I always feel really weird when white people adopt several kids from a specific race, like, these two only adopted black kids. Why is that? And someone might be thinking "well, why not?", and that is absolutely valid too. There is NOTHING wrong about only adopting black children. I'm not saying that, since they are white, they should exclusively adopt white children. I'm not saying that black children are unwhorthy of being adopted. What I'm saying is that I always feel weird when white people go above and beyond just to adopt black kids, or hispanic kids, or asian kids, and so on. It doesn't feel right to me, it always seems like they're making it about them and about the image of themselves that they want to be perceived by everyone else. And I'm aware that white people are not the only ones that do this. I'm sorry if this is confusing or if this doesn't seem relevant to this case.
The Harts had two adoptions of two sets of siblings. Possibly they wanted to keep their children within the same ethnicity or possibly the first set of children had a say in the second set of adoptions.
I am a white mom with black kids...here's how it happens. The agency asks, what color child are you comfortable with...some parents say white only and it is on all of your placement paperwork...and others say Latino...etc. We are also told that there are 30,000 children waiting for homes and the majority are black or Hispanic. Then you open your mind and your heart and you say, I can do this...I can adopt a child outside of my race. Trust me it is so not about you at that point at all...in fact, it will become even more so about the kids. You learn to do their hair and skin and you learn to navigate in a world full of racist people, both blacks and whites.
The adoption agency calls and says they have a child for you and you say yes or no...if you say no based on race...well....um, you shouldn't have been open to race.(and if you want a white kid only, foster care may not the adoption route one should take). My children are all brown, it's the way they wanted it to be...the first two have had a say on the color of the third...and the first had a say in the color of the second, so I'm a white mom with 2 soon to be three black kids.
Not once...was I in this to save a black kid! I wanted to be a mother, I figured why not adopt one of the 30,000 children without a home. After adopting a child from birth I ended up with a child who was bipolar, ADHD and psychotic who has three therapy appointments a week and another who still chews her clothes even at 12 because of sensory issues brought on by drug exposure in the womb. Most foster adoptive kids have issues and their issues can be really hard on a family.
I think part of the sheltering happening with this family was spurned by the negative outlook on who they were as a family. I have to say as a "hippie" mom myself with black kids, I'm feeling quite angered by the way this family is depicted. I don't think camping and going to festivals is wrong...neither is homeschooling or being lesbians in a transracial family.
Instead of shut people away, they should have reached out for help...perhaps it became too much for them, but abuse, showing off, saving and parading children usually is never an adoptive parent's goal. My gut sense says they shut themselves away because they didn't like the negative attention they got, needed help for the kid's issues but didn't reach out to get it, and then they couldn't control the behaviors anymore, didn't have the right resources to parent them or the skills to manage their issues so made bad parenting choices and would rather die with them...than lose them. Horrific of course, but going to festivals, camping, touching worms, and being a transracial family is not...driving off a cliff is.
