The left's interest in Barrett's adopted kids is unhealthy

Most reasonable people would agree that the Barretts’ decision to adopt one sickly orphan and then another following the worst natural disaster in Haiti’s history isn’t merely admirable but heroic. Yet Judge Barrett has been attacked by luminaries of the political left who are outraged that the adoptions were transracial. On Saturday, Ibram X. Kendi, a Boston University professor and author of the best-selling book “How to Be an Antiracist,” questioned the judge’s motives. “Some White colonizers ‘adopted’ Black children,” he wrote on Twitter. “They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage’ children in the ‘superior’ ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.”

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Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian and CNN political commentator, wonders whether Vivian and John Peter weren’t adopted so much as kidnapped. “Many authoritarians seized children of color for adoption by White Christians,” she tweeted. “Pinochet’s regime did this with indigenous kids and Nazis took Aryan looking Poles for German families. Trump takes migrant kids for adoption by Evangelicals.”

It would be a mistake to laugh this off as knee-jerk anti-Trumpism. The sort of racial hype and paranoia coming from the progressive left long predates the current administration and will continue whether or not Mr. Trump is re-elected next month. The National Association of Black Social Workers first announced its opposition to transracial adoption in 1972. In a statement, the group took “a vehement stand against the placements of black children in white homes for any reason” and called such arrangements not only “unnatural” but “unnecessary” and harmful to the physical and psychological development of black children.

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