A cursory Google search reveals dozens (if not hundreds) of blogs and books about adoption written by white adoptive parents, yet there are relatively few by people of color. Adoptive Black Mom is one of a handful of bloggers writing about her experience adopting her daughter, a black teenager named Hope, from foster care when she was a preteen. She began blogging about her experience in the fall of 2013, writing under a pseudonym to protect her (and now her daughter’s) identity. In the beginning, her blog mainly discussed her experience going through the adoption process; now, it details her day-to-day life with her daughter. A couple of weeks ago, she was kind enough to sit with me and talk about her thoughts on race and adoption from foster care. She has a warm personality and an infectious laugh.

In one of her first blog posts, Adoptive Black Mom explained that she always felt as though she would eventually adopt. Being a black woman didn’t have a large impact on her experience adopting, as she made sure to work with a diverse agency and even had other people of color in her parenting classes. However, on her blog, she discussed realizing that strangers would view her as a single black mother and begin to associate her with negative tropes about black motherhood once she was a parent. About nine months after applying to her local agency’s older child adoption program, the decision to adopt her daughter was finalized.

Adoptive Black Mom has blogged about her experience every step of the way, and I wondered how she confronts a problem that often crops up in the adoption community: adoptive parents overshadowing the voices of adoptees. Because her blog focuses on her experience as an adoptive parent, I asked her how she avoids speaking over adoptees. “I defer,” she responded immediately. “I speak only to my experience. I always defer to adoptees; I have my voice, and they have theirs. Even in my writing, I really try not to speak for Hope.” In fact, she regularly invites adoptees to correct her through social media. Once, she also invited Hope to join her podcast, Add Water and Stir, co-hosted with black adoptive mother and blogger Mimi Robinson. ABM pointed out that it is her daughter’s right to speak for herself, and the podcast was Hope’s opportunity to tell her story from her own perspective. “That was her script. My blog is really about me and how I’m approaching my life as an adoptive parent with this amazing, yet challenging kid, and what this experience looks like, and I respect that….Our role [as non-adoptees] is to be a good ally, and good allies fall back.”

Black and Hispanic children are heavily overrepresented in the foster care system. According to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, 24 percent of the children in foster care are African-American, while 21 percent are Hispanic. Only 43 percent of children in foster care are white. Adoptive Black Mom acknowledged the role that negative ideas about black parenting play in increasing these numbers, saying, “There are also some built-in assumptions that in communities of color, we don’t know how to parent appropriately. [The parenting of people of color] is more confrontational; there’s a history of corporal punishment.” She argued that this racial bias leads to more children of color being removed from their families and not returned (though she did point out that not all parents of any race whose children are removed should have said children returned). ABM noted that a possible solution is to have more training for social workers on unconscious bias and systemic issues related to poverty and class. In terms of adoptive parents, she stressed the importance of certain attitudes toward first parents.  “I think it’s very easy for us to demonize – all of us – first families. And that’s not always accurate. People make mistakes and sometimes those mistakes result in tragedy, but that doesn’t mean that they should never have their family back.”

Knowing that some people of color are reluctant to adopt, I asked ABM why she believes that it’s important for more people of color to adopt. “Even for domestic infant adoption, there are lots of women of color who want to place their children with people of color, and the numbers are just not there to meet that need.” She also pointed out that many children of color would like to be parented by families of color, too. However, she added that “for some kids, at the end, they just want a parent. They don’t really care who it is. That said, I also recognize that what kids want as they get older in foster care seems to become increasingly less restrictive. Why? Because they just want a home. That doesn’t necessarily mean that their ideal scenario isn’t with a person of color. And those kids 1) they deserve a home and 2) they deserve to be parented by their dream parents, too.”

To young prospective adoptive parents of color, she had this to say, “It can be done. Have a good sense of humor. If you’re interested in older child adoption, do your homework, find a good agency. Really understand trauma and non-neurotypical brain development.” She discussed the need to surround yourself with a supportive community or village. “Think about how you’re going to build your village. My village doesn’t look like what I thought it was going to look like, and I don’t know anybody whose village looks like what they thought it was going to look like… Everybody’s village looks different.” Adoptive Black Mom also emphasized the importance of listening to adoptee voices when doing research about adoption. “There are not that many [adoptive parents] of color who are blogging about our life experiences, but there are quite a few adoptees of color who blog or tweet or they’re on podcast. Listen to them. I would…say listen to them more than listening to us.”