[...] Americans pay as much as $35,000 to adopt white or Chinese infants. But many African American children like Gabriel have difficulty finding permanent U.S. families at any price. Since the early 1990s, several hundred have found homes -- with white parents -- in Canada.
The irony of one of the world's wealthiest nations exporting its own children has not gone unnoticed. For many, it raises questions about identity, race and the tangled legacy of American slavery.
Margaret Fleming, director of a Chicago agency called Adoption-Link that specializes in African American adoptions, has placed 70 black children with white Canadians since 1993.
"There is no shortage of American families willing to adopt," she said. "There is a shortage of American families willing to adopt these kids."
There is an "adoption hierarchy," Fleming said, that is impossible to overlook. "Blond, blue-eyed girls are at the top and African American boys are at the bottom," said Fleming, who is the white mother to five adopted African American children.
And yet, it is more complicated than just that. Often it is the African American birth mothers who are deciding to send their children to grow up in Canada, the last stop on the historic Underground Railroad, and where the black population numbers 2 percent.
Indeed, the majority of the Canadian adoptions -- as well as a growing number of American babies being adopted by foreign nationals -- are open adoptions, in which the birth mother has an array of parents from which to choose. Many of the birth mothers believe Canada provides a great advantage over the entrenched social order of much of the United States: distance. In a country where skin color predetermines much in life, the thought of a child enjoying hockey and tea in a relatively liberal society struck many as comforting, if not exotic.
Once transplanted, the children themselves are exotic, too. While Vancouver is home to many immigrants from China, Hong Kong and India, blacks are unusual. Some, like Gabriel, make little effort to blend in in the Great White North.
"People call me 'Fro Man,'" he said, shaking his mane. "Everyone here is obsessed with my hair."
He seems at once amazed by the attention he attracts, and bemused by the reason for it. "A thousand times a day, people want to touch my hair," Gabriel said. "A thousand times a day." [...]
| Continue Gabrielle Glaser's Oregonian article "While U.S. couples spend tens of thousands to adopt children from abroad, more and more U.S. birth mothers choose to place their infants with Canadian families. Issues of race, money and culture raise questions about" and then go read Glaser's "Adoption: the geopolitics, the choices" and two added articles, "The price(s) to adopt" and "Agencies offer minority programs"
Also: "It's my joy and obligation to give her that access to her birth culture," "It is incontrovertible that America is a multiracial society" and "White couples, white single mothers, African-American couples and African expatriates"
posted in articles on July 4, 2004 5:00 AM | t (1)
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