A Gray Area

Why We Need to Reevaluate Transracial Adoptions

When I was four years old I was adopted from China, a life-changing event that I’m still trying to understand and process to this day. It’d be hard to ask for a better childhood; I grew up with incredible economic privilege and a supportive family. However, like many other adoptees, I’ve always struggled with my identity and fitting in with the white community that I’ve grown up in, and the Asian community that I was born into and want to connect with. 

Growing up, I’ve noticed that there’s often a societal attitude towards adoptions that often praises parents for adopting children. This praise is especially further amplified for transracial adoptions, where the majority of cases are white families adopting non-white children (often hailing from developing nations). I’ve gone back and forth on my thoughts on transracial adoptions as I’ve personally experienced both the benefits and the problems of it that simply aren’t discussed in the Asian community—or more generally in the mainstream media. Problems concerning the philosophy for transracial adoptions, the amount of corruption and money involved in adoptions, and the mental health of adoptees are all topics that deserve more of a spotlight, and I hope to present a narrative other than the overly optimistic and the care-free stories we see in the news. 

Graphic: Claire Kim, Social Media Strategist

Brief History

Transracial adoptions aren’t anything new, and it became relatively popular for white families to adopt Black children following the Post World War II economic boom. There were 12,000 transracial adoptions between the time of 1946-1976, making it the first major phase of these types of adoptions in America. In 1972, there was especially heavy criticism of transracial adoptions first and most publicly coming from the National Association of Black Social Workers. Concerns were primarily about the quality of care BIPOC children received from white families, as well as the cultural differences between white families and their non-white adopted children and the general loss of an adoptee’s culture. While these criticisms were certainly legitimate back then and even today, there have always been fewer BIPOC families that have looked into adoption. This makes it difficult to match adoptees and prospective parents along racial backgrounds.

International adoptions have really only been popularized within the last 50 years. Factors including declining birth rates in the West, further globalization, and continued economic growth led to this trend. In 2004, just a year before I was adopted, there were over 22,000 international children adopted by American families—marking a peak in adoption history. However, international adoptions have been on the decline since 2016, with 2019 being the lowest number at 2,900 children being adopted. This is the result of countries like China making the process harder for American parents, as China has been a popular destination for international adoptions since 1992 when they opened up their orphanages to the West. 

The White Savior Complex and Colorblindness

We can’t talk about transracial adoptions without acknowledging the white savior complex. On average, over 20,000 Americans have gone abroad to adopt children every year since 1990, many are white parents adopting non-white children. At the same time, there were over 120,000 American children aged that were waiting to be adopted in 2019 alone, many of them being Black. There exists a racial hierarchy that systemically dictates which children are adopted and which ones aren’t. Columbia University Family Law Professor, Solangel Meldano, notes that white parents are more likely to subscribe unconsciously to this racial hierarchy where children from certain races are seen as more desirable as a result of historic systemic racism. In the United States, darker-skinned children are more likely to be presented as troublesome to prospective parents by social workers and white parents are more likely to request lighter-skinned children. The result then is Black and brown children literally being less expensive to adopt.

 “The racial hierarchy places in the adoption marketplaces white children at the top, African American children at the bottom, and children of other races in between, thereby rendering Asian or Latin American children more desirable to adoptive parents.” 

— Professor Solangel Meldano 

Many Christian groups specifically embrace international adoptions, and parents embrace this “savior” mentality. The first American international adoption agency, Holt International Childrens’ Services, was founded by Henry and Bertha Holt, an evangelical couple trying to help place parentless Korean babies from the Korean War with other Christian families. The origins of international adoption are closely aligned with Christian values, and white Christians continue to be the majority of parents searching for international adoptees. There’s something very unsettling about parents who use adoption as a “religious calling,” or even those who do it to fit some distorted social trend. These ignorant motives ignore the humanity of the child and make them a personal mission for the parent, when adoptions should primarily be focused on the child. 

Strangers have come up to my mother in the grocery store to compliment her and tell me how lucky I was to have been adopted. While these compliments might be in good faith, it perpetuates an unnatural power dynamic where the child might feel like they owe their adoptive parent more. We don’t owe our parents anything more than any other child just because we’re adopted; everyone deserves to live and grow up in a safe environment. It also ignores my personal experiences and the challenges my family and I have dealt with. Adoption doesn’t completely solve all difficulties, and it creates its own unique ones; to think that everything is perfect after being adopted (something the media often likes to portray) is ignorant. And if you’re a parent of adopted children, you shouldn’t need to have strangers—or anyone else for that matter—validate you for your personal choice of adopting. 

