Fostering Love, Respecting Race

There are 568,000 foster children in the United States. There are more than 110,000 in California and close to 40,000 in Los Angeles County. In July of 1998, one came to live with me.

I am not sure who was more scared: Aisha, a withdrawn and sullen 1-year-old, or me. I am white. Aisha is black. While I was initially concerned with learning how to care for an infant and deal with being a single parent, other issues nagged in my head and heart: How do I do her hair? Will she feel black? Will she be proud of her heritage? Will she relate to both a white and a black world? Will she have friends of many ethnicities? Will she be happy?

In the last decade, the number of foster children needing homes has increased dramatically, while the number of available homes has stayed relatively the same. In California, more than one-third have been in three or more homes and fewer than 10% are adopted. African American children are five times less likely to be adopted.

In an ideal world, Aisha would have stayed with a loving, nurturing birth parent. In a less than ideal world, she would have been placed with a nurturing, warm black family. Instead, she came to live with me.

I believe that we are each other’s destiny. We have connected and are a family. In my heart I could not love her more than I do. I know she feels loved and safe. She had a turbulent and difficult first year. She endured what no one should have to but is coming through. I know she will be fine.

My problem? I guess it could be illuminated best with an event that occurred several months after I got her. While waiting in line at my neighborhood Target, I was playing with Aisha. Suddenly, an African American woman tapped on my shoulder. I turned to her and she began to scream at me for stealing “the good black men and having black babies.” She went on to yell that I had no right to raise this child in a white home.

After she finished her tirade, I managed to explain that I had not slept with any black man and was a foster parent to this child. I went on to say that there are thousands more children who need foster parents. “If you are worried about black children being raised by white people, become a foster parent. There are plenty others, but this one is mine,” I said to her.

By then Aisha was crying, the woman looked a little stunned and the rest of the shoppers and clerks looked shellshocked. The woman left. As I purchased my goods, the silence broke and a few people, including some African American grandmother types, told me I handled things well. “You just raise that baby, Baby,” one woman said. I got to my car and vomited.

Sometimes in the grocery store, white people approach me to say things like, “Oh, it’s so nice of you to take in a child” or “I always wanted to adopt but, well, you know, they are all black.”

I can’t count the times I have heard people tell Aisha she is so lucky to have a mommy like me. These are strangers in the grocery store. Tasha is not a charity case. She is my child. She owes me no gratitude. I never want her to feel thankful or indebted. It’s cruel for a child to begin life already indebted to someone.

I have read many African American authors, I spend time in African American communities, I have many friends who are African American. But I am not African American. I will never know what it is like to be a little black girl. Neither will I know what it is like to be a black woman. I want to provide for Aisha a “black experience,” but what is that? I make sure her hair looks good. I try to send her to schools with a diverse community. We go to the museums and look at different art. We read lots of different writers.

Still, I know she will question who she is, where she came from and how she will define herself. I just wish people in the grocery store would facilitate her finding her way to being a proud and strong and happy black woman.