Singlewide: Chasing the American Dream in a Rural Trailer Park

Abstract

erences impact the racial composition of transracially adoptive families, yet their work does not include data to support this supposition. There are even fewer studies describing the racial composition of families who have transracially adopted. The scholars speculate but do not attempt to show causation to support the fact that the disproportionately large number of white parents with Asian or Hispanic adoptees is due to the racial preferences of adoptive parents. It is Raleigh’s focus on adoption workers that provides a unique insight into the previously missing link between the desires of adoptive parents and the resulting transracially adoptive families. Although her qualitative, ethnographic research is not nationally generalizable, it provides detailed, thorough descriptions of how adoption workers make decisions matching children to families. It illuminates how adoption professionals must balance their efforts to provide quality social services to the children with providing satisfactory customer service to the adoptive parents. Raleigh’s assertion that adoption is a market that uses and reinforces racial hierarchies and color lines would have been bolstered by attention to potential adoptive parents of color. The attempts in the 1980s and 1990s to recruit black parents to adopt the available black children was reviewed, yet the experiences of parents of color who sought to adopt, including their challenges to be approved as adoptive parents, were not recognized as significant contributing aspects to the disproportionately large number of children of color ‘‘needing’’ to be matched with white adoptive families. The book does an excellent job of explaining racial inequality in regard to the supply of available children, yet glosses over the racial inequality that shapes which families qualify to demand a child for adoption. A consideration of potential parents of color would strengthen Raleigh’s thesis, yet its absence does not unduly undermine it. Selling Transracial Adoption thoroughly, but concisely and convincingly, uses a market lens to unveil how the economic aspect of private adoption creates a dynamic in which meeting the desires of the paying customer perpetuates a social racial hierarchy and compromises adoption professionals’ ability to make decisions based on the best interests of the child.