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1 of 1 DOCUMENT
The New York Times
October 27, 1998, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
New Families Redraw Racial Boundaries
BYLINE: By TAMAR LEWIN
SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 1; National Desk
LENGTH: 5060 words
Until he was 3 years old, Ryan Golden had his own understanding of race: boys were white like him, he figured, and girls, like his African-American sister, Nikki, had dark skin.
"All of a sudden, one day, he was in the bath with Nikki and another girl and he had the realization: not all
girls are black," said Ryan's mother, Kathy Golden, whose North Olmstead, Ohio, family has grown to include two younger Hispanic girls, Abby and Jenna.
Now, at 15 and 16, Ryan and Nikki are far more sophisticated about race, but still casual about the differences between them.
"I'm so used to being a minority in a white school, it's not a big deal," said Nikki, the outgoing one. "Some
people make comments, like 'You act like you're white.' And I say, 'That's really dumb. You can't act like a
color.' "
"Good answer," said Ryan, the quieter one, smiling approvingly at his sister.
When Bernie and Kathy Golden first contacted adoption agencies, in 1981, they were told that the wait for
a healthy white infant would be eight years -- but much less for a child from another country, or of another
race.
"We started down the track for a child from India, expecting to get a child in February 1982, but instead,
the agency called and told us about Nikki," said Ms. Golden, 40. "I was pregnant with Ryan when we got the
call, but I didn't tell them, because I knew we wanted Nikki. Race was never an issue for us. I don't know
why, given that we're both Irish Catholics brought up in a very white world. But we just thought, yeah, we
can do this. My parents were less comfortable with the idea, but that vanished the minute we stopped by
their house on the way home with Nikki and opened up the baby blanket."
While multiracial living is almost a hallmark of the Tiger Woods generation, it is families like the Goldens,
with children of a different heritage from their parents, that play it out on the most intimate level.
Such families are both a measure of, and a response to, a changing social climate that has begun to melt
some of the boundaries that define racial territory.
The proportion of interracial and interethnic marriages has been rising steadily for decades, according to
the Census Bureau, and in a test of new forms allowing people to check more than one race, many people
under 18 used that option.
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"Maybe the whole notion of race is becoming more fluid," said Claudette Bennett, chief of the bureau's racial statistics branch.
But the process of choosing a child -- and which categories of children to consider -- spotlights a family's
deepest feelings about race and culture. So it should be no surprise that race shapes the adoption marketplace, as witness the bald fact that white children usually cost more than black children, and that in the
world of international adoptions, Africa is almost ignored.
Last year, more than 5,000 children were adopted from Europe, more than 6,000 from Asia and exactly 182
from Africa.
"There's a variety of reasons why people go to China for a child," said Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law
School professor who often writes about race. "Part of it is that they can close their eyes and imagine
themselves the parents of a little Chinese girl, but not of Shaniqua with the kinky hair. But another part,
which I've had white friends talk about, was the worry that given the debate over transracial adoption,
they'd be looked at coldly by African-Americans if they adopted a black child."
Race also plays a role in decisions regarding the largest pool of adoptable children, the 100,000 children in
foster care in the United States who need new parents. The black children who make up, on average, 45
percent of those in state care are slower to be adopted than the 35 percent who are white.
"We have families who say I'll take Hispanic, American Indian, anything but black," said Joyce Wadlington,
who is in charge of recruiting adoptive families at the Cleveland child-welfare agency. "I don't know exact
numbers, but I'd say only about 5 percent of the white families coming in are interested in black children."
There are many reasons that American families turn to international adoption rather than the public agencies that handle foster care. For one, foster children are generally older -- most are 6 or older -- and wouldbe parents usually want infants. Then, too, many foster children come with siblings. Some white families
say they have been discouraged from seeking to adopt foster children of another race. And many couples
worry about the lingering effects of the abuse or neglect that landed the child in state custody, and the
possibility of the biological family's reappearance.
It is almost as though the universe of adoption comprises two worlds -- one filled with couples looking for a
healthy infant to make them a family, and the other with older children in foster care looking for parents -whose orbits rarely connect.
Adoption professionals say that many Americans have a romanticized image of overseas orphanages, and
an enormously negative view of foster care -- the system this nation turned to in preference to orphanages.
