Abstract
Selling Transracial Adoption is a qualitative and theoretical exploration of the role that market economy principles and race play in both domestic and international adoptions. Demonstrating depth and richness using qualitative methods, author Elizabeth Raleigh argues that despite the discomfort with the idea on the part of adoption providers and adoptive parents, adoption in the United States (excluding foster care adoption) is an “industry” subject to the market principles of supply and demand and to the protocols of customers and service providers.
Raleigh collected data for this book in two interesting ways that add a new voice to transracial adoption literature: Data collected on the “frontstage” or public face of the adoption market involved her attendance at dozens of adoption planning and recruitment events hosted by private and transnational adoption agencies. As a participant-observer, she documented the recruitment messages and conversations that occur in this very public format between agencies and prospective adoptive parents. The “backstage” data, or private narrative on the adoption market, were documented through multiple in-depth individual interviews with adoption workers; Raleigh seized the opportunity to explore both the workers’ acknowledgment of the frontstage message and their own backstage perspectives.
Early chapters in this book focus on the nature and process of private and transnational adoption in the United States, identifying how parents are recruited using “customer service” language. It is clear through the narrative that adoptive parents are a type of consumers—they have market choices in the adoption process that include cost, age, race, gender, and disability of the child they would plan to adopt. This shopping on the part of potential adopters directly mirrors the consumer process. At the same time, Raleigh highlights the discomfort of both parents and adoption workers with a market framework and identifies a variety of coded language that has developed around the market aspects of adoption. Parents and adoption workers use such terms as “chosen child” and “finding the right fit” that allude to the market choices parents make as consumers but mask them in more child welfare–friendly language. In the chapter “Uneasy Consumers,” Raleigh discusses attending a presentation entitled “Deciding on the Type of Adoption that Works for You” and muses that a more accurate title of this presentation might be “White Parents: Who Would You Rather Adopt, a White Russian Child Who May Have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or an Asian Child Who May Not?” (p. 190). The author emphasizes that this language would not be acceptable to agencies or prospective parents.
Subsequent chapters describe and explore how the oft-denied racial hierarchy in the United States is a key influencer in adoption decisions for the mostly white adoptive parents. The demand first for white babies, then Asian or Hispanic babies, African babies, biracial African American, and finally monoracial African American babies is institutionalized into agency adoption fees and wait times; the higher up on the racial hierarchy a family sets their limits, the more cost and wait time they can expect to incur. This construct is based solely on supply and demand principles driven by the adoptive priorities of white parents.
This book is a frank and fascinating look at adoption in the United States today; however, what makes this book an important addition to the transnational and private adoption literature is that Raleigh does not take a pro or con position on transracial adoption but rather focuses on what the largely unacknowledged market forces mean for the adoptive process and transracially adopted children and their parents. In her conclusion, she identifies that these forces have created an atmosphere of competition for parent-customers by adoption agencies. This competition for customers means that pragmatically, adoptive agencies are often not screening out parents who are truly not prepared to understand and support the needs of their child of color in a society that, despite all protests to the contrary, is decidedly not color-blind. Opening the door for this discussion and for exploration of the tension that exists between adoption agency solvency and true screening and training of potential transracial adoptive parents is an important imperative for adoption social workers in the ongoing quest to make transracial adoption truly about child welfare in a society where race and well-being are intertwined and where “color-blind” adoptive parents can cause harm.