A Few Comment Follow-Ups

I'm sorry I can't address everyone's comments... I'm blogging as much as I can, but my
time is obviously somewhat limited!

@Maggie: that makes a lot of sense. I don't want to do anything to turn the bedwetting issue into a capital-I Issue.

@Eos: the store meltdown wasn't too bad. I just had to pull him out of the checkout line for less than a minute. And as I was telling my husband earlier, I am so thankful he's a clinger and not a runner-offer. My little cousin was a runner-offer, and his parents were in a constant state of panic whenever they left the house with him.

@Lena (a few posts back): I appreciate your dissenting opinion, but I still have a very strong antipathy to Bartholet's position. It's not that she's making stuff up. She's looking at the same info that more objective people -- like the ones at NACAC and Evan B. Donaldson -- are looking at. But she's twisting it to suit the narrow interests of upper-middle-class white adoptive parents. In her world, adoptive parents of color might as well be chopped liver.

She also does one thing that absolutely infuriates me.... she exploits the older special needs children in the foster care system in service of an argument that does not really benefit them. Again and again, her argument is that these kids could all get adopted so much quicker if race-matching became absolutely illegal. There is no such silver bullet. I have made a lot of recommendations on this blog about how to increase adoption rates, and I'm really just parroting things I've read on other blogs and forums. The solutions are already out there. But they're complicated and require a lot of funding. Some examples: subsidized home loans for lower-income parents to adopt larger sibling groups; targeted outreach to non-traditional parents with special needs experience; training social workers better and reducing their placement caseloads.

Here's my theory on what would happen if there were a radical "colorblind" approach in the foster care system. White parents would get placed with slightly more black infants and toddlers, predominantly girls, at the expense of black adoptive parents. And that's basically it. The effect on older child adoption would be almost nil.

I hate this kind of exploitation. I've seen it in anti-adoption arguments as well, via the rhetorical question, "why are you adopting an infant from ___ when you could be adopting an older child in the U.S.A.?" Some people do have the right to ask this question... that is, the people who do have a connection to foster care in some form. But often I see that question and wonder, well then, what are YOU doing? Have you fostered or adopted from the system? Are you a social worker? Foster care alumni? Volunteer with kids in the system? Or are you just self-righteously exploiting the existence of these children in order to make a point about infant adoption?

Anyway, Bartholet is definitely a persona non grata in my books. As someone who has been negatively impacted by racism, negatively impacted by race-matching and negatively impacted by the LACK of race-matching (when it comes to Asian kids), I have a fair amount of experience in this area, but I don't appreciate her brand of "help". I believe in racial reform in the foster care adoption system, but my version would work a lot differently.