Losing Isaiah, Losing Faith

Losing Isaiah is a movie about Isaiah, a black crack baby whose mother put him in the trash one night thinking she’d come back after scoring a hit but her getting stoned and passed out leaving the baby to found by strangers.  A white social worker named Margaret Lewin bonded with Isaiah in the hospital, she and her family later on adopted him.  In the meantime, Khaila was arrested and entered a rehab program.  Four years later, Khaila found out her baby was not dead, decided to fight for Isaiah’s custody and contested the adoption.  The court resolved to dismiss the adoption largely based on the issue of race.  Obviously, Isaiah did not adjust well to his “new” mother.  The movie did have a happy ending with the mothers putting asides their own feelings and placed the welfare and happiness of the child first.

My main grudge with this movie is how the court would feel that it was in the child’s best interest to literally tear him away from the only family he’d known and thrown him unceremoniously to his now-reformed mother. In this case, the court system behaved as if racial identity was the end-all solution and purposefully refused to figure the roles of responsibility and love into the equation.  I believe we need to examine the intentions of the parties involved before summarily positing a life-changing judgment.  According to my understanding of the movie, Khaila willfully abandoned her child in a dangerous place, the outdoor trash, to look for a cocaine fix.  The fact that she was stoned to the point of passing out did help the matter either, as it was, Isaiah was in mortal danger if the workers did not notice the boy and proceed to work normally.  Khaila did not volunteer to attend the rehab center but was placed there after she was caught shoplifting.  Therefore, one can argue that she did not intend to get clean, and the rehab center was a by-product of her arrest.  So the judge was taking the side of segregating the races and ignored the child’s safety and desire stay with his “white” family.  Just by saying Khaila was Isaiah’s mother and so her mother instincts should be enough to take care of him is wrong since Khaila had erroneously failed her son once before. 

The ending was pretty much a fairytale cop-out.  It looked like the director take a look at the plot and say “Well, we have to throw the Lewin character a bone to keep the audience happy and make us appear less racist.”