Transracial adoption and the rise of Reform

Today I turned 55. That’s 54 years 11 months and 24 days of being adopted. I spent 7 days with my mother before I was whisked away to Somerset. Somerset is a beautiful county; I live on the edge of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and open my curtains to the glorious Quantock Hills every day. 

The beauty conceals a much darker underbelly which is emerging more and more over recent months: racism. Somerset has a mainly white population, so you might wonder why anyone would want to raise a child of colour in such a setting. Having been dragged here by white parents in the early 70s, it’s a question I often wrestle with.

To put this into context, when the supply of domestic, white babies dried up and the demand was far higher than the babies available, people started to look elsewhere, encouraged by organisations like the Church Adoption Society, BAAF, and Parent to Parent Information and Advice Services (today called Adoption UK). Voluntary organisations such as these encouraged potential adopters who had been denied a white child locally to look further afield and consider adopting a child of colour. For many couples it became the only route into adoption. 

The push to home such “hard to place” children became more public and mainstream. 

Whether it was in the best interests of the child was secondary to the wants of adopters and the pressures on local authorities to keep children out of residential care. So we got shipped out, all over the country. The lucky ones stayed in a metropolitan area but too many of us were sent to rural or predominantly white areas with white parents and a white family.

Unfortunately, racism is something most people of colour have had to deal with at some point in their life; it is as rampant in cities as it is in rural areas.  It is odious, hurtful, ignorant and damaging. The difficulty for transracial adoptees, particularly the ones being raised in areas without a black community, is who do you go to for support? White parents have absolutely zero conception of how it feels, zero. Comments like “they are jealous of your hair” and other invalidating responses are dismissive and in many cases do more damage than good. I knew no other black people I knew growing up—no one who could offer support, understanding and validation from their own lived experience. No black hairdressers, no restaurants. Nothing. 

So you suffer, often in total silence, internalising your pain. You start to accept casual racism, micro aggressions, the general bullshit (iykyk). This coping mechanism is not helpful though. Mentally, the fallout can be catastrophic. You learn to live with it, people say awful things, you bury it whilst saying “and you can fuck off” in your head to each soul-sapping comment. 

TRAs are also subjected to racism from within their wider adoptee community. Sometimes unintentional, sometimes intentional, regularly getting othered by those who are supposed to be supportive. The lack of education even within adoptee organisations can sometimes be shocking, other times saddening. The level of microaggression is exhausting. 

Now in 2026 we are living in the age of Reform (and worse). It started with the flags, then the protests. Now we are living in a time when people feel so emboldened that racist rants have ceased to be occasional and have again become the norm. People hide behind screens and nicknames but you only have to look in one local Facebook group and it’s there on full display, no longer hidden. Racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism. All there in glorious technicolour. If I’ve seen one “send em back” I’ve seen a hundred. 

So where are you going to send me back to? I was born here, raised here and I even served in HM forces. You’d think that would be enough but apparently not. 

Who do I talk to? Now that I am in reunion with my black family, fortunately I have family to talk to but in terms of professional support I know that when I was looking in 2024 Somerset had one black therapist working in their NHS trust. I ended up working remotely with a therapist in Manchester, hardly on the doorstep!

I think my main problem is community. As a transracial adoptee, you often miss out on all of that. I don’t have black friends who aren’t also TRAs. 

I say all of this while it is still happening today, today with everything we have learned we still as a society hold adoption up as a child welfare gold standard and transracial adopters as some sort of heroes. They aren’t, most have no idea what they are doing, any nod to culture is exactly that, a nod. Guess what though? The supply of domestic black babies dried up too. So what do potential adopters do now? Go abroad, literally uproot a child from their natural setting and traffic them to the UK. They don’t just lose their culture and history, they lose their country, often their language and their nationality. Then they are told to go back to the country they were forcibly removed from and have no connection to any more. How confusing. 

The institutional racism which existed in the 70s never disappeared, it just regularly changes form. You only have to talk to traveller communities about their experiences to see that. Still there and seeping into everything including the care of our most vulnerable, our children.