By Shannon D. Harrington

They were, by and large, a privileged group - 17 white suburban parents, mostly middle class, and living in Westchester County, one of the most affluent places in America. They likely will never experience the humiliation of being treated differently because of their skin color. But as the parents gathered around brown folding tables in the conference room of a children’s hospital, discrimination was on their minds - not because of themselves but because of their children.

They were the adoptive parents of Latino children. And they wanted to know how to guard their children from neighborhood prejudice, playground mistreatment and feelings of cultural isolation.

"Our kids stand out," one mother said during the meeting of New York’s chapter of the Latin American Parents Association.

As a consequence, others say, the children sometimes endure taunts and threats from both white and Latino classmates.

Moreover, some parents say, the children seldom see Latino adults in professional roles in their communities; instead they see them as hired hands, scrubbing kitchen floors and trimming shrubs.

With more international adoptions today than ever before, an increasing number of white American families are facing the challenges of raising children of color in white suburbia. Since 1989, international adoptions by American parents have more than doubled, according to Immigration and Naturalization Service data. Ten years ago, the INS granted visas to 8,102 orphans. Last year, 16,369 visas were issued.

A lot of the growth in international adoptions has come from countries formerly part of the Soviet Union. More than 4,000 came from Russia alone. But a growing number of the international adoptions are taking place in China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Guatemala.

Maris Blechner, executive director of Family Focus Adoption Services in Little Neck, Queens, said tougher restrictions on domestic adoptions and greater acceptability of interracial families have prompted families to look outside the United States when adopting.

And with a majority of the international adoptions being done by white parents, Blechner said, the ethnic and racial compelexities that come with such adoptions increasingly hit suburbia.

That’s what brought the Westchester County parents together during a chilly April evening. They had asked Blechner and Kathe Stojowski, two local experts on international adoptions, for help.

Westchester County is 80-percent white, according to U.S. Census estimates from 1996, and only 103,417 of Westchester’s 896,221 residents - or 11.6 percent - are Latino. Moreover, the parents say that the diversity Westchester does have is largely segregated.

In the predominantly white communities, the parents say their children complain about not having Latino role models. The limited interactions the children do have with other Latinos are with their nannies, cleaning ladies or gardeners.

"Our children can fall in the cracks," one parent wrote to Blechner in an e-mail. The parent said that their children are often assumed to be from working-class immigrant families, "but they have little in common with many in that clique while they are rejected by the Anglo/white groups because of their heritage."

Barbara, the single mother of an adopted Brazilian-born boy and a member of the parents group, has experienced some of those problems.

Barbara, who did not want her last name used in this story, said her son’s classmates or kids in the neighborhood sometimes will call him a Mexican. She wouldn’t normally consider such a remark derogatory, she said. But because of the stereotypes Mexican immigrants in her community have - as the "helping class" - she and her son do take it personally.

"Really what they’re doing is calling him a gardener," said Barbara, a corporate public relations executive.

That class divide - between Westchester’s wealthy white families and the blue-collar, largely immigrant Latino families - has been the toughest hurdle for Barbara and her son.

While her son was in elementary school, she wanted to transfer him to a school with more Latinos. But the school principal cautioned her against that. Until then, Barbara said, her son had been raised in an upper middle class environment. He grew up listening to classical music and spoke both Portugese and English fluently.

Many of the other Latino children in the community, the principal told Barbara, struggled with English and their grades suffered because of it. Many had been raised on meager family incomes. "She said the kids in the other school really were a cultural minority," Barbara said.

The principal persuaded Barbara to kept her son in the predominantly white school.

She said he endured some teasing because of his ethnicity, but it never became too much of a problem.

But later, when he entered intermediate school, where white and Latino children came together, Barbara said her son was picked on by a group of white and Latino students- this time because of his privileged upbringing. "They were chasing him home and threatening to beat him up," she said.

Eventually, she enrolled him at a private school, where he has made both white and Latino friends, some also adopted. "For the first time in years he is happy," she said.

Other adoptive parents say a little diversity can go a long way in raising an adopted child of color. Joan, the mother of a 9-year-old Mexican-American son and an officer in the New York chapter of the Latin American Parents Association, said she and her husband have had a different experience from that of the Westchester parents. Joan did not want her full name used in this story.

The family lives in the Gravesend area of Brooklyn. Joan said that of the 25 students in her son’s third-grade class, five are Latino, five white, about four black, four South Asian and others are biracial. The diversity is one of the reasons Joan and her husband, a first-generation Belgian immigrant, have not moved to the suburbs. In the city, she said, people "are used to seeing families who don’t resemble each other."

If anything, Joan says, more people have assumed that her son was not Latino. Her adopted son’s light skin tone is similar to that of Joan, who is of Italian decent. "He’s had a hard time proving to people that he’s Mexican. They won’t believe him," she said.

Blechner, the adoption agency director, also had the advantage of living in a diverse neighborhood while raising her Korean-American daughter. Blechner and her husband, who are Jewish, lived in a Queens neighborhood with not only a large Jewish community but also a growing Korean community.

Their daughter had both Jewish and Korean friends, attending public schools and Hebrew school. She was exposed to Korean food and customs during sleepovers at the homes of her friends.

And because they lived in such a multicultural community, Blechner said, she believes her daughter experienced scant discrimination because of her ethnicity - at least in her own community.

But for the parents in Westchester, diversity must be sought out, Blechner said.

Back at the meeting at the children’s hospital, Blechner and Stojowski told the parents that they must help their children find Latino role models.

Blechner said that when her Korean-born daughter was a teenager and developed an interest in the fashion world, she noticed that the magazines her daughter was reading featured no Asian models. So Blechner went to a newsstand, searched through racks of fashion magazines until she found some Asian models and then brought them back to her daughter.

And as far as racism, Blechner and Stojowski told the parents that they will have to play a double role - protecting and defending their children from racism while also educating their white neighbors about false perceptions.

"Adoptive parents have to be smarter than their next-door neighbor," Blechner said.

Stojowski, whose adopted son is Peruvian, said that when she taught him to drive, she not only had to teach him how to parallel park but also what to do when a police officer pulls him over. "If a police officer stops you, put your hands on the wheel and don’t mouth him," Stojowski said she told her son.

Blechner leveled with the parents.

"Talking about racism with a child is harder than talking about sex or marijuana," she said. "It makes you sweat when you talk about that with your children."

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