The acclaimed public radio program chose this moment – this moment – to showcase a white mom's narrative about the joys of transracial adoption.
They need to see that because, in
what has to win some kind of award for tone deafness, Terry Gross and her
producers at WHYY Public Radio, where Fresh
Air is produced for NPR, chose this moment – this moment - to showcase a real-life white mother's narrative about the joys of transracial adoption.
Here’s the description of the June
18 program on the NPR website:
“Blogger [name omitted] talks about how raising two white biological daughters and two black adopted sons helped her understand white privilege.”
(I am not linking to
it or naming the blogger because she’s plugging a book about her life raising
these children, and I’d rather not help promote it. The transcript is easy to
find online.)
One of the Black children was
adopted, as a baby, from foster care.
I guess there’s nothing like exercising white privilege to help you
learn about it. And who knew that the
job of Black children was to teach their white adoptive parents?
What follows is 37 minutes of humblebragging
from this white adoptive parent about things like how her children absolutely
do not have to be grateful to her, she hates savior
narratives and she learned how much easier it is for a white person to buy
shampoo.
I’m not going to go into detail
because the issue here is not transracial adoption.* Nor do I want to suggest that the blogger is not a fine parent who cares about racial justice. The problem isn’t the blogger. The
problem is Fresh Air and the
tone-deafness of its producers.
● They could have interviewed Prof.
Dorothy Roberts of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and author of Shattered
Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, about the havoc child protective services – the child abuse police --
wreak not only in Black families but entire Black communities. (Prof. Roberts
is a member of NCCPR’s volunteer Board of Directors.)
● They could have interviewed
leaders of the Movement for Family Power about their calls to expand the narrative
about defunding and abolition from police to include the child welfare system.
● They could have talked to people
in communities of color across the country whose view of child protective
services is vastly different from the narrative among the white professional
elite – the way Kendra Hurley did for Citylab and Eli Hager did for
The Marshall Project.
● They could have talked to
Stephanie Clifford and Jessica Silver-Greenberg of The New York Times about their landmark 2017 story: “Foster Care as Punishment: The New Reality
of ‘Jane Crow’”
Fresh
Air did none of these things.
It is one more example of the extent to which the racial justice
reckoning has yet to reach child welfare – or the journalism of child welfare.
*- For the record, I am not opposed to adoption. I am not
opposed to all adoption of Black children by white families – though some in
the family preservation movement are.
But it is important to understand that almost no one would even consider
transracial adoption necessary if:
● We stopped taking so many Black
children needlessly in the first place.
● We fully embraced kinship
guardianship, often a preferred approach to permanence for Black families.
● Agencies got serious about finding
adoptive parents in Black communities.
Needless to say, none of that was discussed on Fresh Air.
Needless to say, none of that was discussed on Fresh Air.
