Word: fostering
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...even by a person's racial sensitivity? According to current U.S. law, no. Since 1996, it has been illegal to consider race when determining whether families are suitable to raise adopted children - the law was intended to increase adoptions of black children, who are disproportionately represented in the foster care system, by making it easier for whites to take them home. But a new study suggests that approach is short-sighted. "Color-blind" adoption, the report contends, allows some white parents - who may not be mentally ready or have the appropriate social tools to parent black children - to raise youngsters...
...Multiethnic Placement Act-Interethnic Adoption Provision (MEPA-IEP), which Congress passed in response to headlines about white parents who wanted to adopt black children but were thwarted by race-matching policies. The legislation, which prohibited any adoption agency receiving federal funds from factoring race into decisions on foster care and adoption, was meant to widen the pool of prospective permanent homes for black children. Instead, according to the Donaldson Institute and supporters of its study, the law had a chilling effect on agencies that might want to facilitate transracial adoptions, prohibiting them from preparing white parents for race-specific challenges...
Indeed, such anxiety is reflected in the national statistics. Since MEPA-IEP was passed in the mid-1990s, the proportion of transracial adoptions has risen only modestly - from 17.2% in 1996 to 20.1% in 2003. Meanwhile, the government has not compelled agencies to recruit foster and adoptive parents who reflect the ethnic make-up of children in the system, even though the law says they must, so racial disparities have persisted within the family services system. Black children are adopted less frequently and more slowly than kids of any other race. Fifteen percent of U.S. children are black, but they...
...challenge at least bits of the status quo - he supports letting Cuban-Americans visit Cuba and send remittances to relatives there whenever they want, for example. In a Miami Herald op-ed article last summer, Obama insisted that those family ties are "our best tool for helping to foster the beginnings of grassroots democracy" in Cuba, and suggested he would be more willing than the Miami hard-liners to normalize relations with the Castro government. So despite the Hitler analogies, Obama at least seems willing to bet that the peninsula is ready for a more original approach to dealing with...
...district court in Washington, D.C., also alleges that the Department of Homeland Security may be favoring wealthy landowners by routing the fence away from their property. "I puzzled a while over why the fence would bypass the industrial park and go through the city park," Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster, the coalition chairman, says in the suit...