- Andy Hall for the Observer
Good intentions are not enough.
Because race is critical to well-being. Because love isn’t enough. Because playing down the importance of race and ethnicity in adoption is misguided. Because children shouldn’t suffer disconnection and isolation. Because transracial adoption should be the last resort.
None of these ideas are particularly new or novel. Joyce Ladner covered some of the issues in a book published in 1978. And that was a long time ago. But apparently it’s still news. This despite the fact that so many people think we’ve moved past that. We’re in a post-racial society now.
Now transracial adoptive parents pat themselves on the back for their great parenting, noting that they have made so many changes since the bad old days when people just didn’t know any better. Noting how full that half-glass is, and not insisting on the full glass for their children, but instead telling them how happy they should be that there’s anything in the glass at all.
Summary of the study here.
Resist racism 
The comments are heartbreaking/infuriating/whitesplainy, as always. They almost all seemed to say this:
“The only kind of racism that ever happened anywhere was the individual kind, and you could tell those individuals on sight because they were always yelling racial epithets.* In fact, it was so easy to spot a racist in Western society all these centuries that it’s a wonder it took us so long to get rid of them all. Which we did, and now everything is equal for everyone, yay!
“But there was never an entire society that really favored white people over others, and there never will be.** That’s crazy talk. There were just a lot of meanies in Klan robes and hoods, and they’re all gone. I’m a white person, and that means I know all about your life and your experiences.”
*(White people who don’t use racial epithets have hearts as innocent and pure as the tears of little children.)
**(And if you say there was one, you’re a racist, because the only kind of racist left is the reverse racist.)