DNA Testing Ordered

Race May Be Considered To Determine Paternity


A child’s racial appearance can be considered to establish paternity
declared a Rochester Family Court judge. In doing so, the Court
ordered a DNA test to establish the paternity of two children who
appeared to be bi-racial, born to a married Caucasian couple; the
petitioner seeking to establish paternity was an African-American
man.

While there is a strong presumption that a child, born to a wed couple is the natural child of the couple, the presumption is rebuttable.

Apparently, the child’s racial appearance may be a factor to rebut the presumption. In reaching its decision, the court noted that while there is ample case law for providing that “appearance” cannot be considered in determining paternity, there is no case law preventing a court from considering the child’s race.

While the white husband was identified on both children’s birth
certificates as the father, the petitioner had regular visitation with the children and paid child support to the couple. The petitioner sought to establish paternity after he realized that absent an order declaring him the children’s parent, the married couple could unilaterally cut off all access to the children.

The children apparently had a complexion noticeably darker than the couple identified as their birth parents and their sibling, who was natural child of the married parents.

In ordering the paternity test which the court noted definitively
establishes paternity, the court stated: the adults' history of behavior all points to a likelihood that [the petitioner] is the biological father of the subject children, and the children's behavior indicates they understand that he is their biological father to the extent children are able to do so. . . . If [petitioner] were not in the picture, the girls would still have to recognize—at some point—that either Mr. G. or
Mrs. G. is not their biological parent. The court has no magic
wand to change these realities.

Given the unique set of facts where the African–American petitioner, seeking to establish paternity, had an existing relationship with the biracial children, had an established access schedule, and was paying child support to the “legal” Caucasian parents, the children’s racial appearance probably was not the determinative factor in the Court’s decision.
Source: Posted by Daniel Clement on January 17, 2013 New York Divorce Report
Copyright © 2013, Daniel E. Clement. All Rights Reserved.

Supporting multiracial children

Actor Lee Gwang-soo, center, poses with children from multiracial families before making “bibimbap,” or rice mixed with meat, vegetables and condiments like red pepper paste, using foodstuff donated by CJ Foodville, at the Korea Support Center for Foreign Workers in Guro, southwestern Seoul, Friday. CJ is trying to globalize bibimbap by launching its restaurant chain, Bibigo, internationally. / Yonhap

Source: The Korea Times

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Casey Doesn't Get It: The Multiracial Advocacy

 

We have received a response from the Annie E. Casey Foundation because of our complaint (see last blog post). Either they just don’t understand, or they are deliberately excluding multiracial children.

The rather chilling response indicates that they take their data “collected by birth and death certificates at the state level.” That is the absolutely worst way to collect data on multiracial children. Most often, the parent is not asked the race of the baby at birth, and it is written on the baby’s chart by an attending nurse or doctor at the birth. Thousands of women over the years have told me they were never asked the race of their multiracial child until they started school. The fact is that in most states, race of the child is not even on the birth certificate and other times it only has the race of the parents.

What about those death certificates? A dead person cannot self-identify their race. Funeral home employees “eyeball” the person and write down a race—usually only one race.

The next Casey Foundation problem is that if they asked the right questions, they would get the right and most accurate data. In other words, they have admitted to only allowing one choice for “the five largest racial categories.” So if they don’t allow people to mark two or more, they haven’t asked question the right way to begin with. They are using inaccurate data.

The response from The Casey Foundation baffles me because they can get better data from the US Census Bureau, The American Community Survey and schools. The federal government ordered federal agencies to comply with check two or more boxes in 1997. Casey is a private foundation and they do not have to do what the federal government does, but what ever happened to doing the right thing?

Their response concludes by saying they will “explore” revisiting the categories for the 2013 publication and then they abruptly dismiss us. Oh really? There will be more to this story.

Multiracial Children Excluded from Casey Foundation

THUMBS DOWN TO CASEY FOUNDATION! The annual 2012 Kids Count Data Book by the Annie E. Casey Foundation was released today. The data in this annual report are widely-used and quoted. Most of the rankings are by race. THE CASEY FOUNDATION DID NOT USE MULTIRACIAL DATA AT ALL, EVEN THOUGH GOVERNMENT AGENCIES SUPPLY DATA ON THE MULTIRACIAL POPULATION and schools are required to allow students to check more than one race. SHAME ON THE CASEY FOUNDATION for perpetuating the invisibility of multiracial children in this country.

