Interracial Adoption Essay -- Social Issues, Foster Care, Racial Relat

Imagine being a child without a family, longing for to be living in place to call home you, and feeling incomplete because you do not have a place where you belong. Many children in foster care or orphanages are faced with similar feelings. Children who live in the United States often wait years to be adopted and in most cases, the minority children wait twice as long to be placed with families of their own ethnic background. One article by Linda Johnson Price, the president and CEO of Ebony magazine and a woman who was also adopted, discussed the fact that there are around 500,000 children in foster care waiting to be placed into a home and that close to 45 percent of those children are black (Rice, 2007). She also specifies that the Department of Health and Human Services has studies that show that African Americans wait longer than any other race and that adoption experts say that black children are deemed special needs children and it does not necessarily have to do with their me ntal or physical capabilities (Rice, 2007). The number of minority children waiting to be adopted will continue to rise unless we come up with a solution. One way to address the issue with the long wait process that these children experience is to consider interracial adoption. This type of adoption refers to potential parents who choose to adopt a child or children of a different race, culture, or ethnicity from their own. In order to address the disproportion of minority children who wait to be adopted, we must first consider the requirements one faces to be able to be a perspective adopting parent. The adoption process starts off by choosing an adoption agency. Next, the agency will send someone to the prospective parents’ home to gather informat... ...ion will say that parents who adopt children of different ethnicities are not capable of caring or educating the child simply because of the cultural differences. The critics opinion has merit in the since that the parents cannot teach the child to be their race but they can provide love and raise them to be responsible adults. In the end we must consider which is more important, being able to find a child a loving family when race is not a factor or waiting for an indefinite time to try to find a family of the same race. If you are thinking about which is more important remember that for every twenty children who are in foster care at least nine of them wait an extended amount of time to be adopted. All children deserve a loving home and although we live in an imperfect society our children should not have to experience the feeling of not being wanted or loved.