Monica Potts on the foster-care system:
After the January earthquake in Haiti, 10 American missionaries, all white, were jailed after attempting to take 33 Haitian children to the United States for adoption. “The American mind has been shaped by the positive vision of families saving bereft orphans from a grim life in a Dickens-esque institution or from death on the streets,” David Smolin, an Alabama law school professor who has studied adoption, wrote in The New York Times. As shocking as the allegations were, the appeal of international adoption is real — according to the Child Welfare League of America, international adoptions increased by 180 percent between 1989 and 2005.
The politics of domestic adoption are more complex. About half a million children are in the U.S. foster-care system, and a disproportionate number of them are African American. Despite rising rates of American adoption, even interracial adoption, why do so many black children need homes?