Today’s featured scholar is Professor DeLeith Gossett from Texas Tech University School of Law in Lubbock, Texas. Prof. Gossett’s paper, entitled Take off the [Color] Blinders: How Ignoring the Hague Convention’s Subsidiarity Principle Furthers Structural Racism Against Black American Children, is featured in volume 55 of the Santa Clara Law Review. The article explores how children aging out of foster care unadopted are disproportionately black, and race still negatively influences industry standards. The United States has become known as a “sending country,” as it ships many of its black and biracial foster care children abroad to find homes, leading some to call the practice of international adoption “covert racism.” The Article concludes that the United States should not allow international adoptions – whether to or from the United States – until all domestic placement efforts have been exhausted. The Article ultimately calls for abolishment of the current U.S. two-system approach to international adoption that circumvents Hague protocols and protections and contributes to the structural racism against black American children.
To read Prof. Gossett’s article, visit SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2400603
