In the New York Times Book Review today Nina Bernstein has an interesting review of what sounds like a fascinating new book, INTERRACIAL INTIMACIES, by Harvard law prof Randall Kennedy.
Although much of the review is quite positive, in the end Bernstein criticizes Kennedy for embracing “the coercive power of the state to sever family ties permanently and configure new ones in patterns that better fit his own ideal of a better society.”
I haven’t yet read the book and so can’t comment on the substance of this criticism. But I can, and now will, comment on one of the way Bernstein frames it. She is harshly critical of his “one-dimensional account of the problem posed by half a million children in foster care, many of them black,” and his advocacy of “their rapid, race-blind redistribution to adoptive homes that would be predominantly white, arguing that this would benefit both the children and American race relations.” Continuing, she writes
Kennedy seems untroubled that these children’s own parents are overwhelmingly poor and politically powerless, and that the new ones he seeks for them would be more affluent. Absent is any mention of recent cases in which courts found children had been wrongly removed to foster care because their mothers were battered, homeless or ineligible for public assistance. Nowhere is it more apparent that Kennedy’s vision of a race-blind society has a blind spot for economic inequality.
I can’t imagine that Kennedy’s point is that black kids in foster care should be rapidly made available for adoption by white parents. I strongly suspect his point is that all foster kids should be made available for adoption much quicker than is now being done, and so much the better if that results in more black kids being adopted by white parents.
If so, it strikes me as quite a stretch to say that this view reflects an economic blind spot if a race blind vision. It certainly seems much less like social engineering than the explicitly racialist opposition of groups like the National Association of Black Social Workers to interracial adoption, based in part on shibboleths like “cultural competence.”
Kennedy himself spoke about this in 1998 Congressional testimony regarding adoption.
There are a variety of problems with this notion of cultural competency. For one thing, it puts officials in the position of attempting to prescribe “racial correctness.” Fortunately, there exists no authoritative criterion by which to measure what sort of ideas or conduct can certifiably be deemed to be properly “black” (or “white” or “yellow” etc.). African Americans (like the individuals constituting all groups in American society) vary tremendously. Many like gospel music or rap. Many do not. Many celebrate Kwanza. many do not. Many live in predominately black neighborhoods. Some do not. Many are Christians. Many are Moslems. The idea that public or private child welfare officials would homogenize the varied African American community and then impose that homogenized stereotype upon white adults seeking to provide children with adoptive homes or foster care is a frightening prospect. Worse still is that this dubious concern with cultural competency is often nothing more than a pretext for racial matching, a way to continue the racial steering of needy children without expressly saying so.
I look forward to reading Kennedy’s book.
