Black Children Wait Twice as Long to Be Adopted — The Silence Is a Scandal

Consider the child. Not as a statistic, not as a case number in a manila folder, not as an entry in a database maintained by a caseworker with forty-three other entries and a resignation letter half-written in her desk drawer, but as a child — a small human being with a name and a face and a particular way of laughing and a specific fear of the dark and a need, as irreducible as hunger, to be held by someone who will not let go. Now consider that this child, if she is Black, will wait in the foster care system an average of twice as long as a white child to find a permanent home. Consider that she is more likely to be moved from placement to placement, more likely to age out of the system with no family at all, more likely to enter adulthood with nothing but a garbage bag containing her possessions and the accumulated trauma of a childhood spent being nobody’s priority. This is not metaphor. This is federal data, published annually by the Administration for Children and Families, and it describes the lived reality of approximately 96,000 Black children in the foster care system on any given day in America.

Black children constitute approximately 23% of children in foster care while representing roughly 14% of the child population of the United States. That overrepresentation alone is a scandal. But the deeper scandal is what happens after they enter the system: they stay longer, they are adopted less frequently, and they age out — that bloodless bureaucratic phrase that means a child turned eighteen without anyone choosing to be their parent — at rates that should haunt every legislator, every judge, every social worker, and every citizen who has ever spoken the word “family” without pausing to consider who in this country is denied one.

The History We Chose to Forget

To understand why Black children fare so poorly in the American adoption and foster care system, you must first understand that Black America has always had its own adoption system — one that was older, more resilient, and more effective than anything the state has ever constructed. Before the formal child welfare system existed, before social workers and family courts and AFCARS databases, Black communities practiced what scholars call informal kinship adoption: the absorption of children whose parents could not care for them into the households of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, church members, and neighbors. It was not bureaucratic. It was not documented. It was not supervised by the state. It was, simply, the way things were done, and it worked with an efficiency that formal systems have never replicated.

Andrew Billingsley, in his landmark study of the Black family, documented that this tradition of informal adoption was one of the most distinctive and enduring features of African American family life, rooted in West African kinship systems and reinforced by the brutal necessities of slavery, during which children were routinely separated from parents and absorbed by other members of the community. The practice survived emancipation, survived Jim Crow, survived the Great Migration. It was the invisible infrastructure that held Black childhood together when every visible institution had failed it.

And then, in 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers issued a statement that would reshape the landscape of Black adoption for a generation. The NABSW declared its “vehement opposition to the placement of Black children in white homes for any reason,” calling transracial adoption a form of “cultural genocide.” The statement was born of legitimate concerns — the fear that Black children raised in white families would be severed from their cultural identity, that transracial adoption was being used as a substitute for addressing the systemic conditions that were separating Black families in the first place, that white families adopting Black children was, however well-intentioned, a continuation of the appropriation that had defined the relationship between the races in America since its founding.

“Children need people to love them, and to want them. Children need to belong to somebody. They need some place to call home.”
— Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund

The Unintended Catastrophe

The NABSW’s position, whatever its intellectual merits, produced a practical catastrophe. Adoption agencies, terrified of being accused of cultural insensitivity, effectively stopped placing Black children with white families even when no Black families were available. The result was predictable to anyone who understood the mathematics of the situation: Black children accumulated in the foster care system like water behind a dam, waiting for same-race placements that were not coming in sufficient numbers, while potential adoptive families of other races were turned away or discouraged from applying.

Dorothy Roberts, the legal scholar whose work on race and child welfare is definitive, documented the consequences in searing detail. She showed that the child welfare system operated with a fundamental contradiction at its core: it removed Black children from their families at disproportionate rates, ostensibly to protect them, and then failed to provide them with the permanent families that were supposed to be the point of removing them in the first place. The system was better at taking Black children than at placing them. It was better at separation than at reunion. It was, in Roberts’s devastating phrase, a system of “shattered bonds” that replicated, in bureaucratic form, the family separations that slavery had achieved by force.

In 1994, Congress passed the Multiethnic Placement Act (MEPA), and in 1996 amended it with the Interethnic Placement Act (IEP), which together prohibited the use of race as the sole factor in adoption placement decisions and threatened to withhold federal funding from agencies that delayed or denied placements on the basis of race. The legislation was a direct response to the crisis that the NABSW position had created. And yet, more than two decades later, the data shows that Black children continue to wait longer, continue to be adopted at lower rates, and continue to age out of the system at higher rates than children of any other race.

