That grim admonition, from an african-American lawyer, haunts the film ““Losing Isaiah,’’ which opens nationwide this week. A white social worker (played by Jessica Lange) adopts a black baby abandoned in a garbage heap. His crack-addicted biological mother (Halle Berry) is so devastated when she thinks she killed her baby that she gets herself arrested and kicks drugs. Later, when she learns Isaiah is alive, she fights to win him back – even though that means wrenching him from the only family he’s known.
Now switch reels from Hollywood to Washington. There, on Capitol Hill, interracial adoption is creating an odd alliance between Republicans and liberals who agree white families should be allowed to adopt minority kids. The GOP’s ““Contract With America,’’ and the fine print of the welfare-reform bill passed last week by the House Ways and Means Committee, would deny federal funds to agencies that discriminate in placing children based on race. The measure was introduced by GOPRep. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, whose own daughter had to fight to adopt a black child. Even former Democratic senator Howard Metzenbaum supports the GOP bill, though it would repeal an act he passed last year. That law was intended to ease interracial adoptions, but regulations being prepared by the Department of Health and Human Services would make such adoptions even more difficult. Metzenbaum told Newsweek: ““Some bastards at HHS intervened and did the bill great harm.''
In the 1960s, agencies actively recruited white families to adopt minority and other hard-to-place children. Then in 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers condemned the practice as ““cultural genocide,’’ arguing that even the best white parents cannot give black children a proper sense of identity. Interracial adoptions are now officially or unofficially barred in 43 states. Critics say that’s left a disproportionate number of minority children languishing in foster care, waiting often twice as long as whites to be adopted. The National Adoption Center’s register showed that in 1991, an estimated 67 percent of kids waiting for homes were black; only 31 percent of the families seeking children to adopt were black.
The most dramatic cases are those in which minority kids are taken away from white parents who’ve been raising them. A Maryland court ruled last year that the Washington County Department of Social Services had done a ““grave injustice’’ to Sylvia and Michael Mauk by removing Tiffany, a black baby who had flourished under their foster care. The white Hagerstown couple had already adopted a black daughter and a biracial son, but the agency awarded Tiffany instead to a black couple – the foster parents of her brothers. The Mauks vow to press the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Says Sylvia Mauk, ““If you are a good parent, it doesn’t matter what color the child is.''
Black social workers argue that it does matter – and that if agencies worked harder to recruit black parents and reduce the fees they charge them ($5,000 to $10,000 per adoption), there would be no shortage. The GOP would give a tax credit to lowerincome couples who adopt – a move to expand the pool of willing families. ““Losing Isaiah’’ suggests another solution: both women eventually pitch in to care for him together. But then, Congress rarely wraps up dramas as neatly as Hollywood does.
