Adoption together with the black church

Being a black male puts you in one of the least desired categories of Americans, because "dark skin" and "negro dialect"---as Sen. Harry Reid suggested---can keep one from being embraced by mainstream America. What is worse is being a black male orphan born in America. According to a new study by the Centre for Economic Policy Research in Great Britain, African-American males are the least likely to be adopted. To reach that conclusion, economists analyzed specific data from an online adoption facilitator that assists child services agencies that deal with birth mothers and adoptive parents. The data, gathered from June 2004 to August 2009, cover more than 800 children who were available for adoption.

According to the report:

We show that adoptive parents exhibit significant biases in favor of girls and against African-American babies. A non-African-American baby relinquished for adoption attracts the interest of potential adoptive parents with probability 11.5% if it is a girl and 7.9% if it is a boy. As for race, a non-African-American baby has a probability of attracting the interest of an adopting parent at least seven times as high as the corresponding probability for an African-American baby.

This problem could easily be remedied if more evangelical adoption organizations partnered with black churches to increase the number of adoptions. In most black churches, adoption has not been popular because, historically, black orphans are usually rare, as family members, however distant, would take in the children of relatives. However, as the breakdown of the black family occurred in the 1970s by much of the social programming of the federal government, black orphans became more of a problem.

In 2008, the North American Council on Adoptable Children, the Child Welfare League of America, the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, and the National Association of Black Social Workers sought to amend federal laws dealing with transracial adoption, arguing that black children in foster care are ill-served by a "colorblind" approach meant to encourage their adoption by white families. The colorblind approach may actually harm black kids if they are not consciously connected to black culture, as is inferred from a report by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute.

Increasing the number of black adoptive parents will require more education, cooperation, and partnerships among the roughly 46,000 black congregations in America. Evangelicals are growing in their awareness of the implications of James 1:27 and are leading Christians nationally in is this area in many ways. The next big step is to include more church leaders from minority communities in the Christian adoption movement.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, there are only 36,913 black kids ready to be adopted today because they are truly without parents. If one family in every black congregation would adopt one child, all the black children currently in the system would have a Christian home, especially black males. It really is that simple.