A heart-warming story out of North Carolina is making the rounds on national media channels. Peter Mutabazi lives in Charlotte now, but he once lived on the streets of Uganda as a child. Today he is a great dad to four adopted children. He takes joy in providing these children with the childhood he never had.

Part of what validates this story for national media attention is that Peter is black and his four adopted children are white. It’s an unconventional family, Peter explains, but it works because “love transcends racial differences.”

Love transcends racial differences. While most people believe that statement is true, it seems to hold too little bearing in family courts across North Carolina. The power of love to transcend race flows mostly one way — black to white. A sad but growing fraternity of white foster parents have discovered that black or Native American children in their care for years are nearly impossible to adopt. It’s simple racism, in reverse.

Consider three stories, a smattering of many:

  • In Swain County, a girl of Cherokee descent was born with meth in her system and spent two years in the care of a white family willing to adopt her. Though the court knew her mother was still actively using and had been through 15 jobs in a year, the tribal attorney stated in court that “no matter what,” he would not permit this child to be adopted by a non-tribal member. The court returned her to her addicted mother.
  • In Guildford County, a white couple who fostered a black boy for 28 months, since his birth, saw that child removed from their home overnight and placed with a single black woman with a criminal record. The social worker who handled the case was black and invented trumped-up charges that foster parents were not “sensitive to cultural differences.” They never got a chance to address those charges or to advocate for this child in court.
  • In yet another part of the state, two brothers on the verge of being adopted by a white family who had cared for them for 20 months were abruptly moved for spurious reasons. They have now been in three different placements — all single black women — shuffled in and out of various homes for years. (Every year a child is in foster care his chances of being adopted decrease by 25%).

It’s not like we don’t know what happens to a child when his primary attachments are broken. School failure, hyperactivity, truancy, prison sentences — the list goes on and on.

Boatloads of research underscore the need for children to be in a stable home with parents who will take care of them. We always hope for biological family first. But the child’s attachment needs should determine placement. That’s why it’s been illegal for 30 years to place children in homes on the basis of race, though it’s done more and more, in flagrant violation of federal law. It’s one of our dirty little secrets.

Race has emerged as the ultimate trump card in many sectors of our culture. We have just watched Harvard excuse multiple, credible charges of plagiarism in its president, Claudine Gay. What has preserved her against accusations that would have gotten a Harvard undergraduate dismissed? Skin color and gender. The narrative needs her.

That would be a woke happening in a far-away place called Boston, the stuff of academic elites, except that this race-obsessed ideology trickles down in a thousand ways. It ruins the life of a little black boy in North Carolina torn from the arms of people who have loved and cared for him for years, his teddy bear and satchel of belongings in tow, handed to a woman he does not know, with no track record of parenting. But the skin color is the same.

That’s all that can be said for it — the skin color matches.

In the guise of saving him, a cabal of lawyers and judges and social workers who should know better — and do know better — willingly sacrifice him to the god of race.

Peter Mutabazi has it right, though. Love does actually have the power to transcend differences as deep as race or cultural background. It simply does. White parents will help a black adopted child cope with racial challenges in the same way that Peter will help his white adopted children overcome the obstacles in their way — with love that moves beyond differences.

The reality that love is able to transcend race has to be true for all children needing a home. When race becomes a god, it’s vulnerable children who suffer most.