A friend of mine sent me this article published in the online magazine The Root. It is definitely worth the short time it takes to read the entire article. There’s much that I agree with, and some that I don’t, but I think all of it is valuable. The author Angie Chuang writes: “Bring up race and adoption, and watch people squirm.” Are we still squirming when it comes to these conversations? Or have we advanced to a place where we are now much more comfortable talking about race and adoption? Do any of the things  the author writes about surprise you? What do you think?

A couple excerpts:

Call them kidnappers. Call them good Samaritans. Call them unwitting victims to a political drama staged by the beleaguered Haitian government.

Call the 10 American missionaries under arrest for taking 33 children out of earthquake-ravaged Haiti what you will, two facts—rarely mentioned in news media accounts—are indisputable:

All of the detained members of the Idaho-based Baptist group are white.
All of the 33 children are black…

…The current-day realities of transracial adoption remain tangled in the U.S. government’s own conflicted policies about race-matching versus “colorblind” adoption, as well as constantly shifting regulations in countries such as China, the former Soviet Union and Guatemala. There are uncomfortable contradictions: Whites are chastised for their reluctance to adopt black children, but then those who do adopt black children are criticized for not being able to prepare black adoptees to face discrimination—or embrace their identities.

And the most unsettling contradiction of all: Isn’t adoption an act of love? A selfless act? Can we honestly tell the parent of an adopted child who happens to be of a different race that their bond is somehow tainted by generations of racism?

But societal attitudes about race and adoption are not borne of a single family, incident or policy. And our unwillingness to address them amid the clamor over “Haiti orphans” only stymies the real discussions Americans—whites and people of color, adoptive parents and adoptees—need to have.

To avoid them only deepens the hurt. No one wins, not the adoptive parents bruised by stares and judgments, nor of the children who must struggle with the unsolvable puzzle of who they are. Ultimately, the losers are all people of color, forced to see a measurement of their own value reflected in society’s cavalier handling of adoption and race…