Kids’ Needs--Not Color--Are What Counts

Welcome to the Dunn home in Glendora, a stucco house on a street of stucco houses, a ranchette with a basketball hoop and blue trim. Dinner is done, and the kids are plowing through dessert at the big wooden table. They are a family like any family, but for the color of their skin.

The Rev. Tom Dunn and his wife, Jan, are middle- aged and white. Six-year-old Detri and his sisters, Sequoia, 9, and Dashanique, 8, are black. Actually, it would be more accurate to say the parents are tannish pink and the kids gingerbread brown, but that would probably stray from the, shall we say, more political facts.

See, the story of the Dunn family is actually a political story, though you couldn’t tell it right now, what with Detri making those vrroooming noises with his Lego blocks. Two weeks ago, the Dunns formally adopted the three children, who had been their foster children--a move of the sort that, in child welfare circles, is all the talk.

In a place this big, you might think the question of trans-racial adoption would be nothing. Greater L.A. is, after all, the capital of cross-pollination of every kind. But a county government settlement has stirred old fears: black fears that trans-racial adoption will destroy the black community, and white fears that black social workers at the county Department of Children and Family Services are flatly refusing to place black children with families that are white.

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The back story involves a $300,000 payout approved by county supervisors last month to a white Rancho Palos Verdes family who had fought for seven years to adopt a black foster child. The problem was not the law, which favored the family, or even the children’s department policy. Rather, according to a memo from county counsel, the problem was a handful of African American county caseworkers in the department’s Alameda office in South-Central L.A. who “improperly impeded” the adoption “solely” on the issue of race.

Moreover, the memo said, one investigation--by longtime child advocate Hal Brown, then a member of the independent Children’s Services Commission--

found that the department “had a pattern of discrimination in this regard.” Put bluntly, the black caseworkers were accused of flouting the law to keep black children from white families, in the hope that, with time, the birth parents might get their acts together or a black adoptive family might come along.

As with all things racial in L.A., the debate has generated much baloney. (I don’t know anyone whose motives are “solely” racial. Do you?) The department says the Alameda office is getting a bad rap. But Brown, who has been in children’s services for 16 years, says the staffers there have a long record of resisting trans-racial placements, which the National Assn. of Black Social Workers has termed cultural “genocide.”

Amid the drama, however, there’s a deeper crisis. Right now, this county has 75,000 children in foster care, 30,000 of whom are black. The need so far outstrips the availability of black adoptive families that it is immoral to deprive the children of good permanent homes--no matter whose old fears it stirs up.

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This is especially clear when you meet families like the Dunns, whose saga began when Detri was 5 months old. He was literally starving when they got him--the mother had been giving him flour-water; a year passed before even a relative bothered to call.

By that time, of course, the Dunns loved him as their own baby. Still, when an aunt materialized from out of town, they had to give him up. A month later, they went to visit, and found the toddler, dull-eyed, in a filthy shack with broken windows and bad plumbing; the place reeked of urine, and there was no food.

Standing beside him were two tiny girls, his sisters. The look in their eyes pierced Jan Dunn to the core. Later, the girls said their aunt beat them with belts and coat hangers. It was seven months before a horrified social worker managed to send all three children back to the Dunns.

But when they asked about adoption, their new caseworker--in the Alameda office--advised them not to even apply lest some new relative demand the kids. Such things do happen; still, when Brown interceded and the case was moved to the agency’s office in Covina, the adoption proceeded without a hitch.

And now about the race thing: Yes, people notice. And, yes, the Dunns sometimes wish they all looked alike. But most of the kids’ wishes are reserved for their birth mother, whom only Sequoia remembers having met.

“Someday, we’ll help you find her,” says Jan Dunn, kindly, softly.

The children look at her carefully, then the younger ones smile. Sequoia’s eyes twinkle. Does trust have a color? “OK,” she says. “But you better stand by my side.”

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.