Social science finds no evidence that being raised by white parents is harmful to black children.
After news broke in 2010 that an earthquake in Haiti had claimed upward of 250,000 lives and displaced 1.5 million survivors, most Americans took note of the tragedy, thought to themselves how awful it was, and then resumed their daily lives. Others went a little further, generously donating money and goods to relief organizations like the Red Cross. And then there were people like Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s pick to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.
In the aftermath of the earthquake, the Barrett family adopted a toddler named John Peter from a Haitian orphanage. It was their second time adopting from Haiti. Several years earlier, they had taken in an orphaned girl named Vivian. During an interview last year at the Notre Dame Club of Washington, D.C., Judge Barrett, who sits on the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, discussed her adopted children.
“We knew that we wanted to adopt internationally—the wait for domestic adoption was just very, very long—and there were so many children in need,” she said. “Vivian is amazing. She was 14 months old when she came home and she couldn’t make any sounds at that point. Nor could she pull herself up to a standing position, and she was wearing size zero- to 3-month clothing because she was so malnourished.”
Judge Barrett said that she and her husband, Jesse, were told at the time that Vivian may never speak. “She’d been so sick [that] she hadn’t had a lot of practice making sounds and she hadn’t been spoken to a lot.” Today, all that has changed. “Vivian is incredibly athletic now, and trust me, the speech has not been a problem,” she joked. “I was looking at her the other day at the gym and just thinking what a miracle it is how strong she’s become.”
Most reasonable people would agree that the Barretts’ decision to adopt one sickly orphan and then another following the worst natural disaster in Haiti’s history isn’t merely admirable but heroic. Yet Judge Barrett has been attacked by luminaries of the political left who are outraged that the adoptions were transracial. On Saturday, Ibram X. Kendi, a Boston University professor and author of the best-selling book “How to Be an Antiracist,” questioned the judge’s motives. “Some White colonizers ‘adopted’ Black children,” he wrote onTwitter. “They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage’ children in the ‘superior’ ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian and CNN political commentator, wonders whether Vivian and John Peter weren’t adopted so much as kidnapped. “Many authoritarians seized children of color for adoption by White Christians,” she tweeted. “Pinochet’s regime did this with indigenous kids and Nazis took Aryan looking Poles for German families. Trump takes migrant kids for adoption by Evangelicals.”
It would be a mistake to laugh this off as knee-jerk anti-Trumpism. The sort of racial hype and paranoia coming from the progressive left long predates the current administration and will continue whether or not Mr. Trump is re-elected next month. The National Association of Black Social Workers first announced its opposition to transracial adoption in 1972. In a statement, the group took “a vehement stand against the placements of black children in white homes for any reason” and called such arrangements not only “unnatural” but “unnecessary” and harmful to the physical and psychological development of black children.
But what do the empirical data show? In their 2018 book, “Saving International Adoption,” Mark Montgomery and Irene Powell assess the vast literature on interracial adoptions and report that it reveals no evidence of harm to black children. Comparing black adoptees in white families with those in black families, there is no statistical difference between the groups in terms of self-esteem, self-concept and family integration, and “only a small, if any, effect on objective outcomes such as school performance and behavioral problems,” they write. The “overwhelming conclusion of studies of transracial adoption is that it is not bad for children. This greatly weakens the case of the opponents of transracial and transnational adoption on the grounds that it harms children.”
The reality is that there are more black children in need of adoption, here and abroad, than there are black families who have expressed a willingness to take them in. Liberals who advocate for apartheid adoption policies are putting an aesthetic preference ahead of the needs of homeless kids. The question isn’t whether Vivian and John Peter’s situation is ideal. It’s whether they are better off wallowing in a Haitian orphanage or living with parents in the U.S. who want to care for them and happen to be of a different race.
This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal