I wrote last week that it seemed to be the latest Hollywood trend for white entertainers to adopt children of African descent — as if they are throwing it in the faces of middle-class and wealthy blacks whom haven’t exemplified any interest in adopting black children themselves.
Besides Angela Bassett and Courtney Vance, who of prominence or among everyday black adults are opting for the job? Why aren’t there many more candidates?
So, is Sandra Bullock now your momma? You won’t act like mother to our lost and abandoned children, so Sandra Bullock and Madonna and Angelina Jolie have to act as surrogate mothers because we are too busy and too selfish to aid a black child in need.
The statistics bare this out: Of the estimated 500,000 children in the U.S. foster home system, more than half are minorities. Of those available for adoption, 40 percent are black, although blacks represent only about 13 percent of the general population. What‘s worse, according to the National Adoption Center, which keeps track of so-called hard-to-place children, about 67 percent of such children are black and 26 percent are white. Contrast this with 67 percent of the waiting families are Caucasian and 31 percent are African American.
While well-to-do blacks seem to ignore the plight of needy children who look like them, and while the Michael Jordans and the Tiger Woods and the Charles Barkleys of America are blissfully immersed in some kind of millionaire’s parade of debauchery, access and self-indulgence, others have tried to fill the vast void that we refuse to fill. Enter Sandra Bullock, stage right.
We seem to not want to even mentor black children, much less adopt. The Big Brothers Big Sisters of America [BBBS] had to mount a massive and costly national campaign with Alpha Phi Alpha just to rustle up interest in mentoring black boys and girls. Blacks make up a whopping 36 percent of all boys and girls in the BBBS who need mentors, but only 18 percent of all people who actually step in to do any mentoring. Pathetic.
The average single black businesswoman appear too busy and to self-centered to raise an adopted child because she’s scrambling to pay the notes on her Mercedes Benz 550 series and lives alone in a sprawling 5-bedroom homes. But she is so far in debt that she can scarcely afford to even feed herself much less take care of a needy child. Yet she can complain to the media that she can’t find a man to have a child with.
Then we have the likes of Antoine Walker, the former Boston Celtics star in the NBA, who lost $100 million in combined contracts over his career, because he made it about him and no one else. Walker now owes $7 million yet still owns 21 luxury cars — but can’t afford to adopt one child.
Are we so filled with such self loathing that we can’t even stand to take care of the youngest of ourselves? Most of us don’t even bother to ponder the question. Yet we have the nerve to wonder why those black infants grow up to break into our houses, rob us, carjack us, shoot other kids with impunity, sell their womanhood for love and have eight babies by seven different daddies — all because they lack direction and a loving family.
The black criminals and welfare queens of today are the unloved babies of yesterday. — terry shropshire
