This story is being co-published with The Imprint, a national nonprofit news outlet covering child welfare and youth justice.
Becky is a foster parent in rural Minnesota, who lives about an hour outside of the Twin Cities. In her home, any child who joins the family is welcomed into a loving environment. But she wasn’t sure all the children the child welfare system sent her way would receive the same welcome in her nearly 90% white community, where she says racial inequities are rampant.
To protect the kids from any additional trauma, she has not accepted placements of a few prospective foster children. She knew that kid would need protection from racism and transphobia in her community — on top of the love and caring she would provide.
“The social worker hadn’t even thought of it,” said Becky, who asked to be identified by her first name only to protect her family’s privacy. She is white, but well-informed about the hazards kids of color in the child welfare system can face in foster homes outside of their communities with people they’ve just met.
One consideration four years ago stands out.
“In that time, right after George Floyd, I said: ‘Please don’t place a transgender, multiracial child outside of the metro.’ I don’t care what community it is — it will likely not be good for that child.”
An Imprint investigation published in September found that in Minnesota, more than 40% of the foster children placed with strangers were Native American, African American, Asian American/Pacific Islander or Latino. Of the licensed, non-relative foster parents who received them, twice that percentage were white, state data show. In some parts of the state, 100% of foster parents are white. The difficulties of transracial placements that are prone to arise are not routinely acknowledged or adequately addressed, according to interviews with foster youth, adoptees, child welfare professionals and academics.
The Minnesota-based nonprofit Families Rising Minnesota, funded by the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families, aims to help. The group provides in-person training for foster and adoptive parents, support groups, and helpful classes that assist caregivers with things like how to sew a ribbon skirt for Native foster youth and manage hair care and styling for Black children. In two of the state’s largest counties, training with Families Rising Minnesota is mandatory for foster parents. So far, the nonprofit has worked with about 400 transracial families in the state.
Last year, the organization received a $25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to lead the Center for Workforce Equity and Leadership to provide training and support to child welfare workers.
Ligia Cushman, executive director of the national umbrella group Families Rising, said families reach out to her organization for all kinds of reasons, often involving difficult conversations around race. Program participants are often best served in groups, talking among themselves and with others who have more experience in transracial families.
“It can be, ‘I’m raising a Black child in a very white community or a racially fueled society,’” she said. “We bring people in to talk about it and teach families how to have those hard conversations about what it means to be a parent of a Black child in America, and what does that feel like?”
Becky has had three foster children so far: one white, one Native American, and one Black, white and Native American. For these children, she said, she has been able to provide opportunities for them to connect to their roots, joining powwows and smudging, and attending workshops on “Black Girl Magic.”
But perhaps most helpful for Becky, as a parent, was connecting with other diverse foster and adoptive parents of kids of color who helped her find communities and role models for the children, as well as hearing from young adults who have grown up in these types of homes.
Those relationships taught her about how to respond, for example, when her multiracial 6-year-old Black foster daughter asked her if the police would kill her like George Floyd. Then there’s the less-overt but still biting commentary from unwelcome strangers — like the person in Walmart who boldly asked her if one of her foster children was hers.
In Minnesota, child welfare agencies provide training to foster parents that’s required to cover “cultural diversity, gender sensitivity, culturally specific services, cultural competence, and information about discrimination and racial bias issues.”
But Cushman said often the training is not all that memorable or impactful. Families Rising hopes to help fill the gap.
“Our trainings are really focused on connecting stories to strategies,” she said. “We want to give families real time, real life experiences and explain how other families overcame them.”
Learning to advocate for their kids
Melissa Greene, program manager for Families Rising Minnesota, said that at one time, the organization had two different groups for transracial foster and adoptive families: one for “parents who were just acknowledging that they had children in their home who didn’t look like them,” and another for parents ready to learn to advocate for their kids and be allies.
The former group benefited from things like the “cup game” — where families put beads in clear plastic cups corresponding to the race of different people in their communities. For some families, the only people of color in their community were their children.
For the second group, Greene used her own experiences and those of other white parents of foster or adoptive children of color to help them navigate their daily life experiences, such as how to respond to explicit or implicit racism and negative judgments of their children or blended family. A common experience is strangers boldly asking whether children are adopted, without considering the sensitivity of such a question from an outsider.
“I coach parents exactly how I’ve come to introduce my family: ‘They’re my family,’” Greene said. “I don’t tell my children’s story. It’s nobody’s business. That’s their story to tell. I love when somebody’s like, ‘You’re his mom?’ And I’m like, with confidence, ‘Yes.’ Dare them to ask me one more question.”
Families Rising Minnesota education specialist Sarah Benson also helps families advocate for their kids in educational settings, which can be confusing for parents who don’t know what IEPs or 504 plans are, and aren’t aware of the racial bias in certain special education programs and academic classifications.
For example, Benson worked with one family with white parents and a Black teenage boy who was in foster care at the time. The boy was diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome and needed an Individualized Educational Plan/Program for support. The child had been categorized as having an emotional and behavioral disability, and Benson helped the family convert that to “other health disorder” to make sure he was not stigmatized or discriminated against.
“I said to the parent: ‘They’re going to get the same services, but here’s why this matters,’” Benson recalled. “‘This category unfortunately is seen by teachers and staff who are not trained in special education specifically that these students are choosing their behaviors. Your child has fetal alcohol syndrome, and their brain is affected differently.’”
Cushman, who is Dominican American, has had her own experiences with racism in the education system, noting that it can show up anywhere. Her Black adopted son came home one day from fourth grade and told her that they were both “from the wrong side of the tracks.” But he added that his dad, who is white, was not.
Cushman and her husband asked what he was talking about, and he said they were reading a book in class about World War II that said that Black kids were from the wrong side of the tracks and white kids shouldn’t be friends with them.
Cushman met with the principal and they talked about what the teacher could have done differently and how to correct what had already been done. She also talked with the families she works with and reminded them to pay attention to what their kids are learning in school.
“A lot of adoptive parents are not prepared for the community’s response to you having a Black child,” Cushman said. “Adoption seems like this beautiful blessing and a wonderful thing. It can be that, and it can also cause harm. So we spend a lot of time talking to parents about that, too. How do we repair that harm?”
Lived experience
Families Rising is intentional about employing staff and bringing in speakers of color who lived in foster care or were adopted by white parents. Earlier this year, they invited transracial adoptee, podcaster and author Angela Tucker to be a keynote speaker at their annual adoption and foster care conference. Cushman and Greene also encourage families to read Tucker’s book, “You Should be Grateful: Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption” and transracial adoptee and writer Hannah Jackson Matthew’s workbook, “Standing in the Gap.”
The in-person support groups and events in Minnesota have also helped Becky learn from her foster children. Prior to connecting with Families Rising around 2020, she had taken mostly online trainings on being a foster parent through her local child welfare agency. She didn’t find them particularly noteworthy.
In contrast, at the Families Rising annual conference, she was moved by a speaker who was a transracial adoptee herself and emphasized that parents should never negate a child’s experiences. If they say something that seems too strange to be true, it may actually be true, she learned.
Becky watched the recording of the speech at least four times.
“Am I going to remember that one online training that I took five years ago? No,” she said. “But am I going to remember somebody’s story that they shared with me? Yeah, likely.”