"If people are choosing international adoption because they think that the children available overseas
won't be abused, won't be from a dysfunctional family, will be from a better background than the children
in foster care here, that's not necessarily going to be true," said Nancy Ward, a supervisor at the Children's
Home Society in Minneapolis, which handles many international adoptions.
Until the political opening of Russia in the early 1990's, most children adopted internationally were Asians
placed in white homes, with Korea providing the largest contingent. But last year, for the first time -- despite extensive publicity about widespread emotional problems among children adopted from Russian and
Rumanian orphanages -- the largest group, nearly 4,000 children, came from Russia.
"Always before, international adoption meant interracial adoption," said Barbara Irvin, of Family Adoption
Consultants, outside Cleveland. "In the good old days, I would stand up and tell families doing intercountry
adoption that they were about to become a walking advertisement for interracial living, that they would
never walk into McDonald's unnoticed again. But that's less true now."
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Ms. Irvin said, however, that she was "not always sure that people who adopt a Caucasian child from Russia
understand the intercultural aspect."
"That child is Russian," she said, "just like a Korean child is Korean, and all children, whether or not they
look different from their parents, are curious about their background."
In recent years, there has been increasing recognition that children benefit from feeling connected with
their heritage. But when the child's background is different from the parents', that is a more complicated,
and more self-conscious process. Though every adopted child must deal with individual identity questions,
those who are adopted across race or culture lines also grapple with the issue of group identity.
The issues range from the cosmic to the quotidian: What if a child adopted from Guatemala avoids the two
other Hispanic children in his class and says he hates the Spanish-speaking stores and restaurants his adoptive parents seek out? Will a Chicago synagogue be a comfortable place for a Chinese girl's bat mitzvah?
Or, for the Goldens, who live in a mostly white suburb west of Cleveland and run a wholesale windowcovering business, how does a white family learn about black hair care?
"When Nikki was a little baby, with little curls all over," Ms. Golden said, "I took her downtown to a black
hair shop, put her down and said, 'You have to help me learn.' They taught me about oiling the hair, they
taught me everything I needed to know. By now, I can do extensions."
The deeper questions of racial identity are not so easily answered. For the children adopted from overseas,
there are new institutions to bolster that connection. Korean adoptees can take their pick of support
groups, culture camps and guided homeland tours of their birthplace.
For American black and Hispanic children adopted into white families, there are fewer formal supports.
"You have to do it yourself," said Ms. Golden, whose family provided foster care three years ago for a biracial brother and sister, until the sister's behavior problems became too disruptive. "When Nikki was little,
we would get together informally with other white families who had black kids. And even now that they're
teen-agers, they stay in touch. It is important to have a racial identity. Nikki was 4 or 5 when she started
calling herself black. We'd never told her she should call herself black, but she identified that way very early."
Bound by Law
Matching by Race A Heated Issue Again
Recent changes in Federal law have re-ignited a longstanding debate over racial matching, an issue still
throbbing with the passions released in 1972, when the National Association of Black Social Workers declared that placing black children in white homes was a form of racial and cultural genocide.
In 1994, Congress passed the Multiethnic Placement Act, making it illegal to delay placing a child to find a
racially matched family, and emphasizing the need to recruit more minority adoptive families. Two years
ago, the law was amended, making it illegal to use race as a routine consideration in placing children. But in
a confusing set of guidelines for implementing the law, the Federal Government said it did allow consideration of a child's cultural needs and parents' racial attitudes in individual cases where an agency believed it
was warranted.
While the laws were touted in Congress as a means of cutting the time children spend in foster care, many
experts say that it is the lack of interested families, not policies favoring racial matching, that delays placement of older, dark-skinned children. The main impact of the law, they say, will be to facilitate white families' private adoptions of biracial infants.
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Many, perhaps most, social workers of all races still believe that, when possible, racial matching is in the
child's best interest. But many are confused about when and how to consider race in placements -- and
even whether they can legally give families the training and counseling they believe will help transracial
adoptions succeed.
"There's a mixed message in the policy," said Madelyn Freundlich, of the Evan Donaldson Adoption Institute
in New York. "On one hand, race and culture shall not be considered. On the other, there shall be a lot of
outreach to find minority families. No wonder people who place children are very nervous about what to
say, worrying that they may be making a misstep, or being scrutinized in such a way that it's a no-win situation to talk about."
