In the 9 page
thread about racism and people unwilling to adopt AA kids, NDN raised a good point: to what degree are ANY adoptive parents able to raise their child not just with token recognition of their cultural origins, but as a participant in their birth culture?
Also, I think it is very interesting that people act like this issue doesn't apply to people adopting white children domestically.
I used to live in a city near Appalachia. The CC friends and co-workers I knew there who adopted CC kids were not adopting from their own *culture*, they were adopting kids of their own *race*. The culture of highly educated, upper-middle class professionals and the culture of the poor white rural teen moms whose children they adopted (through foster care as well as private adoptions) are not the same.
If I had adopted the poor, white, Appalachian children my boss adopted, would I be expected to maintain or teach them to value cultural standards like: filling baby bottles with Kool-Aid or Mountain Dew, keeping my yard filled with rusty metal objects, old appliances, and fighting roosters, eating greasy processed foods at every opportunity, spitting chewing tobacco into a tropicana can all day long, and trafficking in meth while letting my kids be raised by a big TV?
Or would it be better to "sanitize" that culture and surround them with bluegrass music, recipes for burgoo and chess pie, and a video collection of "The Waltons"?
In reality, people wouldn't expect me to do any of those things--no one would bat an eye or accuse me of anything if I just raised them in our family's Italian-American way and ignored their "birth culture" completely.
And what about religion?: there is a big difference between what some of my clients meant by "Protestant" and what my adopting friends meant by it--snake handling and speaking in tongues in a church where women can't cut their hair or wear pants vs. the typical Episcopal or Presbyterian church--not a lot of shared culture there!
People can say whatever they want, but the desire to raise white children can't just be about sharing cultural background, or they would be sorting babies by the socio-economic, educational, political and religious backgrounds of the birthparents, not their skin color.
I can attest that I have more in common culturally with my dh, from an educated middle-class AA family, than with any of the CC families I worked with in a social work setting.