in-laws and their family never observed ANY of those things!
My Mexican father-in-law (a retired Navy aviator) listens to Count Basie and Duke Ellington, not to conjunto music. His sisters (one of whom was an O.R. nurse for Michael De Bakey) are gourmet cooks who make almost everything EXCEPT stereotypical Mexican food! No one in the family was into pinatas or Cinco de Mayo or tamale-making parties or the Christmas Posada.
In short, we could tell during the interview process that my very Hispanic family just wasn’t Hispanic enough to suit the social worker!
In the end, everything worked out, and we adopted a beautiful half-Hispanic little boy.
And wouldja believe, that half-Hispanic little boy is a fair-skinned blond?
I’ve been facetious, but don’t get me wrong- I DO understand the value of different ethnic cultures. But who’s to say what “genuine” Mexican culture is, and who’s to say that my Puerto Rican niece is wrong to embrace her Irish heritage over her Puerto Rican heritage? And why should any of that matter in determining whether my wife and I were suited to raising a child?