Why we need ICWA

[Mike__M]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/la-sha/what-white-parents-adopting-black-children_b_8951402.html

What White Parents Should Know About Adopting Black Children

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Adoption, regardless of racial dynamics, requires a level of patience, love and empathy, but a white person choosing to adopt a black child must first be willing to confront the passive racist views all white people hold, subconsciously or not. Going in with the mindset that this black child is no different from any other child is a naiveté the adoptive parent cannot afford, and for which the adopted child will pay. The desire to love a black child must be matched by the willingness to learn and accept the unique needs of blackness and black childhood.

A white parent adopting a black child must first understand that no matter how much they'd like to believe that race is not real or pretend they don't see color, that black child is dealing with the very real social ramifications of his race and color....

This piece from Tuesday's Huffington Post may seem out of place here in the First Americans group, but the concerns of the author are parallel to those addressed by the Indian Child Welfare Act. Try substituting the word native where the author has used black to see what I mean.

ICWA is a favorite target of anti-Indian forces in the U.S. Some Americans still hope to make Native kids into good little white people. Along with boarding schools, adoption had long been one of their effective strategies. It still is for some evangelical and LDS groups.

Here's my radical idea: how about these privileged colonizers come up with a plan to scale back their confiscation of minority children, by amending their own society to reduce the ways that their culture causes children of color to need new families?

An obvious first step would be for them to stop employing law enforcement agents that needlessly kill young Black and Native people. (I don't have first hand experience with this, but I suspect that being dead has an effect on one's ability to be a responsible parent. Fear of being killed for strolling in public places might have some effect as well.) But that's just a first step.

What is needed is elimination of all the ways that structural racism puts minority children at risk of being taken from their parents. Until that is accomplished, we need to continue to discuss how non-white children should be raised when their parents are white.

The comments that appear in these type of stories are usually dominated by the defensive white adopters' opinions; rarely do they shut up long enough to notice that the adoptees themselves are strangely silent.