Since 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers has opposed transracial adoption (white families adopting black children) on claims that it inhibits black children from obtaining a racial identity, and robs them of the skills necessary to withstand societal racism.

Decade after decade, the NABSW has renewed this stance—a neo-segregationist notion operating under the guise of self-determination. It is a stance that can be traced to that coveted African-American orthopraxy which strictly prohibits one’s white partner from being seated with the rest of the family at the Sunday dinner table.

Real as it is, we’d be kidding ourselves to pretend that the National Association of Social Workers wouldn’t be buried beneath a stigma of racism if it too had taken a similar stance against transracial adoption. And surely, nothing more than the nonsensicalness of such a stance would keep the NASW on the hook, allowing us all to eternally condemn the social work profession until the stance was repudiated in an official public repentance of sorts.

But as of late, the Haitian earthquake has brought transracial adoption to the forefront of American imagery—an appeal to our inner altruist—languid and vivid in all of its disproportions. We’ve seen scores of white American adoptive parents waiting nervously at the airport, eagerly anticipating the moment of true amnesty when their black Haitian sons will arrive through gate 73, not as refugees, but as new members of the family.

We’ve even seen Gov. Rendell (D-PA) usher in a plane of Haitian orphans to the safety of American life—a politically expedient gesture in a time of great American outpouring for Haitian misery.

Beautiful as it is to see, one can’t help but get the feeling that it all seems a little contrived, like the inconspicuously engineered rainbow tribes of Angelina Jolie and Madonna. It seems as if adopting impoverished black children from third-world nations is “in”—a fad bemusing the latest accessory in fashion, as if being seen sporting an internationally adopted black baby on one’s waist is chic.

If it’s black poverty we’re all after, there are plenty of unparented black children here in America. We’d need only look for them in South Central LA, New Orleans, Detroit, and Cleveland. Poverty is no less visible or real in Bed-Stuy than it is in Malawi, or Port-au-Prince for that matter; just ask the orphans who live there. Surely, Madonna and Angelina Jolie know that they’re there, in the public and visible custody of the state, shirtless and shoeless like the exploited toddlers in “Save the Children” ads.

Could it be that adopting African-American children is out of season and unfashionable, as if an African-American child is just a cheap American knock-off of the real thing—a prized African or Haitian orphan? Is it that there’s no multi-million dollar 501c3 willing to put an abandoned black child from East St. Louis on television to solicit some 17 cents a day?

You’ll excuse my protectionist tone, but this “white flight” to transracial adoption seems all but disingenuous, fundamentally no different than the racial exoticism that made Josephine Baker famous for dancing in a dress made of bananas.

Where white adoptive parents in America are willing to forgo racial differences to care for children not of their own, many seem to be unwilling to forgo these same racial differences when it comes to nationality, language, and space.

Rescuing children [across race] from the impoverished oblivions of their abandonment is admirable, but racially objectifying them like transnationally traded commodities isn’t interracial love, it’s colonialism. And we all know what that did for racial progress.

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