Adding to the concern is a growing body of legal battles, including one now dragging through the Rhode
Island courts, in which white foster families and black relatives fight over a child.
Ms. Ward, who worked in the Detroit child welfare system before going to Minneapolis, said her experience
had convinced her that it was difficult for white families to meet the needs of black children.
"It may not be so in Europe, where the racism is different, but here, I don't think most families are
equipped to give kids the coping skills they will need," she said. "The history of racism against blacks in this
country is so deep, so ugly and so violent. It's not that we don't have racism against Asians or Hispanics, or
that it's benign, or that white families are any better equipped to help a Korean child fit in with Koreans,
but in this society, that has less severe consequences.
"When you close your eyes and listen to African-American adults who were raised in white families," Ms.
Ward said, "you would think they were white. Things like that make it hard for them to identify with the
African-American community."
The Goldens agree that, when possible, a child should be placed with a racially matched family. But they
also say that their mixed family has changed them profoundly, giving them a window on a world in which
differences are genuinely celebrated and race need not be a divisive force.
"Becoming a multiracial family opens up your eyes to the richness and beauty of all that diversity," Ms.
Golden said. "We celebrate Cinco de Mayo, we have black baby dolls, we have Hispanic dolls. It's really
transformed me. I'm much more aware of all kinds of prejudice. I used to be a person who couldn't talk to
someone without blushing. I was really shy. But when someone in Bible school calls your daughter a nigger,
you have to confront them."
Bound by Heritage
Bridging the Gaps At Culture Camp
For one week in July, Camp Idhuhapi, a YMCA camp in the Minnesota woods west of Minneapolis, becomes
Camp Tiger, a place where dozens of teen-agers adopted from Korea gather to explore their cultural heritage.
In the dining hall, David Gross and Mia White are making mahndu, Korean dumplings, spooning the meat
filling into egg roll wrappers and sealing the edges, while they talk about who has the neatest dumplings
and who did not answer whose letters over the winter.
It is desultory conversation, but the setting carries a profound charge for the young people who come, year
after year, to spend a week with others who share their experiences.
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Camp Tiger is led by David Yoon. Mr. Yoon, whose parents are Korean, was born and reared in Detroit and
has been bridging the gap between Korea and the United States, adoption and immigration, since his first
trip to culture camp after fourth grade.
"When I went to my first culture camp, I thought it would be very different to be with adopted kids," said
Mr. Yoon, now a 24-year-old high school teacher in New Orleans. "And the family life is very different. But
there is a lot that is the same about the experience of being Korean in America. That's the common ground.
I saw one girl arrive yesterday, with fear in her eyes, and I knew she had never seen so many Koreans in one
place before."
Most of the Camp Tiger participants said that while they enjoyed the Korean cultural activities, what drew
them to culture camp was less what they did there than simply being with others who were like them, in a
way that their parents were not.
"I go to an all-white school, and I've had my share of people make fun of me," David White said. "All my
friends are Caucasian. It's a tough life to be by yourself. I come here, and I remember how beautiful Asian
can be. It makes you feel better to be in an environment where everyone knows what you've been
through."
Mia, the only Asian in a Catholic high school in Charleston, W. Va., said she enjoyed both the sameness she
feels at culture camp and her sense of uniqueness at home.
"I stick out like a sore thumb," she said. "But I like being different. I'm the total opposite of the Asian stereotype. I'm very outgoing, I'm not studious and I have a very loud voice."
There are dozens of culture camps scattered across the nation, most of them for Koreans, the largest, and
oldest, group of international adoptees. Camps have sprung up for Romanian, Russian and Chinese adoptees, including day programs for those too young for sleepaway camp. In Minnesota, there were four Korean
culture camps this summer, plus Celebrate Romania weekend, and La Semana Culture Camp for families
who have adopted Latin American children.
At Camp Tiger, while the teen-agers ate the Korean dinner they had prepared, the parents who help out at
camp talked about the questioning their children had gone through, about the daughter who said she
would marry a "regular" -- that is, white -- boy because it was easier, the son who only wants to date Asian
girls and the daughter who lay sobbing on the bed, asking why she had to look so different that no one
would date her.
