Oh, I forgot something which is important. In the U.S., one often doesn’t have to pay fees to adopt special needs kids, or hard to place children. other than the normal legal fees associated with them – and they are quite small. In fact, one can get help, even for white kids, when they fall into this category. And, often, once a child is school age, they fall into this category. Color or race isn’t the issue. Age is the issue.
There are more black children in the system for three reasons: first, more wind up in the system (this isn’t the place to discuss that), second, fewer black families formally adopt children. There is often an informal process amongst blacks, but when that breaks down, and it has, you wind up with all these kids who have nowhere to go. And thirdly, some time ago black social workers got up in arms about white folks adopting children of color, because they felt it was a sort of “genocide,” and, as a part of that, white parents couldn’t possibly appropriately bring up a black child. Their “black” identity would be extinguished. These are 3 very real reasons why there are more black kids in the system than any other at this time.
There are incentives for all adoptive parents of hard to place kids, regardless of the child’s color or ethnicity. Not foreign born kids, but kids born right here in the U.S.A., and there are millions of them that need homes.
The fact is, the author probably wanted an infant – a new born. The wait in the U.S. for white children and even bi-racial children can be long, even with an expensive adoption service. Frankly, it has gotten so even black infants are becoming a premium – it’s not until after the bio mom has either decided she can’t take care of the child, or has had it taken away, that they enter the system. And, often, by that time, many are no longer considered infants – which for the purposes of adoption, usually means school age.
