Interracial Adoption Research Paper

Interracial Adoption & Why Race Should Not Be an Overriding Factor The process of adoption was legalized in the United States in the 1850s, and over the past 150 years since then, the institution has drastically changed with our society(Fogle). One of these changes being the growing concern of interracial adoption.The conversation about whether or not race should be a determining factor in adoption first surfaced in 1972, when the concern for children being placed in a household with adoptive parents of a different race was first introduced at the national conference of the North American Council on Adoptable Children (Liem). The discussion became a debate between which mattered more: the color of ready-to-adopt families’ skin or their qualification

The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) is a federal law that requires government officials to take children of Native American race away from caring foster families and place them with Native American families they (in most cases) have never met before. Now, knowing the terms of this law, imagine the anguish that an American couple-Rusty and Summer Page-experienced when their 6-year-old daughter Lexi, whom they raised in their home ever since taking her in as a foster child four years prior, was taken away and sent from her loving home in Santa Clarita, California, to live with a different family hundreds of miles away in Utah -- simply because Lexi is 1.5% Choctaw (Dynar and Sandefur). Solely because Lexi has a very distant Native American ancestor, she was taken from the Pages, who want to adopt her as their own, but can’t adopt her because they aren’t of Native American ancestry (Dynar and Sandefur). Normally, laws regarding adoption try to serve the best interests of children, but the ICWA forces courts to disregard this rule and place children, while also disregarding their individual needs, with members of Native American tribes -- even if these members have no connection to the children. Originally, the Indian Child Welfare Act was created out of a concern that state

In 2017, the obsession with culturally matching in adoption processes went too far in Britain (Mander). Sandeep Mander shared his and his wife’s story with The London Spectator in an article named “Too Indian to Adopt” on September 2, 2017. Sandeep and his wife are British Sikhs, but aren’t practicing ones. They like to think there is something out there, but they are far from being religious. Both Sandeep and his wife went to Roman Catholic schools growing up, they work in business, and their closest circle of friends are white British. The Manders do not seek to convert anyone to Sikhism or any other religion. Yet, on the basis that both Sandeep and his wife’s parents came from India, they have been prevented from adopting any white British child. They also live in Berkshire, where there aren’t Sikh children in need of being adopted, which means they have effectively been banned from adopting. Sandeep had been frozen out because the adoption service had classified him and his wife of Indian/Pakistani heritage, and therefore “unsuitable” for adopting white British children, who make up the bulk of local children in need. This outcome had been the result of the first question Sandeep was asked when applied for adoption at this service. When asked his ethnicity, he had responded ‘Indian’. That was true, ethnically Sandeep is Indian, but born and