As a backdrop to the singing and cooking and games, the campers share stories of being mistaken for the
only other Asian around, of wondering whether colored contact lenses would help them fit in, of having
people they considered friends make insensitive remarks about their having slanted eyes or a flat face.
Most of the older campers, and counselors, also Korean adoptees, said their parents had done a wonderful
job of raising them and of encouraging their connection to Korea: many learned of culture camp while attending Korean dance classes or support group meetings.
Still, several said wistfully that they had sometimes wished for parents of their same culture.
"I had kind of an identity crisis in junior high school, after a bunch of Hmong families moved into my neighborhood," said Eva Margolis, a counselor who is a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles. "When I
saw the Hmong students, speaking Hmong with their parents, being who they were being, I was really jealous. For a while, I just wanted to hang out with the Hmong kids and their parents, and I kept thinking what
it would be like if I had parents who were the same as me. That's when I started teaching myself Korean. I
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do think the best thing is if Korean kids could be adopted in Korea. But that would only work if that culture
changed enough so that they would be accepted."
Bound by Choice
A Tough Journey To a New Home
On a Friday afternoon in May 1996, the caseworker for Luis, a 10-year-old Puerto Rican boy, picked him up
at school on Manhattan's Lower East Side and took him to a spacious beige stucco home in a New York
suburb, where Charlotte and Scott, a white couple who wanted to adopt him, were waiting to show him his
new room in his new home.
"He came in with nothing but the clothes on his back," said Charlotte, who asked that only first names be
used to protect Luis. "It's a day you never forget. You have this kid who crosses your threshold, who all his
life had been told to hate white people, who's very vulnerable, and you immediately feel that he belongs to
you. He's upset, he's crying, and you have to comfort him, but he doesn't know what to say, and you don't
know what to say. What we ended up with, what we talk about a lot, is how many changes he's gone
through, and how scary and confusing it must be. Then we went to the Gap and bought him some clothes."
Luis remembers the day, too. "When they picked me up, I didn't want to go," he said. "They had to strap me
down in the van. I cried and did all that baby stuff. I'd never been in a house before. I wasn't used to all the
trees."
But now, at 13, just back from a whale-watching camp, his adoption finalized, Luis has a different view.
"It feels wonderful," he said simply, smiling out from the flying-saucer toy he has stretched to frame his
face like a neon-pink crown. "I trust them more, we talk more, we do things together. They're my parents.
Parents are someone that watches you, that grounds you, and they're also friendly."
Luis may not have come as far as children adopted internationally, but his journey across ethnic and class
lines has been just as dramatic. Born in poverty on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Luis spoke Spanish
until he was 5 and started school. That was also the year he was removed from his parents' home, and, after being shuttled around in foster care briefly, placed with a Puerto Rican foster mother nearby.
Luis knew little beyond his own neighborhood, and when he arrived, Charlotte and Scott say, there was a
lot of talk about "you white people." They have tried to support Luis's sense of himself as Puerto Rican, although, Scott said, none of the positive stereotypes of Puerto Rican life -- extended family, strong sense of
religion, good food -- resonated with Luis's early experience.
"He said he wanted Puerto Rican food, so we ran around getting recipes," Charlotte said. "But when we
served it, he'd say he didn't like rice or beans or peppers. It turned out what he meant he wanted was
McDonald's. One Puerto Rican friend suggested a very simple thing: if he says he wants to be a scientist, we
say something like, 'The world needs more Puerto Rican scientists.' "
The ethnic differences were never a serious issue in Luis's adoption, and that seems right to Charlotte and
Scott.
"Maybe in an absolutely ideal world, where you would be deciding which of many families should get to
adopt a child, all this racial stuff, about providing direct role models to help kids develop self-esteem, would
make sense," said Scott, who, sensing Luis's craving for adult attention, spends an enormous amount of
time coaching his soccer team, helping with homework, even watching him play video games. "But the
basic thing every child needs is an emotional foundation, and finding someone who will be there for that is
a far more important issue."
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Despite more intensive recruitment efforts, and a nationwide push for faster permanent placements, it remains difficult to find adoptive families for older children in foster care, like Luis.
Of the 520,000 children in state care nationwide, about 100,000 need adoptive homes. But in 1995, the last
year for which statistics are available, only 27,000 were adopted.
