The new brave world of race? Interracial adoption and the issue of racial categorization

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE : The main idea of the article about using race as an analytical tool is to demonstrate how race can be a salient factor in how people experience, inhabit the world and consequently family. Interracial adoption is discussed as a phenomenon which borrows from the particular fears and order of a society. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS : the research problem concerns the question of how the concept of racial categorization can be understood in a racially mixed frame of reference relating to the experience of interracial adoption. The article uses the method of critical analyses as well as the analyses of the reference literature. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION : The first section of the article discusses race as a social construct, the second indicates white as the unmarked category and shows that the rest of racial categories is marked in contrast to whiteness. The third part provides justification for a thesis that in racial categorization, as in other social classifications, one category tends to dominate, usually taken for granted as normative, typical and most desirable. It causes social and parenting problems for the adoptive family. RESEARCH RESULTS : The result of the argumentation is that race is often socially recognized as inherent and inherited quality that is seen to fit an adopted child for a specific social situation. Children are assigned to race categories based on assumptions about descent. Regardless of the fact, the phenomenon of interracial adoption exposes the fragility of conventional meanings of human races. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS : the social acceptance of interracially adoptive families requires a society which does not define itself on the facts of blood and race allegiances, but on a set of deeply humanistic ideals.