thoughts on family

Last month I was fortunate enough to spend a long weekend with my sister, her husband and their 3 year-old foster son.  They’ve been foster parents for over a year now, so I’ve had the opportunity to learn more than I ever thought I’d want to know about the Florida foster care/adoption system.  They’ve had their current foster son since late February, and it’s getting down to crunch time… they find out later this month whether his natural parents’ rights will be terminated.  Last month I asked my brother-in-law what would happen if that happens, but for some fluke reason they aren’t able to adopt him.  Would it be an easy process to find another family, and how long would it take?  My bro-in-law said it would take about twenty minutes, because he’s white.  His race being what it is (and to a lesser extent the fact that he hasn’t yet reached school age) means that there is a long waiting list of families who would each jump at the chance to adopt him.  

I wasn’t totally shocked to hear that, but I was floored by what my brother-in-law told me next.  In the Florida foster care/adoption system, black children are classified as special needs children.  I couldn’t believe my ears.  Apparently blackness ALONE warrants classification as special needs.  This seemed so wrong, and I was outraged to hear it.  In this system, each child is labeled based on how difficult it is to place him/her in a permanent home.  So, a perfectly healthy black child and a disabled white child will have the same likelihood of being adopted.  This is of course problematic, as it assigns value to a child based solely on race or health.  Even more so, it’s problematic because it assigns value at all, instead of presupposing that each child is inherently valuable.  I was still shocked that a state-wide system could be set up this way, and my brother-in-law pointed out that the characteristics of the system itself are neither here nor there.  It merely reflects what’s going on in the society at large.  In other words, the system doesn’t label or assign each child as anything at all, but simply mirrors the reality of how Floridians view these children.  

At this point, I asked the next logical question and I got more social commentary. How does the Florida system classify children of other races? The part of Florida they live in has a very, very small Asian population.  The main races represented are white, black and Hispanic.  Mike and Sarah have never had an Hispanic foster child.  They’ve had several black children, but all of them eventually were placed with other family members.  The white children, however, seem to be good candidates for adoption.  

In my view, this speaks volumes about the structure and role of the family unit among different races.  At least in Florida, Hispanic children rarely enter foster care.  (Not only have my sister and brother-in-law never had an Hispanic foster child, they don’t know anything else who has either).  It seems that the Hispanic family is so strong that another family member almost always intervenes before things escalate to the point of a child being removed.  In black families children will be taken away, but more often than not someone (usually a grandmother) will step forward and care for the child.  In white families, this support is noticeably absent.  If a child is taken away, typically he/she will eventually be adopted.  There aren’t any other family members available or willing to take the child.

Granted, these are broad observations based on limited anecdotal evidence.  But even so, there seems to be a bit of truth here.  Why is it that the concept of family is so different among people of different races? 

I’m still sort of processing all of this information.  I’m not yet in the synthesize and conclude stage, but I wanted to get this out there to see if anyone else has some thoughts.  It’s a difficult thing to think about when it’s not just a thought experiment, but you can actually see these things play out in the sobering world of social services.