The Atlantic, Aug 26, 2018: America Soured on My Multiracial Family
Behind the veil of adoption, is a darkness that is present. There are racists who loathe the idea of white parents raising a black child, and ideological arguments about identity, raise questions about whether a white family’s love can harm a child of a different race. Sometimes, people even question whether adoptive parents truly love their children, claiming that parents adopt to “virtue signal” or simply to ostentatiously demonstrate their open-mindedness.
In 1972 the National Association of Black Social Workers famously declared white adoption of black children to be a form of “cultural genocide.” But that was decades ago. By the 21st century, American churches were fully engaged in an adoption movement. Families continued to adopt domestically, but they also reached out overseas. By 2004, the peak of international adoption, Americans brought home 22,884 children, many of them with special needs, many of them of different races from their new parents.
But then came a backlash. Claims of cultural imperialism, wounded national pride, and rare, sad horror stories of exploitation or abuse soured foreign nations against American families. And at home, identity politics and even outright hostility against the Christian adoption movement triggered attacks from some on the left—attacks that were soon to be matched and exceeded by attacks from a racist right.
The first significant blow came from the IRS during the Obama administration. The adoption tax credit (a significant financial aid to adoptive families) was made fully refundable for the 2010 and 2011 tax years. The IRS responded with mass-scale audits of adoptive families. In 2011, it audited a staggering 68 percent of families who claimed the adoption tax credit. In 2012, that figure hit 69 percent.
Then, sometime around the summer of 2015, a noticeable shift began. The attacks on adoptive families came less and less from the left, and increasingly from the so-called alt-right—a vicious movement of Trump-supporting white nationalists who loathe multiracial families. They despise international adoption and call it “race-cucking your family” or “raising the enemy.”
The French family, who adopted a child from Ethiopia faced a ghastly experience “They lifted pictures of my then-7-year-old daughter from social media and Photoshopped her into a gas chamber, with Donald Trump pressing the button to kill her. They put her image in slave fields. They found my wife’s blog and filled the comments section with gruesome pictures of dead or dying African Americans. They made me wish for the days when the left came after us; at least progressive critics didn’t want my daughter to die.”
Over the years, overseas adoption has plummeted—down 72 percent since 2005—and it’s not hard to see one of the reasons. A broken American culture inflicts itself on nations abroad and families at home, and attitudes shift.
French writes “We love our daughter more than we love our own lives. But the idealism of 2010 is gone. Then, we thought our family reflected the future. Now we know that was naive. Now we know that while the promise of Galatians—the promise that we are “all one”—is true in the Kingdom of Heaven, in America it does not yet apply.”
