For roughly $20,000 what could you buy? A car? A semester's worth of college tuition? A beautiful, bouncing, black baby?
According to Jezebel, in her website for NPR, the Race Card Project, Michele Norris touches on the scary reality that black children cost significantly less to adopt than any other race.
Norris' piece dives into some of the price differentials for children of different races being adopted domestically. She cites one example of a woman who was told that black babies cost less than $20,000, while biracial children were around $25,000 and white kids were $30,000.
In 2010, a study showed that black children were less likely to be adopted than white children, and that girls were more desirable than boys. According to the New York Times:
"The probability that a non-African-American baby will attract the interest of an adoptive parent is at least seven times as high as the corresponding probability for an African-American baby."
Part of this is due to who is adopting; in 2009, an ad campaign funded by the federal government was released to encourage black families to adopt, in the hopes that they'd be more likely to take home children who looked like them. Before that, the passage of the 1994 Multiethnic Placement Act sought to protect children from adoption agencies that might work less hard to place them because of their race.
Perhaps the saddest thing about this reveal is how totally unsurprising it is.
Read more at Jezebel.
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