Nice White Lady: Whiteness and Domestic Transracial Adoption in Helen Doss's The Family Nobody Wanted

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Famous for adopting twelve children, most of them children of color, Helen Doss used her transracially adoptive family to model white racial liberal values. The Family Nobody Wanted argues for white social responsibility for addressing racial discrimination, framed by sentimental anecdotes about her harmonious multiracial home. Focusing on the national and racial ideology of the 1940s, when most of the adoptions were completed, this essay calls attention to the domestic conditions that led to Doss's public prominence and the interconnections between white racial liberalism's emphasis on civic duty and the rise of adoptive parents as important civic actors. These developments, traced through Doss's autobiography, demonstrate the mechanisms by which white civic responsibility became attached to the act of transracial adoption, with implications for how white adopters are perceived today—often as experts in transracial adoption experiences whose views are privileged above other participants in the adoption system.