Selling transracial adoption : families, markets, and the color line

While focused on serving children and families, the adoption industry must also generate sufficient revenue to cover an agency’s operating costs. With its fee-for-service model, Elizabeth Raleigh asks, How does private adoption operate as a marketplace? Her eye-opening book, Selling Transracial Adoption, provides a fine-grained analysis of the business decisions in the adoption industry and what it teaches us about notions of kinship and race. Adoption providers, Raleigh declares, are often tasked with pitching the idea of transracial adoption to their mostly white clientele. But not all children are equally “desirable,” and transracial adoption—a market calculation—is hardly colorblind. Selling Transracial Adoption explicitly focuses on adoption providers and employs candid interviews with adoption workers, social workers, attorneys, and counselors, as well as observations from adoption conferences and information sessions, to illustrate how agencies institute a racial hierarchy—especially when the supply of young and healthy infants is on the decline. Ultimately, Raleigh discovers that the racialized practices in private adoption serve as a powerful reflection of race in America. While focused on serving children and families, the adoption industry must also generate sufficient revenue to cover an agency's operating costs. With its fee-for-service model, Elizabeth Raleigh asks, How does private adoption operate as a marketplace? Her eye-opening book, Selling Transracial Adoption, provides a fine-grained analysis of the business decisions in the adoption industry and what it teaches us about notions of kinship and race. Adoption providers, Raleigh declares, are often tasked with pitching the idea of transracial adoption to their mostly white clientele. But not all children are equally "desirable," and transracial adoption-a market calculation-is hardly colorblind. Selling Transracial Adoption explicitly focuses on adoption providers and employs candid interviews with adoption workers, social workers, attorneys, and counselors, as well as observations from adoption conferences and information seto illustratelustrate how agencies institute a racial hierarchy-especially when the supply of young and healthy infants is on the decline. Ultimately, Raleigh discovers that the racialized practices in private adoption serve as a powerful reflection of race in America "Chosen Children" examines the role of the adoption marketplace in shaping how transracial adoptive families are sorted and matched, and analyzes what these practices suggest about race in the United States. In contrast to previous work on race and adoption markets that focus on the experiences of adoptive parents, Raleigh's project focuses on adoption workers--social workers, attorneys, and counselors. Taking a market approach that treats adoptive parents as consumers and children as commodities, Raleigh brings together interviews with adoption practitioners, participant observation at adoption information sessions, and adoption statistics in order to demonstrate how the downturn in supply of "adoptable honorary white children" (which she defines as Asian and hispanic children) led to the increased popularity of the transracial adoption of foreign-born and biracial black children. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Staying Afloat in a Perfect Storm 2. Uneasy Consumers: The Emotion Work of Marketing Adoption 3. Transracial Adoption as a Market Calculation 4. “And You Get to Black”: Racial Hierarchies and the Black–Non-Black Divide 5. Selling Transracial Adoption: Social Workers’ Ideals and Market Concessions Conclusion: The Consequences of Selling Transracial Adoption and the Implications for Adoptive Families Notes References Index