Color-Evasive Love and Freedom from Violence in (Neo)Liberal Adoption Laws (2025)

Summary

This webinar examines how national ideas about race, gender, and nation informed beliefs about what kinds of families could create "better futures" for children, and how these beliefs shaped adoption laws in the twentieth century. Through U.S. history, state actors have placed significant scrutiny on poor families of color, leading to disproportionate removal of Black and Native children from their families of origin. In the 1980s and 1990s, Congress passed laws to encourage transracial adoption as the neoliberal solution to poor non-white families' supposed deficits, uplifting white familial love through, privatization, individualism, and color-evasive ideology. These laws presented white adoptive parents as victims of policies that previously prioritized race-matched adoption, and constructed them as a vehicle for poor children of color to achieve freedom from violence and institutional harm.

The Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994 shortened the time requirements between a child's placement in foster care and their ability to be adopted, effectively limiting the time parents have to petition to regain custodial rights to their children. After fifteen months, children in foster care were declared "legal orphans," and their adoptions were accelerated by the state. The act also limited prioritization of "race, color, or national origin" as requirements for placement with foster or adoptive families. The Interethnic Provisions of 1996 amended the Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994 to strictly prohibit foster care and adoptive family placement based on race-matching. It also established tax credits for adoptive parents' adoption expenses. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 tightened welfare eligibility for poor families, establishing work requirements, limits on the dollar amount of welfare a family could receive, and a time limit of five cumulative years of welfare aid, after which point a family would be denied assistance. This legislation furthered racialized inequality gaps and surveillance on poor families of color; meanwhile, the Interethnic Provisions of 1996 incentivized transracial adoption by white families with tax credits. The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 further accelerated the foster care to adoption process, establishing concrete dates for permanent decisions about a child's placement, shortening the period in which parents could regain custodial rights to their children. 

On the whole, these laws built off of preexisting surveillance of poor families of color, making it more difficult for them to access welfare resources to combat systemic inequalities, increasing odds that the state would remove children from their families of origin. The policies eliminated race-matching requirements for adoption, accelerated adoption processes, and established tax credits for adoptive parents, establishing systems for transracial adoption. This further legislated bias against poor families of color, further uplifting white familial love as the idealized norm over that of families the state deemed unable to provide adequate care.

Suggested Reading

Myers, Kit W. The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States. University of California Press, 2025.