ADOPTION BATTLE RAGING OVER MIXED-RACE PLACEMENTS.

Byline: Amy Kuebelbeck Associated Press 

The way Jan and Steve Sharp see it, their cherished daughter was wrenched from their home after nearly three years purely because she is African-American and they are white.

The Sharps brought ``Baby D'' home from the hospital when she was 4 days old to be her foster parents. When the happy, talkative baby turned 1 and they had heard nothing from relatives, they asked to adopt her.

Days later, the county told them it had found the toddler's grandmother, and the fight began. The Minnesota Supreme Court ultimately ruled - based on a Minnesota law requiring the state to give preference to relatives and same-race families when placing children - that Baby D must go to her African-American grandparents in Virginia. She was moved days before her third birthday.

``She was hysterical. She was pleading, `Don't leave me,' '' recalls Jan Sharp, tears welling at the memories of four years ago.

But rules were rules, and Minnesota - like Arizona and California - required race-matching for all government placements. All other states had similar, unofficial policies.

Now a new federal law, effective Jan. 1, prohibits states from using race as a reason to delay or keep children out of an adoptive home or foster care. But the controversy over whether children and parents should be matched by color - like socks - roars on.

``Kids should not be placed based on race and color. Kids should be placed based on a loving home, period,'' said Frank Taylor, president of the Minnesota Suburban NAACP, which supported the Sharps.

Strict race-matching policies began out of concern that too many African-American children were being placed with white families. The National Association of Black Social Workers has called interracial adoption cultural ``genocide'' and endorsed it only if exhaustive attempts to find relatives or same-race adoptive parents failed.

African-American children need African-American parents to learn traditions, language skills and ``survival skills'' in a society where color still matters, said Lester Collins, executive director of the Council on Black Minnesotans, a leading force behind Minnesota's now-moot law.

``We're talking about the way a people move and how they greet one another and how they worship - everything about life and who it is that a child ultimately develops into being,'' Collins said. ``An important piece of that is a sense of community.''

Proponents of race matching say that whites, with their affluence and their numbers, have an advantage over African-Americans in adoptions.

Steven Belton, who was the attorney for Baby D's grandparents and who helped pass Minnesota's law, said that without same-race preferences, whites have a monopoly on adopting white children and get to adopt nonwhite children as well.

``If people truly believe that we should be offended as a society by racial preferences, then do away with the white racial preference ... and assign children by lottery, first-come, first-serve,'' he said.

But critics said the policies themselves were racist and often forced African-American children to languish in foster care for years because of a lack of available African-American families.

About 52 percent of children awaiting adoption through state placement services around the country are African-American, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. African-American children on average wait longer for a permanent home than white children.

Opponents of interracial adoption contend that with more effort, enough African-American parents could be found. Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet, an expert in family and adoption law, disagrees.

``There's just a major numbers problem,'' she said. African-American families adopt at roughly the same rate as white families, she said, but simply cannot absorb so many African-American children who have been orphaned.

Supporters of interracial adoption also say that in addition to giving homes to children who desperately need permanency, a parent's fierce love for a child of another color can only help melt racial barriers.

What about long-term effects of children adopted by parents of a different race? A 20-year study of African-American Korean and American Indian adoptees concluded that such children grow up adjusted emotionally and socially and ``aware of and comfortable with their racial identity,'' writes Rita Simon, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C.

Despite the new law, Bartholet worries that states and activists will quietly try to continue race-matching: ``There is no question that there will be adamant opposition to the letter and spirit of this new act,'' she said.

In the case of Baby D, the grandparents argued during the custody fight that they searched for the girl as soon as they learned of her birth, and that the Sharps were selfish to try to keep her.

The grandparents declined comment, but their attorney said Baby D is now thriving and has ``never once'' asked for Jan and Steve Sharp - though the Sharps said court officials called them to Virginia shortly after the move for an emergency visit because the girl was crying inconsolably.

They have not seen her since.

The Sharps now have two adopted sons, ages 1-1/2 and 2-1/2, both of them African-American. They were adopted out of state to avoid Minnesota's law.