Gift children : a story of race, family, and adoption in a divided America
(Book)

In 1970 Doug and Gloria Bates adopted a four-year-old black girl as a sister to their two biological white sons. Two years later they adopted another black girl. Gift Children is the story of the twenty-three-year interracial journey that ensued, a story that helps illuminate race relations in America today while depicting both the harsh difficulties as well as the heartwarming rewards that followed.

Gift Children is an intimate portrait of race relations told through the history of the Bates family. It is a deeply American story about bringing up children (in this case, in Eugene, Oregon), about celebrating and growing together, about coping with family tensions and dilemmas, and about negotiating the difficult years of adolescence and young adulthood. While casting a sharp light on the racism that lies all about us - and often within us as well - it is preeminently a book about caring, trusting, loving, and working together. Gift Children describes the problems, setbacks, and pain of a family's attempt to live interracially, but ultimately it tells of a signal success hard won in an imperfect world. All who are interested in families, adoption, and race relations in America will find Gift Children an important and moving book.