Annual Study Finds Child Education, Health Improving

By Sarah D. Sparks on July 25, 2012 5:36 AM

Children's health and education are showing positive signs even in the midst of a dismal economic environment, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation's annual ranking of child well-being, released this morning.

The 23rd-annual Kids Count Data Book represents an overhaul of the Baltimore-based group's historically health-dominated 10 benchmarks. This year the indicators have been expanded to "holistically measure" child well-being, incorporating 16 measures of health, education, economic well-being, and family and community support, according to Laura Speer, an associate director for advocacy reform and data at the foundation. The data from different indicators are not necessarily comparable, however, as they span different comparison years based on the most recent state and federal information available.

Researchers found education and health are on the upswing across all benchmarks, though gaps still exist between children of different racial groups, and Northeast and Midwestern states score well above states in the Deep South and Southwest.

Children with health insurance increased 2 percentage points to 92 percent, from 2008 to 2010, while child deaths dropped 16 percent between 2005 and 2009, from 32 to 27 deaths per 100,000 children. The number of babies born below healthy birth weight held steady.
Moreover, "Even in this time of economic decline, education got better," Speer said. Five percent more children—or 47 percent—attended preschool, and the percentage of 4th and 8th graders reading proficiently and the number graduating high school on time also rose.

"If I had to make one big bet, I'd ensure every child is reading proficiently by 3rd grade," said Patrick T. McCarthy, the foundation's president and CEO. "We know this is a pivot point, that up until 3rd grade children spend a lot of time learning to read, and after 3rd grade they basically are reading to learn, relying on their reading skills to do well. If a child is not reading well by the end of 3rd grade it becomes increasingly difficult for them to catch up to their peers."
He said that while there isn't a silver bullet to improve literacy, research does point to reading achievement gaps caused by differences in school readiness, general attendance, and summer learning loss. "You put those three things together and they are all things we can do something about."

Of little surprise, children's economic picture was bleaker. The study found 22 percent of children under age 18 living in poverty, up from the 19 percent in poverty in 2005, representing 2.4 million more children in families with $22,000 or less a year for a family of four. Likewise, 41 percent of children lived in homes with a high housing cost, up 4 percent since 2005. And since the economy plummeted in 2008, 27 percent more children—now one in three—has no parent with full-time, year-round employment.

Moreover, "Poor kids and kids of color continue to fall behind their more affluent and advantaged classmates," McCarthy said. "In 2010, American Indian and black children, both at 49 percent, were nearly twice as likely as white children to have no parent with secure employment. This is a very bad sign for those who care about opportunity for those children."
Casey researchers found several signs of improvement for families overall. Teen births continued to tick down, from 40 out of every thousand children born in 2005 to 39 births per thousand in 2009. And only 15 percent of children in 2010 lived in homes with a parent who has less than a high school diploma, 6 percent fewer than in 2005. Yet poor children increasingly live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty.

"Where a child grows up can make a huge difference" McCarthy said. "A low income child growing up in a flourishing community is more likely to thrive and succeed. That same child in poverty who lives in a community with a high concentration of poverty where most of the neighbors are also poor is far more likely to get off-track in school become involved gangs and fail to gain successful employment. So, investments that focus on improving neighborhoods can help provide a foundation for children's future."

Speer agreed in a briefing with reporters on Monday: "This is especially troubling because growing up in poverty is one of the greatest threats to healthy child development and it can really affect everything from their cognitive development and their ability to learn to their social and emotional development and their overall health."

The study comes on the heels of similar new child well-being data released last week by the the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics; it also found that fewer children are the victims of violent crimes.
Source: Education Week 

Multiracial Children Struggle to find Donor Matches

Multiracial Children Struggle to find Donor Matches

Seattle Children’s patients are often the most critically ill kids in the region, and some of them require life-saving transplants, such as an organ or bone marrow transplant. This is a daunting procedure for any family, but it can be even more so if that child is of mixed-race.

Multi-ethnic and multi-racial children have extremely diverse genetic makeup, so the odds of finding a donor who matches that genetic makeup lowers dramatically. With the growing community of racially and ethnically diverse people, it’s important that more people become donors so that the chance of a mixed-race child finding a match increases. At this time, the number of mixed-race donors falls far below those in need of a bone marrow transplant.


