ON THIS DAY IN 1996: The Inter-Ethnic Adoption Act was signed into law.   That statute prohibited federally-funded adoption agencies from requiring that the race of adoptive parents match the child they wish to adopt. This was particularly significant in speeding up the adoption of African American children who otherwise tended to languish in foster care longer than white children. Curiously, it was the National Association of Black Social Workers who most opposed this approach. A few years before the statute was passed the NABSW president testified before Congress that its members viewed “placement of Black children in white homes” as “a blatant form of racial and cultural genocide.”