Selling Transracial Adoption: Families, Markets, and the Color Line by Elizabeth Raleigh

Abstract

404 ADOPTION & CULTURE 62 Rev. of Selling Transracial Adoption: Families, Markets, and the Color Line. ELIZABETH RALEIGH. Temple University Press, 2018 250 pp. $34.95 (Paperback) ISBN: 9781-4399-1478-6. By Kimberly McKee International and domestic adoption require individuals to grapple with the complexities of what it means when children exist in a market economy. These adoption practices are further complicated when considering the role race operates in placing a monetary value on children. Selling Transracial Adoption: Families, Markets, and the Color Line by Elizabeth Raleigh offers a nuanced and compelling discussion of the consumerism of international and domestic adoption economies. She notes this is not a critique of individual adoptive parents’ actions; rather, the monograph seeks to delineate the contradictions and complexities in the ways transracial adoption is packaged to adoptive parents. Raleigh offers a firsthand account of adoption service providers’ understandings of adoption as a business and not as an altruistic endeavor, with the latter being the dominant trope whereby adoption is a humanitarian act of child-saving and rescue. She conducted in-person interviews with East Coast adoption professionals and phone interviews with adoption professionals from the Midwest, the South, and the West Coast. These interviews were complemented by participant observation. Raleigh attended over forty conferences and information sessions, either in-person or online, to see how adoption workers navigated the complexities of selling adoption to potential adopters and expressed the various services their agencies offer to prospective adoptive parents. Selling Transracial Adoption outlines multiple ways agencies strive to keep their doors open even as the pipeline of available, adoptable children declines. From intentionally designed promotional materials to the language deployed by adoption workers, adoption agencies empower parents to see themselves as customers. Raleigh recounts witnessing adoption workers performing emotional labor as they seek to balance portraying adoption as both social service and customer service. In doing so, these agency professionals remind parents that they are not buying children; rather, prospective adoptive parents are seeking a service in their desire to create a family. Agencies also discuss the exponential growth of new markets (e.g., Ethiopia) and emergence of new markets as ones close down to allow for survival during a time of overall decline in international adoptions). Raleigh crafts a compelling examination of how markets of children are created and how this shopping for children is packaged to become palatable for prospective adoptive parents as they select the children they wish to adopt. She is careful to underscore the ways in which adoption agency professionals reframe the selection process of children into notions of fit. An emphasis is placed on finding the right match for both parents and child. According to Raleigh, euphemisms abound that mask potentially contentious or controversial topics concerning transracial adoption, open adoption, or adopting children with special needs. Euphemisms facilitate the ability for parents not to engage in a deeper reflection on their REVIEWS 405 consumer desires or the biases attached to them. Raleigh notes, “the tone of the word ‘fit’ implies an innocuous individualized preference. In addition, the word is free from judgment and blame” (80). This language underscores the intentional work to accommodate prospective adoptive parents as clients. Such language reflects how adoption agency staff and social workers accommodate prospective adoptive parents’ requests, as these individuals are interested in having their consumerist desires met by adoption agencies. The emphasis on fit seeks to hide the messiness that arises when adoptable children are ranked by desirability. Not only does this account for prospective adoptive parents’ gender preferences but also their preferences concerning race and ability. Raleigh notes the emergence of hierarchies with White healthy children placed at the top and Black children placed at the bottom. Interspersed in between are healthy Asian and Hispanic children. Yet, most significant in this discussion is Raleigh’s attention to prospective adoptive parents’ acceptance of foreign-born African children and US-born biracial (i.e., part-White) Black children. And it is with these racial preferences that Raleigh argues parents negotiate their own personal color lines with what they can accept into their families. At the same time, adoption agency professionals facilitate adoptive parents’ pathways to contemplating transracial adoptions. Raleigh notes that social workers...