In spring of my third year of law school I am in Professor Charles Ogletree’s coveted criminal justice clinic where, per Massachusetts law, as a third-year law student I can represent defendants in low-level hearings. My clients are battered women and juveniles. “Tree,” as we call him, is one of a handful of Blacks on the faculty and I and other students of color gravitate to his warm, intentional mentoring.
I am also working on my thesis—a requirement to graduate—under the direction of Professor Martha Minow, a white woman and an expert in family law who years later will become the school’s dean. It is 1994. I choose to write on the particular injustice mixed-race kids face when it comes to moving from foster care to adoptive homes. I argue that transracial adoption is inherently better than the foster care system, which as a rule urges parents not to bond with their foster child. That a permanent, loving, adoptive home of any race is better than the foster care system.
This is the same general topic I’d argued in Steyer’s civil rights seminar back in college, but now I have a new weapon in my arsenal—the new labels “multiracial” and “biracial” that are gaining traction among federal and state policy makers. Armed with the new race classification schema I argue that the government has no business deciding which aspect of a multiracial/biracial child’s heritage gets preference in adoption placement. As I’d done with the Drummond case back in college, I dismiss the importance of “cultural heritage transmission” for Black kids as pseudoscience. I argue that by keeping mixed-race kids in foster care longer than white kids until a suitable Black adoptive family can be found, the government is denying those mixed kids the equal protection of the law on the basis of their race.
My feeling—based on my own lived experience—was that white parents could raise Black babies just fine. After all, I was raised in a white community largely by my white mother and I was fine. Mom was the one who told the Mormon missionaries at our door that they had nothing to offer us because “we are a Black family.” I’d made it up and out of childhood to college and now to graduate school and I knew I hadn’t had as much as one drop of this “cultural transmission.” And I was fine.
I wrote that thesis furiously, arguing specifically that it wasn’t the government’s right to call mixed-race kids “Black” and subject them to these “cultural transmission” rituals, which sounded almost like voodoo to me. The counterargument—that mixed kids raised by white parents were not fine—was a mirror too closely held up to my own face. I had to look away.