"We wanted to do this because it's where the need is greatest," Charlotte said. "Most of our friends
thought we were crazy. Adopting an older child from foster care is not something people like us are supposed to do. There's an assumption that you're doing this because of infertility, which was not our situation. And there's a perception that all the kids in foster care are crack babies who are going to grow up to
be drug addicts."
Charlotte, 38, the research director for an educational media company, and Scott, 39, a pension-fund manager who had worked in a summer camp for emotionally disturbed teen-agers, knew not to expect an easy
adjustment, immediate bonding or perfect behavior. And it has often been rocky. At the beginning, especially, Luis had frequent rages, in which he would call them names, fight or break a window.
"When he first came, he was suspended from school for getting in a fight," Charlotte said. "I thought, 'Oh
my God, he'll be marked for life as the bad kid from the city.' But he's very sociable. And he made friends
very quickly. He's an amazing kid. He's amazingly resilient."
Even for a resilient child -- and determined parents -- the long adoption process took its toll.
"People talk about adjusting to the child, which is certainly an issue, but far more agonizing was having this
bevy of social workers and others in your life, and having the adoption, which we were told would take
about six months, stretch out to two years," Charlotte said. "Until the adoption was finalized, we were just
foster parents, and if we went out of state, even to Newark airport, we had to get permission. If he needed
medical care, like when he got the chicken pox, we couldn't take him to our doctor, we had to go to the
clinic where they took Medicaid."
In March, around the time the adoption was finalized, Luis's behavior took a nose dive after having
smoothed out some.
"We had a really bad few months there, remember?" Scott asks.
"No," Luis says. "I try not to remember bad things."
"I think it was about the adoption being finalized," his father says.
"Yeah," Luis says. "It took, like, duh, 20 years. It was weird, to think that I was going to be changed forever. I
didn't think it was going to happen."
After the adoption, Luis went for the first time to visit his previous foster mother, wearing his soccer gear
and showing off the trappings of his new life.
He seems solidly and happily in place with Charlotte and Scott, at ease performing on the piano or arguing
with his parents about which room he can use to watch "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer."
"The hardest thing, actually, the thing he can't disentangle in his mind, is sorting out what's race and what's
wealth," Charlotte said. "It's confusing. I travel a lot for work, so we took him to Russia, and now he thinks
that's what white kids do. For us, this has all the rewards of any kind of parenting, like when he was at
camp, and he called and told us everything he was doing. That's what's thrilling, being included in his life.
There are these very touching moments, like when we go to Boston Market, and he insists that we get the
family meal."
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Bound by Blood
2 Kinds of Family Fight Over Boy
If there is any single case that recaps the sensitive issues surrounding transracial adoption, it may be In Re
Justin, which has been making its tortured way through the Rhode Island courts for more than two years -half the lifetime of the brown-skinned boy at its center.
Justin was born to a Hispanic father and a 17-year-old black mother who was living in foster care with an
aunt.
Since he was 13 months old, Justin has lived with Ronald and Sharon Lapierre, foster parents who are
white, and Eric, an older boy they had adopted. The Lapierres want to adopt Justin, too, and the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth and Families has approved their petition to do so.
But Justin's extended family wants him back. Justin's grandmother, Linda Saxon, expressed interest in
adopting Justin soon after he was taken from his mother, who had a history of substance abuse. But in
1996, Ms. Saxon died of a heart attack. Justin's caseworker took him to the funeral, and after the service,
Christine Thompson, Justin's cousin and godmother, told the caseworker that she wanted to raise the boy.
The fight for Justin has become a Solomonic tug of war: The Lapierres argue that Justin's solid attachment
to them must not be disturbed, and that the research points to good outcomes for transracial adoptees.
Insofar as they raise the race issue, it is to stress that under Federal law, racial-matching policies are illegal.
Ms. Thompson does not frame the case as a racial one, but argues that blood ties are paramount, and that
religion, as well as heritage and cultural connections -- two terms some see as a stand-in for race -- must be
considered. She says that the state public welfare office unfairly failed to consider Justin's extended family
members as candidates to adopt.
The competing claims are so strong that some experts in the case recommended an unusual open adoption,
with the Lapierres adopting and Ms. Thompson having the right to visit. But Rhode Island law makes no
provision for such a resolution.
