Michael Gove, please listen: in adoption race matters!

Today there will be another extremely important debate in the House of Commons in regard to the adoption process: There is a Bill being put forward, which seeks to remove the importance of race, religion and ethnicity to the adoption process.

Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove’s concern - himself an adopted child - does not want to see children languishing in care homes, which, he argues is being thwarted by a ‘PC’ culture, that seeks to achieve, not only a greater cultural, ethnic and racial match between child and parents, but also seeks to have due understanding about who the child is they are adopting.

The greatest era in this whole debate is to consider these aspects ‘PC’ in the most negative sense.

It doesn’t take much to imagine this scenario: a Black African child adopted by a loving white family in a predominantly white suburban area. The child knows she is different, but nothing is ever explained to her. She is only ever told she is deeply loved. At school, she is taught that people who look like her were once enslaved, but a courageous white man- William Wilberforce- set them free. She also learns that people who look like her are plagued with illness/ disease and are among the poorest, people in the world. At home whilst watching TV those lifestyle adverts rarely feature a person like her. The same is reflected on many TV programmers, too. In sharp contrast, TV and radio debates around crime and religious extremism, often talk about Black people. And when the subject of racism is spoken about, and/or experienced it becomes a difficult concept because the people that most love her in the world are white.

What too often occurs with many of these children is a level of self –hatred. It is difficult to want to belong to something which is routinely associated with the negative. But of course its normal to want to belong, in every sense, to what is linked with being positive. In extreme cases, Black children have sought to erase their skin colour buy scrubbing their skin with a wire brush. Others engage in gross mimicking of what is perceived to be white, whilst rejecting everything that is seen as Black.

In this all too often scenario the child is saved from the children’s home, and possibly a life of crime and prison, but at a heavy price: You are shoe-horned into fundamentally denying who you are for a life of greater opportunity.

The sensible debate should be how do we achieve both: Get more children into loving adopted homes, whilst respecting who the child is.

Micheal Gove MP should begin to respect the latter too. In doing so, he would be adhering to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 20 (3) which requires that due regard is paid to ‘the child’s ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic background’ when a child is deprived of their family environment, but even more than that he would be demonstrating that he is both listening and caring.

Simon Woolley