The Foster Care-to-Prison Pipeline

The consequences of growing up in foster care without achieving permanency are documented with a precision that makes the system’s inaction all the more inexcusable. Youth who age out of foster care are, according to research compiled by the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative, dramatically more likely to experience homelessness, unemployment, early parenthood, and incarceration than their peers. Within four years of aging out, approximately 50% will have no earnings, and only 6% will have earned a two-year or four-year college degree. They are incarcerated at rates that dwarf the general population, creating a pipeline from foster care to prison that operates with the mechanical efficiency of an assembly line.

For Black youth, these outcomes compound upon the racial disparities that already exist outside the foster care system. A Black child who ages out of foster care enters an economy that discriminates against him for being Black, a housing market that discriminates against him for being Black, and a criminal justice system that monitors and punishes him more heavily for being Black — with the additional burden of having no family to provide the safety net that keeps most young adults from falling through the cracks during the vulnerable transition years between adolescence and independence. The system that was supposed to rescue this child has, in practice, positioned him at the intersection of every disadvantage the nation has to offer.

Why Informal Kinship Care Is Not Counted

One of the most pernicious features of the current system is its failure to support the very mechanism that sustained Black children for centuries. Informal kinship care — the arrangement in which grandparents, aunts, uncles, or other relatives take in children without going through the formal foster care process — continues to be the most common form of out-of-home care for Black children. The Census Bureau estimates that approximately 2.5 million children nationwide are being raised by relatives without parental involvement, and Black children are disproportionately represented in this number.

These caregivers — overwhelmingly grandmothers, overwhelmingly women on fixed incomes, overwhelmingly performing the work of the village that the rest of the village has abandoned — receive no foster care payments, no Medicaid for the children in their care, no respite services, no legal authority to make medical or educational decisions for the children they are raising. They are invisible to the system because they chose family over bureaucracy, and the system punishes that choice by withholding the resources it would provide to a stranger who took the same child through the formal process.

What Is Working

The most promising developments in Black child welfare are happening not despite this history but in direct response to it, as communities, faith institutions, and reformed agencies work to bridge the gap between the children who wait and the families they need.

Kinship navigator programs, now operating in more than thirty states, connect relative caregivers with the financial, legal, and social services they need to provide stable homes. These programs recognize what the formal system has been slow to acknowledge: that the grandmother who takes in her grandchild is not merely a babysitter but a parent, and she deserves the same support the state would provide to a licensed foster family. Early evaluations show that kinship navigator programs reduce re-entry into foster care, improve child well-being outcomes, and stabilize placements that might otherwise disrupt.

Heart Gallery initiatives — traveling photography exhibits featuring professional portraits of children waiting for adoption — have been shown to increase adoption inquiries, particularly for older children and children of color who are underrepresented in traditional adoption recruitment. The concept is simple but powerful: show people the faces. Not the case numbers, not the diagnoses, not the behavioral incident reports, but the faces. In states where Heart Galleries have been implemented, adoption rates for featured children have increased significantly, because it turns out that the barrier was never a lack of willing families but a lack of connection between willing families and waiting children.

Faith-based recruitment programs, particularly those operating through the Black church, have tapped into the oldest tradition of communal child-rearing in African American life. Organizations like One Church, One Child, founded by Father George Clements in 1980, challenged every Black congregation in America to produce one adoptive family. The program has facilitated thousands of adoptions and, more importantly, has reframed adoption within the Black community not as a failure of the biological family but as an extension of the communal responsibility that has always defined Black survival.

“We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.”
— Marian Wright Edelman

The scandal of Black children waiting twice as long for adoption is not a mystery. The causes are documented. The solutions are known. The resources exist. What is missing is the will — the collective, sustained, uncomfortable will to prioritize the permanency of Black children over the institutional inertia that has kept them waiting for generations. Every day that a child waits in foster care is a day of childhood lost, a day of bonding that will not happen, a day of trust that will erode a little further until the child learns the lesson the system is teaching, which is that no one is coming. The question is not whether we know how to do better. The question is whether we love these children enough to do it. And the answer to that question is not found in our policies or our budgets or our position papers. It is found in whether the children are still waiting.