Adoption in Black and White

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Meanwhile, the real-life consequences of the same-race requirements have emerged in a number of court battles. Most prominent has been the case of Lou Ann and Scott Mullen of Lexington, Texas, who filed suit in April to adopt two black brothers, ages 2 and 6, whom they have raised since infancy. Though Texas law bars race from being the determining factor in adoption, the Mullens charge that caseworkers delayed the adoption in order to seek an African-American home. Their case is bolstered by a separate class action against the state of Texas, filed jointly by lawyers at the conservative Institute for Justice in Washington and three liberal Harvard law professors--Elizabeth Bartholet, Randall Kennedy and Laurence Tribe--that aims to have race-matching practices declared unconstitutional. Argues Tribe: "Leaving African-American kids in foster care rather than allowing them to be adopted by loving parents inflicts very serious harm on children."

Bill Mandel couldn't agree more. In 1991 he and his wife became foster parents of Robyn, a three-day-old, crack-addicted black infant who had been abandoned on San Francisco's Mission Street. For more than a year, the Mandels were never contacted by county social workers. But when they tried to adopt Robyn at age 14 months, the county sought to remove the child from their care, citing the lack of a racial match. The Mandels obtained a restraining order, then in May 1994 won the right to adopt. Mandel has little patience for those who worry about the child's sense of identity. "Every parent has to address that," Mandel argues, "regardless of race."

Rita Simon, a sociologist at the American University in Washington, tracked 200 parents and children from interracial families for 20 years. In 1971 she found the youngsters understood their race was different from that of their parents, but did not seem bothered by the fact. Twelve years later, the kids--then teenagers--perceived their parents as "very, very committed" to informing their children about black issues. "They would say, 'My God, not every dinner conversation has to be about black history,'" says Simon. When she returned again in 1991, the grown children told Simon, "We're not Oreos. We may not share the same taste in music or even dress like children who live in the ghetto, but that doesn't make us any less black."

Harvard's Kennedy notes that there is no consensus among African-American parents on how to raise a child. "I'm sure there's a difference between the way Jesse Jackson raises his kids, Louis Farrakhan raises his kids and my parents raised me," he says. Ruth-Arlene Howe, a law professor at Boston College, counters that efforts to ensure race-blind adoptions are "a major, major assault on black families."

Try telling that to the Coxes, who worked hard to instill a sense of black identity in M.W. and T.W. They enrolled the girls in an interracial play group and an integrated Lutheran church, and were planning to move from their white suburb to a racially mixed neighborhood. But all that is on hold now, as the Coxes worry--and wait

--Reported by Wendy Cole/Delafield, Tammerlin Drummond/Miami and Sharon E. Epperson/New York