The State Department’s international adoption statistics indicate that international adoptions by United States citizens have increased by 140 percent since 1995. These numbers mask a troubling insight into the racial politics of the American middle class.  As Americans fly to China, Russia and Guatemala for their children, (14,396 children in 2003), African American babies must be exported to other countries to find loving families.

As Dawn Davenport reports in The Christian Science Monitor, citizens of other countries increasingly look to the United States to find healthy African American babies ready for adoption. Americans do not go overseas because of a lack of children: while adoptive parents can wait up to five years for an American-born Caucasian child, the waiting time for parents eager to adopt an African American boy is under a year.  

“I think that more Americans would adopt these babies if they knew they were available,” says Stacy Hyer, a white American living in Germany with two adopted black children.

But to blame the paucity of interracial adoptions on lack of media coverage does not fully address the complexity of the problem. Adoption is an expensive business, Davenport reports, and the costs of international adoption can hover around $40,000, compared to $10,000 to $12,000 for an African American male. While these numbers vary according to circumstance, it may not be frugality that drives Americans abroad, but lingering concerns and worries about the reality mixed race families face. Can Caucasian parents provide a good home for an African American child? Will he lose his connection to his culture? Who will do his hair?  Will he be the victim of heightened racism in a suburban, all-white community?  International adoptive parents may be more immune to such fears, and certainly, there are wonderful American parents whose love defies both their individual and community’s prejudices. Nonetheless, as African American children languish in foster care, middle class parents send them an undeniable message by choosing to predominantly adopt from abroad: you are less desirable than a child whose skin color is closer to our own. The adoption fees for African American babies reflect this terrifyingly prevalent attitude.

These trends may be changing as a younger, more racially fluid generation becomes parents, but the numbers can’t help but be disquieting.  An informal search for prospective parents revealed only three couples interested in adopting an African American child, while pages and pages of smiling, heterosexual couples sought Caucasian babies. Caucasian and international orphans undoubtedly need love too, but according to the Child Welfare League, there were approximately 542,000 children in the foster care system in the United States as of September 30, 2001, of which 38 percent were African-American. November is National Adoption Awareness Month. One can only hope that it will be used as a platform to increase awareness about the hidden racism of international adoptions.

llouison