July 13, 1971 was a hot, muggy day in Menomonie, Wisconsin. My family breathed a collective sigh of relief as we stepped into the cool anteroom of the town's courthouse. Our appearance there was the culmination of my parents' two-year effort to adopt a young boy into our family.
On this day, the courts would officially recognize Casey and Cooper Moo as brothers. As far as Casey and I were concerned, the legal world was way behind the times. A Hennepin County adoption agency had placed Casey in our home more than a year earlier, and we had already been through a full calendar of events together: a Halloween, a Thanksgiving, and a Christmas. We'd swapped candy corns for jelly beans, shared leftover turkey, and fought over presents. We didn't need a piece of paper to tell us we were brothers.
For our parents, the event was perhaps more significant. After today, Mom and Dad could answer the question "Is he yours?" the way they wanted to answer it: "Yes, this is Casey, our youngest son."
We entered the courtroom of Judge Bundy, who was finishing another case. Casey was 3, I was almost 5. We gawked at the grandeur of the courtroom and shied when Judge Bundy glanced our way. Suddenly our parents motioned us to approach the bench. Our family stood before the man in black robes while our attorney handed him the paperwork. I was smiling and found I couldn't stop. I looked at Casey and saw he was grinning too. Nervous energy. After a short bout of paper shuffling, the judge pronounced everything in order. He paused and removed his reading glasses to look down at us.
"You two young men ready to be brothers?" he asked. We responded with low giggles and nodded vigorously. "Well, why don't you guys come up here and make it official?"
Judge Bundy held out his gavel to indicate that Casey and I could be the ones to strike it and make our kinship a matter of legal record. Excitement filled us as we climbed the stairs to the stand. "Here," said the judge as he carefully took my right hand and Casey's left and wrapped them around the gavel.
I will carry this image my entire life: Casey's small black hand above my small white hand gripping the handle. Together we slammed the hammer home—whack! Casey and I whooped in delight. What a great sound! We looked at the judge. Like Casey and me, he wore a huge grin. But he also had tears in his eyes—as did everyone else in the room. "What was everybody crying about?" we wondered. I mean, Casey and I were elated—we were officially brothers!
"Cultural Genocide": The Politics of Transracial Adoption
Had our court date been even a year later, the above event might never have taken place. In 1972, at its fourth annual conference, the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) delivered a position paper in strong opposition to transracial adoption. While transracial adoption (TRA) can refer to adoption of a child of any racial background into a family of a different racial background, the term is most commonly used to refer specifically to the adoption of African-American children by Caucasian parents. A year after the 1972 NABSW conference, transracial adoptions plummeted from 2,574 to 1,569—a drop of 39 percent. Two years later, the number had sunk to 733. TRA in America has never fully recovered from the NABSW position paper, which in part read:
Black children in white homes are cut off from healthy development of themselves as black people.... We the participants of the workshop have committed ourselves to go back to our communities and work to end this particular form of genocide.
Immediately after the NABSW's 1972 conference, TRA became extremely controversial. On one side of the issue were adoptive parents of African-American children and private adoption agencies that arranged transracial adoptions. This group steadfastly defended TRA as a much-needed option for the growing number of black children in the foster care system. On the other side were the NABSW and a host of other agencies, primarily state and federal, who believed that insufficient efforts were being made to recruit black families for black children. They also questioned the ability of white parents to understand racism and prepare black children for it. How would white parents respond when their children came home from school and asked, "What does 'nigger' mean?" How could a black child have positive black role models if he or she were removed from the black community and raised in an almost exclusively white world? Additionally, some African Americans cited transracial adoption as another form of "integration"—a concept that to many was synonymous with obliteration of black culture.
The furor rose to such a pitch that my parents, who for career reasons had moved the family to Kodiak, Alaska, soon after adopting Casey, worried that the TRA debate raging in the Lower 48 states might result in an effort to remove black children from their adoptive white families. Our family was far too busy being a family to listen to those who would tell us we could not be. From the moment Casey joined us we became a mixed-race family, and we dealt with all its issues—including racism—together.
