Does Race Have Any Place in Adoptions?

I read your article “Salvation or Last Resort?” (Nov. 3). What if the under-heading had read, “Thousands of white children are waiting to be adopted. Do they belong only in white families? A few black parents say no and are fighting to change what they believe are restrictive adoption laws.”

How ridiculous that sounds and yet, it is equally true that white children are not placed with black families.

The truth, however, is that only a few of your readers would consider it sensible to place white kids with black parents.

Most of us know that the caste system exists and the lower caste--black--does not adopt the children of the higher caste.

Is The Times or Lynn Smith arguing that African-Americans should have as much access to white kids as whites have to African-American kids?

Are you willing to argue that black parents would even be given serious consideration as adopters of white kids? If The Times is not willing to make this argument, then race is a consideration in the placement of children.

All kids deserve a home. All kids deserve a home in which they are loved. One child is not born to be placed with a family so that other kids will learn tolerance.

It is a terrible thing that so many kids have not found homes where they can be loved, but we will not solve that problem by pretending that race is not just as as much a problem in 1993 as it was in 1973.

Is it possible to create a society in which race is not a factor? Probably. Have we created such a society? Not yet.

BETTY HANNA-WITHERSPOON

Los Angeles

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The question of trans-racial adoption is indeed complicated, but the strongest argument against it was contained in the first paragraph of your article.

Dan Zeidman wanted to adopt an African-American baby to “. . . help solve a major social problem and teach his . . . children about tolerance.”

People adopt babies for the same reason they bear them: because they love and want children, not to serve as a vehicle for social, political or educational agendas.

LYNN BAILEY MELTZER

Los Angeles

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Shortly after the birth of our second child, in Pittsburgh in 1959, my husband and I began adoption proceedings at Welcome House in eastern Pennsylvania.

We treasured our girls, born five years apart, and the experience gave us the confidence to approach the challenge of adoption.

To our utter surprise, at our first adoptive parents orientation, we learned that trans-racial adoptions were not legal in the county in which we lived. We interpreted it as one of the last vestiges of institutionalized racism.

In 1962, our 5-year-old Korean son completed our family. Thirty-one really good years and 4.5 grandchildren later, I find myself reading an article in which professionals cast simplistic slams on the motivations, competence and humanity of people who choose the route we chose.

To suggest such a limited range of reasons for trans-racial adoption (making a “liberal statement” or taking what was left over when we couldn’t get “healthy, white infants”) is truly cynical. And, call it “cultural identity” or “cultural competence,” 40 years ago we called it racism.

Most of us who have had the experience have not raised “bananas” or “Oreos,” but, as with all our children, have raised unique and individual realizations of unique and individual circumstances.

MANYA SCHAFF POLONSKY

Los Angeles

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I have just finished reading “Salvation or Last Resort?” and I am, to say, the least, disturbed.

I am afraid that the point is being missed, which is: What is truly in the best interests of the child? The underlying theme of the article seems to be a refrain of “separate,” and that only some feel that “separate, but equal” is the ideal standard.

Sadly, it no longer astonishes me that there is such pervasive racism in 1993, but it continues to depress me that so many people feel that the only right answer to so many of our problems is segregation.

The suggestion that the only way to raise a minority child is to keep him or her with “their own kind” is both absurd and short-sighted.

It serves neither the individual nor the society well, and that sort of de facto segregation will only contribute to the continued stress and misunderstanding that pervades our society and the world.

I am not so naive as to think that racism will ever disappear from the face of the earth, but I am firmly convinced that the way to fight fire is with a hose, not by pouring gasoline on the flames as separatists do.

JEAN M. BEASLEY

Playa del Rey