“I know you really want to be parents, and I can tell that you would love and dote on the child,” Angela Tucker, a consultant for an adoption agency, told Todd and Tammy. “But adopting a Black child requires more than love. I will not be recommending that you proceed with adopting a Black child.”
Tucker is a black woman who was adopted by a white family and the author of the book “You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption,” which chronicles the harms of such placements. She tells this story about Todd and Tammy in a recent Substack column from early September, “What It Felt Like to Stop a White Couple From Adopting a Black Baby.”
Tucker, like many caseworkers at adoption agencies, loves to tell white people about how they could never raise a child who doesn’t look like them and should feel guilty for even trying. Her approach is not only offensive, it may also place her — and her employers — in legal jeopardy.
According to the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, agencies may not discriminate by race when children are placed for adoption out from foster care. And in cases of private adoption — where a parent decides to voluntarily place a child with another family like Todd and Tammy’s — the agency could still be on the hook. First, if it is also receiving federal funds to do adoptions out of foster care, it could lose that funding. Even if it doesn’t receive public money, couples like Tammy and Todd may be able to file an “implied cause of action” claim under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, according to Mark Fiddler, an attorney who focuses on adoption and foster care.
But Tucker and her employer don’t seem to realize this or don’t care. She offers “a workshop on the realities of racism within child welfare to this and 10 additional white couples hoping to adopt.” Topics include redlining housing policies from 100 years ago. Then she meets with each couple privately to assess how many black people they know. Tammy tells her that everyone in her family is white, but a cousin did adopt a black girl. Tucker writes: “Tammy said this with enthusiasm as though this answer would get her extra credit or a gold star.”
Could Tucker be more patronizing toward a couple she says is otherwise qualified to adopt? When the couple tells her that they think race is “secondary,” she tells them that “transracial adoptive parents don’t have the luxury of being neutral when it comes to race.” Maybe not. But adoption agencies are supposed to be.
Despite the laws in place, it is astonishing the degree to which opposition to interracial adoption continues to govern placement decisions. A complaint filed last year with the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, noted that a county in North Carolina is removing “African-American children from white foster and potential adoptive families based on reasons evidence indicates were related to race.” Usually, these decisions are made in hushed tones, but Tucker is far more brazen.
Ryan Hanlon, the president of the National Council for Adoption, notes that “there is an important role for adoption agencies to ensure pre-adoptive homes are safe and meet state laws, but the agency should not be given veto power over birth parents from placing their child with adoptive parents based on race.” He calls actions like Tucker’s “morally reprehensible.”
Of course, there is nothing wrong with providing parents who are adopting transracially with tools to help— classes on how to do black hair, for instance. But the truth is that transracially adopted kids (who made up 28% of adoption between 2017 and 2019) do just fine. An April survey of 1,200 adoptees commissioned by National Council For Adoption found that kids who were adopted by at least one parent who shared the child’s race were actually less happy than those who were adopted by parents who were both of a different race.”
None of this will affect Tucker and her social-worker friends because the dirty secret is that they don’t care about finding loving homes for children. As Tucker notes, “I do not view my work as passing judgment or merely having an opinion. Instead, I view it as preserving Blackness.” Maybe it’s time Tucker found a new job.