Adoption in a Color-Blind Society

Recent adoption policy changes are based on assumptions that race is no longer relevant and that if government officials and activists would just get out of the way, adoption would provide one means of eradicating the fixation on race and racism. Adoption in a Color-Blind Society examines the public presentation of private adoption agency Web sites and 'race talk' in adoption chat rooms to lay bare the lie of color-blind discourse and reveal that rather than eroding, the meaning of race has shifted. The private adoption market provides an illustration of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's thesis of the Latinization of the U.S. as biracial children are either "downgraded" or "upgraded" into a tri-racial system of categories depending at least in part upon their heritage. Drawing also on popular adoption literature and information in the public domain, the book provides a critical interpretation of the discursive practices of private adoption and argues that despite the current discourse of equity in contemporary adoption, African American children continue to be marginalized as bargain basement deals. Color-blind individualism extends beyond the U.S. to our new global reality where children are simply another commodity within the transnatinal marketplace of adoption.

Pamela Anne Quiroz is associate professor of Policy Studies and Sociology at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She is also a research fellow at the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy.