Ad Pushes Black and Latino Parents to Adopt

During one of my brief TV watching sessions the past week, I was honestly a little confused when I heard an ad in Spanish on a mostly monolingual English station.

The ad was a cute 30 second cartoon encouraging Latino parents to adopt. The pitch is: “You don't have to be perfect to be a perfect parent.” Awww…

Apparently, this ad is a part of an entire Ad Council campaign that's trying to get Black and Latino parents to adopt Black and Latino kids, particularly older kids and teenagers. In 2006, Black kids made up 15 percent of the nation's children and 32 percent of kids in foster care while many of their adoptive parents were white.

The problems with the foster care system are so much bigger than any ad campaign can fix in a big swoop. There are concrete laws and policies adoption centers have that steer away Black and Latino parents from adoption while simultaneously not preparing white parents to raise a child of color. These laws and policies found their ground in the Multiethnic Placement Act (MEPA) which, a recent report by the Donaldson Adoption Institute found, is failing to meet parents' and children's needs when it comes to race.

From a Washington Post article about the report:

The report cited a 2006 study of dark-complexioned adoptees in white homes, which found that "for many children . . . a white skin color was so desirable that they rubbed themselves with white body lotion, cream or white chalk, or, alternatively, tried to wipe off the brown color."

Dark-complexioned children adopted from outside the United States were often similarly troubled. Children "adopted from Sri Lanka and Colombia who expressed the wish to be white or to have been born into the family had more behavior problems," the new report said.

During my brief stint as a tutor for foster care kids here in Oakland, I got a very small glimpse into the complicated and inefficient foster care system here. The problems are deep, to put it simply. While I don't think an ad campaign can "fix" all the problems with foster care, I have to recognize that finally there is some popular attention to the problems of race and racism that keep some adopted kids from growing up with healthy racial identities and parents who affirm who they are.

Check out the ad for yourself:

(see video below)

Leticia Miranda is the youth program coordinator at The Freedom Archives and an editorial intern at ColorLines.