Addressing interracial adoption issues important

All last week at the Interactions hair salon in Provo, shop owner Tamu Smith and her customers have been talking about Haitian orphans and what it means for a white family to take in a black child.

Smith is a black woman married to a white man. She's mom to both biological and adopted children, hair dresser and confidant of many black children and their adoptive white parents. And as talk turns to Utahns and their efforts to provide homes to Haitian orphans in the wake of the earthquake, she says she's glad so many want to help children in need. But it's naive to think that love for the child alone will erase cultural differences.

"I think people who adopt interracially feel that 'if I provide a great home and love, if I center them in the gospel of the LDS Church or any church, then this fixes the problem' and you can trump some of the cultural differences," she said. "Even in the best of homes, they will eventually look at their parents and say, 'I'm different.' "

What to do with those differences is the stuff not of chance, but of reflection and hard work, experts say.

"So many adoptees are struggling with what it means to be black," says University of Utah Ph.D. candidate Darron Smith, who is completing a dissertation on transracial adoptions in Utah and who, with BYU sociology professor Cardell Jacobson, interviewed dozens of black adults who were adopted as children by white families.

Whether they had black or biracial biological parents, as these children in their new white families become teens, some may be unsure where they fit in — the black world or the white world, both or in-between. Some biracial adoptees even report being afraid of blacks. He said his research found most got past those struggles, though their teen years were often painful. The majority of the grown adoptees he interviewed are now "doing fine."

White adoptive parents must realize, he says, "that love is not enough." Tamu Smith wonders who will teach those children "how to be a black adult." Black children face issues that white parents have never faced, such as racism. The parents must bring the local black community into the child's life as both mentors and family friends, they agree. For Haitian children, that should mean enlisting Utah's Haitian community.