Transracial Adoption Research Paper

Ralph Flynn is a California man who has recently filed a lawsuit against his parents for using him as a sex slave after adopting him at nine years old from a Russian orphanage. Ralph and Carolyn have been arrested for several months and their trial will shed light on the many abuses faced by Ralph during his childhood and teenage years. Adoption is a very selective process but international adoption may be less so. Every parent in the United States seeking to adopt a child must go through many tests and surveys before being approved as financially, mentally, and physically fit to adopt a young child; this process is to ensure that every adopted child has a good home. However, this process and its extreme rigor may change due to the relevance of this crime. Ralph Flynn’s impact may be huge, and his effect will change the adoption process, child protection, and people’s perspective of abuse.

Adoption is technically defined as “a two-step judicial process in conformance to state statutory provisions in which the legal obligations and rights of a child toward the biological parents are terminated and new rights and obligations are created in the acquired parents” (“Adoption” 1). However, the definition of adoption extends further than the cold and unfeeling dictionary definition. Adoption is love and joy and contentment and wholeness and laughter and tears and growth and work and a new start. My oldest brother was adopted, in addition to eight of my cousins, and I am so thankful that each one of them had the opportunity to be placed in my family. They are my family and the joy I see in the younger kids’ faces at being a

In the United States, many children are put up for adoption or adopted from other countries. Adoption is a great alternative for women who are not ready to commit in raising a child on their own. Adoption is when a person or couple decides to become legal or permanent parents of who is native of the United States or of another country. Many adoptees do want to find their biological parents, but in these rare cases, many may be hesitant as they feel scared and abandoned, may refuse to know anything about their birth mother and father. Children of the adoptees have the right to search and find their adoptee’s birth family.

A. Topic Sentence-The Gladney Center of Adoption works to address this issue by placing children who are without a home with foster families.

C. Thesis and Preview: Consequently, we need to do something to make adoption easier and better not only in the United States, but all over the world. Today I will give you a few solutions to fix the foster care system.

Thesis Statement: The process is often thought of as complicated and uncommon, but with increased awareness and proper education, individuals can better understand the gift that is adoption.

Having a parent who was adopted, and not being able to open their file leaves their children feeling empty. I grew up not knowing the other half of me and not knowing what cultures I could be a part of. Children who have a parent or parents that went through closed adoption process feel confused with their roots, lack medical history of potential diseases, and feel a loss of ethnic identity.

The issues that children face today are intense and tremendous. These issues continue with discrimination in adoption. These people see by color instead of the child. The love for a child should not matter by the color of their skin, but by who they are. Children need loving homes with caring parents. If an adopter did not want a different race child, they would have not accepted the adoption. If the government was just to take the child away, then they should not have given the child to them in the first place. Interracial adoption is a fine way to rescue a lost child and build a loving family.

Over the last decade intercountry adoption has been dramatically increasing, becoming a relatively common method of family formation among American parents. In the article “Constructing Interracial Families Through Intercountry Adoption”, four researchers from the University of Illinois analyze the role of race and ethnicity in constructing American families through intercountry adoption basing their findings off of the U.S. 2000 Census. Researchers, Hiromi Ishizawa, Catherine T. Kenney, Kazuyo Kubo, and Gillian Stevens, argue that intercountry adoptions, illustrate the fluidity and tenacity of specific racial boundaries in American families. In their research they seek to investigate how parents who adopt children from abroad take the child’s

323,123,019 and growing is the United States census for this year of 2016 (U.S. and World Population Clock). 415,129 is the amount of children living in the United States who are currently in foster care waiting to be adopted (The AFCARS Report). These numbers are staggering and highlight a huge problem in America caused by adoption regulations, same sex debates, and cost; the effects are rising foster care numbers, declining adoption rates, higher abortion rates, and physical and psychological harms to children.

Seen as a cultural model/mother, as well as a feminist fellow, Audre Lorde has vertically, horizontally and obliquely transmitted black American feminist cultural practices of protest, different attitudes towards racial issues, social mobility and even altruistic behavior to black Germans specially Ayim. “With Lorde’s promoting, Afro-Germans began to examine their history” (Michaels, “The Impact of Audre Lorde’s Politics and Poetics on Afro-German Women Writers” 26). Therefore, Ayim was encouraged to search Afro-German history thus preparing for her M.A. thesis. Though black Americans and black Germans live in the same geomental community, sharing the first part of an identity, differences in their physical environment make cultural transmission and adaptation easier (Schönpflug, “Introduction to Cultural Transmission: Psychological, Developmental, Social, and Methodological Aspects” 4-5).

The experience of many African American Transracial Adoptees with America’s racial complexities parallels the narrative above, an internal struggle to understand racial discrimination, solely due to the skin they inhabit. Transracial adoption, the placement of children in families of differing racial and cultural, began in the 1950s to provide shelter to Asian orphans displaced after World War II; it later expanded to include African Americans and Native Americans (Barn 1273). However, adoption of blacks into Caucasian families encountered sharp criticism in the black community. In 1970, The National Association of Black Social Workers argued that the adoption of African Americans by Caucasians promotes “cultural genocide”, seeking to protect black’s racial and cultural identity (Bradley and Hawkins-Leon 434). Despite thereof, Multiethnic

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

Regardless of race, one particular adoption issue that steadily occurred in the past was the need to almost conceal the fact that the parents adopted the child, as if adoption was something to look at negatively but contrastingly, corresponding with social standards of the time, “childlessness was considered deviant” (Patton 34). Perhaps the underlying reason for wanting the child to look like the parent is so that a nonstandard act like adoption appears natural. An example of this occurred during the baby boom after World War II until the late 1960s. Unwed white women and infertile couples that sought to have kids could easily match with a white baby with similar physical characteristics and ethnicity. In this way, it served as a beneficial arrangement for both the parents and the child, making the adopted children seem “as if they had been born into their families” and to mask the “sexual deviance of White unwed mothers and infertile White couples” (Patton 20). Unfortunately, kids of color and even children with health problems and disabilities at the time were “labeled [as] unadoptable” (Patton 40) and less favored among the white middle class, even though they actually cost less to adopt. The interview with Sam Bennett illustrates this dilemma as she reveals that it took longer for her family to

Similarly, the cultural experiences of transracial adoptees are uniquely influenced by their adoption and their place within their own racial/ethnic groups and cultures (Baden et al., 2012). The exposure to a child’s birth culture will help the child decide if their birth and/or adopted culture accurately reflects their identity