The case sounds many of the themes that mark the short history of transracial adoption. Until the civil
rights movement, most adoption agencies did not serve African-Americans, and black children whose parents could not raise them were generally cared for by relatives or neighbors.
"People forget that adoption agencies didn't start working with black families until the late 1950's and
1960's," said Carol Williams, who heads the Children's Bureau of the United States Department of Health
and Human Services. "Then, with the civil rights movement, there got to be a significant amount of placement across racial lines, in the era of love is all you need. It was in reaction to that history of exclusion, and
that idea of color blindness, that the National Association of Black Social Workers said that identity is important, that race matters."
But then, when public welfare agencies pulled away from transracial adoption, white families complained
that racial-matching policies were keeping them from parenting children who needed them.
"It was a predictable swing of the pendulum that got us to the Multiethnic Placement Act, and then the
amendments," Ms. Williams said.
Ruth-Arlene W. Howe, of Boston College Law School, sees the laws as a way to give white parents easier
access to the growing number of babies born to unmarried white mothers and black fathers. "The new law
on racial matching is really about helping white parents to assert their right to adopt whatever child they
select," said Professor Howe, who has testified for Ms. Thompson.
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Ms. Thompson, a single 27-year-old credit specialist who lives in Cranston, R.I., stresses her continued relationship with Justin while he lived with his mother, then in visits she and the mother made while he lived
with the Lapierres, and finally, in a few overnight visits from Justin that she was granted.
"I'm not saying a white family should never adopt a black child," said Ms. Thompson, who was last allowed
to see Justin in March. "But here you have a child whose blood relatives want him, relatives who can give
him a true sense of belonging. There are thousands of children in foster care who desperately need adoptive families. Why are they trying to take this child, whose family wants him? Frankly, I can't imagine a case
in which the headline would read, 'State Favors Black Foster Parents Over White Blood Relatives.' "
The Lapierres' lawyer, Keven McKenna, said that as foster parents, his clients may not speak to the media.
But they have assembled an impressive list of experts on transracial adoption to testify for them in the
closed-court hearings that will soon yield a decision.
"Transracial adoption is a tremendously complicated issue," said Mr. Kennedy, one of two Harvard Law
School professors who provided testimony backing the Lapierres. "You're talking about kids, you're talking
about groups. And one of the uglier things that's not often spoken of that's also going on is resentment of
white yuppie infertile couples. I've had people come up and say, 'How can you defend these people -they've got everything else, now you want them to have our children.'
"But what we're talking about is who is 'our children,' " Mr. Kennedy said. "Black children, American children, all children? When people talk about how tough it was growing up in a mixed-race family, I always
ask, compared to what? Weren't there any advantages? Don't people growing up in a mixed-race family get
a different view of human possibility?"
In Search of a Child
SUNDAY -- Adoption is no longer a secret process laden with stigmas.
MONDAY -- Money plays a defining role in the desperate quest for a child.
TODAY -- By adoption, some families are redrawing racial boundaries.
ON THE WEB -- A forum and video clips from a meeting between an adoptive mother and a birth mother
are available on The New York Times on the Web at: www.nytimes.com.
LOAD-DATE: October 27, 1998
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
SERIES: IN SEARCH OF A CHILD -- A Question of Identity -- Last of three articles.
GRAPHIC: Photos: The Goldens say their mixed family gives them a window on a world in which differences
are celebrated. (Andrea Mohin/The New York Times)(pg. A1); A COMMON HOMELAND -- At Camp Tiger in
Minnesota, where teen-agers adopted from Korea spend time with others like them, campers wrapped
packages of toys for children in Korean orphanages. (Judy Griesedieck for The New York Times)(pg. A12);
CREATING A FAMILY -- Luis, 13, did not want to come live with Charlotte and Scott in a New York suburb
two years ago, and the adjustment has been difficult. The long adoption process took its toll, as well, but
now, Luis says, "it feels wonderful." (Nancy Siesel/The New York Times)(pg. A13)
Graph "Coming to America By Way of Adoption tracks the number of children, in thousands, adopted from
outside the United States, by region, since 1979. (Source: Immigration and Naturalization Service)(pg. A12)
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TYPE: Series
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company