Colorblindness philosophy has historically been supported by international adoption agencies and white America. Parents of transracial adoptees shouldn’t treat their kids any differently because of their race, but they do need to teach and provide resources to their children about systemic racism and the way society will treat them because of their race. Regardless of who raised me or how I was raised, I’ll be seen as an Asian man, and this has a specific social and cultural significance that my white mother wouldn’t be able to teach or understand without help. 

The Corruption

While China is often considered a “safer” country to adopt from because of its competitive application process for parents and a generally more transparent system as opposed to other Asian countries like Vietnam and Cambodia, it should be noted that there have been many scandals and cases of corruption. Nonetheless, as a result of the growing demand by Western countries for babies to adopt, there’s also been an increase in baby trafficking to help meet these needs. The Chinese government doesn’t release numbers about how many babies are trafficked and then resold for adoption, but many top officials in Hunan were fired for profiting from the trafficking of over 1000 babies who were eventually adopted in 2005. Furthermore, orphanages were found paying families $300 for their baby girls in 2008 because of the demand and the financial gain to the orphanage and adoption agencies. The government gives orphanages stipends for the number of kids, so some have been caught buying babies directly from poor parents and even the black market. This is an incredible amount of corruption for an industry that prides itself on creating the healthiest situation for children. 

Due to its economic growth, the Chinese government has made international adoptions more difficult while simultaneously promoting domestic adoptions for reasons such as political prestige. However, even with this pressure to change, the fees that orphanages and adoption agencies collect from international adoptions are much more than domestic adoptions, meaning orphanages are more interested in international parents. A lot of people don’t realize the business side of international adoptions and the corruption that comes with it, but it’s necessary to understand when thinking about the international adoption process and system. 

The Psychological Impact

I’m not even sure what the psychological impacts are. This isn’t meant to be dramatic or an “oh, woe is me!” thing, but as an international adoptee, I am still learning and realizing the true personal effects of being adopted. Several studies suggest that adoptees (both international and domestic) face higher levels of mental health problems. One specific study showed that adoptees struggle more with diseases like anxiety, depression, and alcoholism. While countless other factors such as socio-economic standing and family history contribute to different mental health outcomes for different adoptees, this is certainly something to note.

“The most straightforward implication is that adopted children may face both special environmental and genetic risks for adjustment problems and mental illness.” 

— John Krystal, MD, Editor of Biological Psychiatry

Some mental health problems are often unavoidable, as many events that adoptees face are naturally traumatic, and many international adoptees struggle with unique challenges like not knowing who their parents are. However, there should be more awareness for both parents and adoptees to encourage difficult discussions and to promote better mental health practices. This also isn’t meant to suggest that all adoptees are facing these challenges or parents shouldn’t consider adopting because of this. Studies have also reported that adoptees are generally happy and become contributing members in their community—but the psychological difficulties of adoptees are also important to remember if we want to help this community. 

Final Thoughts

We need to acknowledge that the history of international adoptions is rooted in an unconscious white savior complex mentality both by the parents and the Western countries that support them. Transracial adoptions should be seen as a band-aid solution to the real problem of poverty and lack of access to healthcare in developing countries, which are both reasons that many babies are abandoned in the first place. A study in China found that nearly 70% of parents who abandoned their children were poor rural families that couldn’t afford to have another child or were limited by the One Child Policy; the first is a common trend for many parents who give up their children in the developing countries. China is an extreme case, in that many of the adoptees are relatively healthy girls as a result of cultural sex preferences, but sex preferences are common throughout much of the world where countries favor boys over girls. Access to healthcare, or lack thereof, explains another reason for parents abandoning children. Many families struggle to financially support children with special needs or severe medical complications at birth. This explains why many boys adopted from China have complicated medical pasts. The increase of specific restrictions on parents seeking to adopt from China means that children with disabilities, medical problems, or that are older are now being adopted.  At the moment, generally speaking, Western countries and the parents who adopt have access to the resources that will help that child thrive, and in some cases survive, but if there was more investment in providing access to health to poorer segments of society, we’d avoid some of the concerns brought up already. 

International adoptions are declining as a result of countries like Ethiopia, China, and South Korea creating stricter requirements for prospective parents. However, there need to be more resources available to both adoptees and their parents concerning mental health and dialogues about race. While we can and should criticize the current state of the system and white saviorism, we should also encourage other qualified parents from different cultural backgrounds to adopt in order to mitigate some of the loss of culture many adoptees face. We must remember with all of the opportunities many adopted children receive, there is also significant loss.  

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To further decolonize our minds: 

The Atlantic | Child Trafficking in China

NIH | The Transracial Adoption Paradox

NIH | Mental Health and Well-Being of Korean Adoptees

Child Welfare Information Gateway | Core Issues in Adoption

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