Quote from a book I’m currently reading

EthicsofTransracialAdoption[1]

"Transracial adoption helps individual children by placing them in permanent adoptive homes, but it does nothing to repair the web of racial injustice that makes so many black children available for adoption in the first place."

— Hawley Fogg-Davis, The Ethics of Transracial Adoption.

ETA: Although this quote is about domestic transracial adoption of black children in the U.S., it could easily be changed to:


"Transracial/transnational adoption helps individual children by placing them in
permanent adoptive homes, but it does nothing to repair the web of
racial/social/political/government injustice that makes so many children available for
adoption in the first place."

Author: JaeRan

Assistant professor at UW Tacoma, writer, and researcher.

4 thoughts

  1. I think of it like this: Yes, there were some righteous gentiles during the Holocaust, and individual Jews were saved (some were even adopted). Does that mean that the Nazis should have been allowed to continue running Auschwitz?

  2. I think that is very true. I am infinitely grateful that my two amazing daughters (from China) are in my life. I also think, that as an adoptive parent, it’s my responsibility to fight to repair that web of injustice that allowed me to have them.

  3. I don’t follow the concentration camp analogy. Some portion of children (a minority of those who actually are placed for adoption, I’d readily guess–as I agree with that Fogg-Davis quote) would need to be adopted, even if racism didn’t exist and even if social services were ideal. And I’d venture that it should be possible to avoid transracial placements for those children.
    Nobody ever “needed” to be placed in a concentration camp. Or are you making the TRA=cultural genocide argument?

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