I Wrongly Lost Seven of My Children to the White Supremacist Child Welfare System and Five to Transracial Adoption: Damn NAAM!
The racist child welfare system continue to target and separate thousands of Afro-American families and adopt them out to whites which then purposely isolate them from their True [birth] families and culture.
Here we are again. Another November and another National Adoption Awareness Month (NAAM) and/or National Adoption Month (NAM) is being celebrated and trending on social media. This is the second year that I have decided to write something REAL to add to the narrative. Although I must say that my decision was actually made for me when I found myself bombarded with countless tweets in my feed with the hashtags #NAAM and #NAAM19. Unsurprisingly most of said tweets were and are praising adoptive parents, and child welfare adoption in general, and together they serve to create and uphold the standard propagandistic image that we are all very familiar with. The image that child welfare and adoption professionals (and adoptive parents themselves) have worked hard to present. You know what image I am talking about. The one where adoptive parents are hailed and lauded as selfless, noble, saint-like individuals whose efforts to save unwanted, unloved, and severely abused/neglected children, by providing them unconditionally loving homes, make them worthy of admiration and validation.
I did see some other perspectives, mostly from adoptees and True/birth families whose experiences enabled them to see past the hype and mania about child welfare adoption, manage to get through hoards of positive and almost euphoric articles and tweets from child welfare agencies and professionals, adoptive parents, and uninformed/unaffected members of the public. However, those (real) perspectives were and are few and far between. For me, Novembers are hard enough but when you add the pervasive NAAM/NAM celebrations it becomes almost unbearable. For all of those who know me, my work, or my previous writings, you know how I got here and for all those who don’t I will give a brief background. In 2013/15 my children were unjustly removed by the (racist) and incompetent Lucas County (Toledo, Ohio) child protection services even though I was the a DV surviver and unoffending parent.
Despite being a full-time college student with an associates degree, no history of mental health or addiction issues who had recently been illegally evicted from my home, my children stating and wanting to be returned to me, completing most of the case plan without being offered the “services” that I was entitled to, prematurely filing for TPR, and provable misconduct and misrepresentations on behalf of several CPS workers, I never got my children back. Instead, most of my children were systematically adopted out to white families who have made absolutely no effort to connect with me. That said, I wish that I could say that my experience was unique but it is far from it. Low-income Afro-American families commonly experience such negative and unjust outcomes within the child welfare system and there has been numerous studies that confirm as much. All of this brings me to the reason why I hate NAAM and NAM. I know some of you must be thinking. It’s only for one month out of the year. Why not? What harm can it do?
A lot. Actually.
Because as an Afro-American parental rights activist and advocate and mother who has lived through it, and witnessed many other True/birth parents forced to do the same, the narrative is just plan wrong and damn right offensive to True/birth parents and families who wrongly lost their children and family members. Children that they loved dearly. Children that they could’ve cared for and raised in safety and peace had they been white. That is not to say that low-income white parents don’t experience wrongful child removals and terminations at the hands of the American child welfare system, it is just that it happens far less than it does with Afro-Americans — and even when it does there is much more social and legal capital available to them than there is to Afro-American parents thanks in large part to the the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and the white supremacist society in which we live. Yes, adoption can be a beautiful thing under the right circumstances. The problem is that those circumstances are becoming more and more elusive, especially from Afro-American parents, for children and families trapped within the child welfare system.
And then there are the questionable actions, to put it mildly, of many white adoptive parents (Yes, I said it) — many of whom actually go out of their way to erase the cultural identity of the Afro-American children they adopt as well as to keep them away from their True/birth families. Many do this without compassion and with callous disregard and contempt for the birth/True families. One disturbing trend that I recently became aware of, one that I have personal experience with, is that of white adoptive parents changing, both formally and informally, the “ethnic” or “Black-sounding” FIRST names of their Afro-American adoptive children to Caucasian sounding names like Becky or Sarah — in addition to the last names being changed which is a standard procedure after an adoption. In my case, and without my knowledge or permission, the CPS workers and foster families began using and/or calling my children Caucasian sounding names even before my TPR so as to already have my children used to their “new name”. That’s how sure these people were that my children were never coming home. I have since found out that my children’s adoptive parents legally changed their first names also — I still don’t know the new “white” names that they choose to give them.
