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This book is a welcome addition to the literature on this controversial subject. It comprises six chapters, each by a different author, embracing different perspectives — personal, historical, legal, political, psychological. The authors’ interests stem from their involvement in the group Children First in transracial fostering and adoption. Their abiding concerns are both for children who wait for permanent families and for the well-being of existing transracial families. All the authors are unequivocal in supporting the view that black children should be placed with black families wherever possible; nevertheless they believe there comes a point when the advantages of this have to be weighed against the costs to the child's need for a permanent family.
The text draws on research studies like Rowe and Lambert's Children who Wait which showed that the longer the child waited for placement, the less likely s/he was to return to family life, and on the longitudinal results of the work of Simon and Alstein (1977, 1981, 1987) which showed that transracial placements are satisfactory substitutes in the absence of same-race placements. These latter studies gave little support for criticisms of transracial placements based on anticipated difficulties later in life. The difficulties foreseen by critics of such placements included poor survival skills in a racist society, inability to relate either to black or to white, lack of racial pride and dilution of identity, thus undercutting the prospect of a positive black identity. In essence these placements were seen by critics as amounting to ‘internal colonialism’, cultural genocide, exploitation, repression and the perpetuation of a racist ideology. The influential group of black social workers and allied professions (ABSWAP) were and remain severe critics of these placements, unanimously condemning such studies as Gill and Jackson (1983) who described them as largely successful despite their description of some of the children