Breaking Through Adoption�s Racial Barriers
From New York Times:
A growing number of white couples are pushing past longtime cultural resistance to adopt black children.
In 2004, 26 percent of black children adopted from foster care, about 4,200, were adopted transracially, nearly all by whites.
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.
"It is a significant increase," said Rita Simon, a sociologist at American University, who has written several books on transracial adoption.
"It is getting easier, bureaucratically and socially.
With so many people going overseas, people are also increasingly saying, Wait a minute, there are children here who need to be adopted, too."
The 2000 census --- the first in which information on adoptions was collected --- showed that just over 16,000 white households included adopted black children.
Adoption experts say there has been a notable increase since 2000.
The combination of legal changes and greater embracing of multicultural families --- Americans have adopted more than 200,000 children from overseas in the past 15 years --- have lessened resistance from both blacks and whites.
Read more from this post.
