Adoption Rules and Racial Rights

Adoption is Not a Simple Recipe

“The prevailing idea of adoption is tidy and neat,” Angela Tucker writes in her new book You Should Be Grateful. “It’s a simple recipe. A family with extra love and resources meets a child in need of both. What’s not to love about this?”

But adoption is far from simple. Tucker, who was born to an African-American mother and adopted by a white couple, shares her story of growing up in a white family in a white town in a white state. Despite having a wonderful childhood, Tucker acknowledges the complexities of adoption and the desire for a world where her birth mother could have kept her.

A Complicated Journey

Tucker’s vivid description of the complex emotions that accompanied her on the journey to finding her birth family will be an education for those who haven’t given the concept of adoption much thought. She shares the challenges of growing up black in a white family and the difficulties of fitting in. But she also reminds us that many people exist in this intersection of happiness and tragedy.

Policy Solutions

Tucker’s book is ultimately a mishmash of her own story and “research” she has picked up from progressive academics. While she is right that adoption is not neat and any policy solutions to the problems of our child welfare system will have to recognize the complexity of these issues, her nuance seems to go out the window when she turns from the personal to the political.

Source: Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum, is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.

*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases