Interracial Adoption

Today's New York Times front page led with a story "Breaking Through Adoption's Racial Barriers."  Apparently, in the last decade, the number of interracial adoptions has dramatically increased.  The NYT reports that 4200 black children were adopted transracially from foster care.  "That is up from roughly 14 percent, or 2,200, in 1998, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect at Cornell University and from the Department of Health and Human Services."  Wow.  I think it's a great trend -- that children are getting homes without regard to their color.  I wrote about this in an article published a decade ago in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism: "Mothering Across the Color Lines: White Women, "Black" Babies."  I wrote about my personal experience as the biracial/black daughter of a white single mother.  The difficulties that people suggest are the difficulties of identification and assimilation and of keeping children connected to their "heritage" could also be the result of growing up in a household as I did.  And I would hope that we are not ready to (again) outlaw mixed marriages because of those difficulties.  I thought one woman--the white mother of two now-adult black adoptees--was the most important thing to remember for families blended in all different ways: "The way most white people use the term 'colorblind' is just silly.  We want to create color aware families, not colorblind families."  Agreed.  It's the solution to the problem that "Race trumps family" as George Hutchinson, author of In Search of Nella Larsen, so eloquently puts it.