In fact, only 3 percent of the 16.5 million potential bone marrow donors in the National Marrow Donor Program’s Be The Match Registry identify themselves as mixed-race.¹ And unfortunately, this is a big problem that very few people know about. However, with the help of Japanese-Canadian documentary producer, Jeff Chiba Stearns, this could begin shifting in the very near future.

Jeff is raising awareness of this subset of patients in need of donors through his compelling documentary, Mixed Match, which highlights the lives of young mixed-race patients who are awaiting a match in order to undergo a life-saving procedure that is their only medical option.

Maga Barzallo Sockemtickem, a part Native American, Caucasian and Ecuadorean

15-year-old, is one of the patients profiled in Jeff’s documentary. Maga spent seven months at Seattle Children’s Hospital in 2011 waiting and hoping for a donor match to be found.

“Waiting for a donor is a terribly trying and draining period of time for both the patient and the patient’s family,” said Dr. Douglas Hawkins who leads the Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Seattle Children’s Hospital.  “Identifying a match is something entirely out of a family’s control, and all they can do is hope for the best.”

Finally, after months of anticipation, a donor was identified as a match for Maga and she was able to undergo the bone marrow transplant necessary to save her life. In the documentary, she tells Jeff, “My genes are very unique, and to find someone that matched nine out of 10 of them … it just fascinates me.”

In order for more success stories like this to unfold, a more diverse donor registry needs to be created. This will allow for more matches and subsequently more lives saved.

Statistics

• Every year, over 30,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with life threatening blood diseases like leukemia. For many patients, a bone marrow transplant is their only chance at survival. Only 30% of patients find matching donors within their families. The remaining 70% must search for an unrelated donor.²
• The number of people who identify themselves as multiracial in the U.S. has grown from 3.9 million in 2000, the first year the census included the category, to 5.2 million in 2008.
• About 6,000 people in the U.S. are awaiting a bone marrow match.¹
• According to the World Donor Marrow Association, while two out of three Caucasians find a match, the chances of a patient from another ethnic background can be as low as one in four.³
• Despite rapid improvements in marrow registries around the world, the global registry is still disproportionately represented by the U.S., U.K. and Germany — all predominantly Caucasian countries.³
• According to the 2000 U.S. Census, 41% of the mixed-race population is under 18, meaning much of the mixed-race population is too young to donate marrow, which requires donors to be at least 18.³

Sources

1. National Marrow Donor Program
2. Mixed Marrow
3. World Marrow Donor Association
4. Seattle Children’s Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Program

Article Source: Seattle Children's Hospital-Published in Global Health, Patient Care.

Interracial families and Korean Language

40% of multiracial children have difficulty with Korean

By Kim Bo-eun If your mother isn’t Korean then the Korean language may not be your mother tongue. Forty percent of children from biracial families are having trouble speaking Korean as most of their mothers have the same problem, a study showed Wednesday. The study by the Korea Institute of Child Care and Education was based on a survey of 534 multiracial families with children aged two to seven from June to September last year. It found that 40 percent of the children had Korean language difficulties. The number of biracial children reached 151,154 last year, comprising 11.9 percent of the total number of foreign residents. More and more Korean men have married foreign brides, especially from China and Southeast Asian countries. Children who scored highest on the test had Chinese-Korean mothers; while those who had mothers from China, Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan showed similar levels of language development. “The greatest factor behind the children’s delayed language development is that the mothers are not able to speak Korean very well,” said Choi Yoon-kyung, a researcher at the institute. “However, despite their mothers’ inability to speak the language, children in families in which their fathers or grandparents participate in childcare do not have difficulty in speaking Korean.” Another problem with interracial marriages is that they occur in rural parts of the nation, in which there is a lack of young women to marry men who work on farms. “The problem is that rural areas do not have adequate educational centers the children can attend to acquire the language,” said Choi. “And fathers are usually busy working on farms so they are unable to take part in childrearing.” The study also showed that children who attend childcare support centers or are using public services scored higher on the test, suggesting that a Korean speaking environment and interaction with other Koreans help in learning the language. A positive development is that the government has started to take up the full cost of attending daycare centers since last year for children from multiracial families. However, the authorities need to take additional measures. “The government needs to identify the families in which the children experience difficulty in acquiring Korean, usually the ones with low incomes, to provide adequate support for them,” said Choi. “Attention also needs to be paid to the parents, ensuring that both the fathers and their foreign spouses are ready and willing to participate in raising their children,” she added.  Source: