This story is being co-published with The Imprint, a national nonprofit news outlet covering child welfare and youth justice.
When she ran the African American Adoption Agency in Minneapolis more than two decades ago, Marquita Stephens helped develop a training program for foster and adoptive parents planning to care for kids of a different race. It involved a Bingo-like game. Agency staff handed prospective parents a scorecard, with boxes to mark after they answered a series of questions.
“What is the race of your physician?” The parent would put a pebble in a corresponding box. “What is the race of the majority of your neighbors?” Another pebble.
The training helped all participants, Stephens recalled, but it was particularly beneficial to white parents.
“By the end of it, you had a chance to see what your world looked like, as it was racially composed,” Stephens said. “You had to talk about the notion of bringing a child of a different race into that world — and then you talk about what you want to do to adjust that world in order to ensure that you can build a healthy ethnic identity in this child.”
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Publish date : 2024-09-09 22:01:00
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