I am sure that there are some transracial adoptive parents that don’t do these things and that truly try to do right by their Afro-American adoptive children — that is, they understand and speak-up about the issues within the child welfare system, they choose an OPEN adoption, encourage contact/communication with True/birth parents and family members and embrace the child’s blackness in tangible ways. And that is great. However, per my personal and professional experience as a mother and as a former foster child myself — who was unjustly taken from my activist mother though she was able to get me back after two-plus years of jumping though hoops and fighting the state — I must admit that I will always be suspicious of adoptive parents that choose to adopt through the child welfare system.
Why?
Because many (white) adoptive parents outright refuse to accept the fact that the child welfare polices that encourage them to transracially adopt also enable and reward rampant institutional and structural racism, constitutional and civil rights violations within the system — resulting in thousands of wrongful removals of Afro-American children and TPR’s of Afro-American parents annually. Moreover, many (white) perspective adoptive parents not only refuse to speak-up if they see something wrong they actively work to sabotage family reunifications — especially in the cases of infant and toddler Afro-American children who tend to be the most desirable within the child welfare adoption scheme (because they are the most malleable and least likely to remember their families)— I have personally seen it happen in multiple cases including my own. And yes, it is true that there are financial incentives in child welfare adoptions (though there is almost none for family preservation). Both to the states and the adoptive parents — disabled or “special needs” children allow for additional monies to the state and adoptive parents.
All of the pain and trauma that these closed transracial child welfare adoptions cause, and not just to the True/birth parents and families, but to the adoptees themselves is immense. Unjustly losing my children caused me to develop severe PTSD that I still struggle with daily — which is extremely common in parents and children that have had contact with the child welfare system. My mother also developed the disorder after I and my sister were removed from her although neither of us knew what it was at the time. It is the trauma of losing my children and the resulting PTSD that led me to agree to have my story featured in Psychology Today magazine (I will include a link to the article below) provided that my experience with the child welfare system be included. Untimely, it is the trauma, white privilege/supremacy, racism, oppression, civil/constitutional/human rights violations and the destruction of natural familial bonds that everyone is celebrating and encouraging when they choose to celebrate, promote, and acknowledge November as national adoption awareness month and/or national adoption month.
All that said, and considering the time of year it is, I want to take this time to let my children know — and the countless other (Afro-American) children out there who were needlessly and heinously separated from their parents and families — that you are loved. You weren’t not wanted. There were family members and friends that wanted to care for you but weren’t allowed to. And please be proud of who and what you are. Strong, resilient, majestic, beautiful, intelligent princes and princesses, kings and queens. After all, ever since slavery — and make no mistake our current child welfare system is a modern from of slavery and oppression for Black people — our families have been separated and destroyed by white supremacist systems and yet we somehow managed to survive and we will continue to survive. No matter what anyone says, or how long it has been, your True/biological family will always love you and will continue praying for your safe return.
#NationalAdoptionMonth #NationalAdoptionAwarenessMonth #NAFPAorg #WhiteSupremacistCPS #AfricanAmericanChildWelfareAct #CasaSoWhite #BlackFamilyMatters #BlackLoveMatters #BlackLivesMatter #BlackFamiliesBelongTogether #BlackHistory #BlackMothersForCPSAbolition #BlackMothersForChildWelfareReform #AbolishCPS #AbolishFosterCare #RepealASFANow #EndCPS #KeepBlackFamiliesTogether
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Latagia Copeland-Tyronce, MSW, CADAS, is a longtime parental rights and social justice advocate, child welfare reform activist, writer/blogger, and journalist whose work has been featured in BlackMattersUs and Rise Magazine. She is the founder, president, and executive director of the National African American Families First and Preservation Association (NAFPA) a groundbreaking 501c4 nonprofit origination, the first of its kind, devoted exclusively to the protection and preservation of the African American (Black) Family though policy and legislative advocacy.
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