“I don’t wanna die young, cuz the system is f*cked up”
The final installation of this Protect Black Children writing series deals with the child welfare system. This includes foster care, kinship care, and child protective services. The most notable full work on this topic is, without a doubt, Dorothy Roberts’ Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001). One of the many profound statements Roberts makes is one I would like to situate at the center of this piece. She writes, “The child welfare system is designed not as a way for the government to assist parents to take care of their children but as a means to punish parents for their failures by threatening to take their children away. The child welfare system, then, is a misnomer. The mission of state agencies is not to promote children’s welfare. Rather, their purpose has become child protection: they try to protect children from the effects of society’s colossal failure to care enough about children’s welfare. The system is activated only after children have already experienced harm and puts all the blame on parents for their children’s problems. This protective function falls heaviest on African American parents because they are most likely to suffer from poverty and institutional discrimination and to be blamed for the effects on their children.” It is critical that we make the distinction between this notion of child protection Roberts articulates and the central premise of this series: Protect Black Children. We do not intend to conduct research, examine scholarship, and analyze history in order to deem certain Black parents “unfit” for raising children. Rather, this blog series intends to usher the needs, conditions, and (under)development of Black children to the forefront of our minds as thinkers, scholars, and workers for all Afrikan/Black people.
A critical examination to make is on the child welfare system as a whole. Child welfare reflects the political choice to address dire child poverty in Black communities by punishing parents instead of confronting the structural reasons for racial and economic inequality… America’s child welfare system is a racist institution. The greatest danger to Black children in the child welfare system is the destructive and degrading regulation of their families by the state. The American child welfare system is raising too many Black children with the dispiriting perspective that state authorities are in charge of them instead of their parents. Situating our analysis of the child welfare system within a critical context of race is imperative, because the wide majority of scholarship utilizes a social work perspective, absent of any critical race intervention. Because of this, there is no attention paid to the racial disparities that are exacerbated and reinforced by this system. Racial inequities in the child welfare system cause serious group-based harms by reinforcing disparaging stereotypes about Black family unfitness and need for white supervision, by destroying a sense of family autonomy and self-determination among many Black Americans, and by weakening Blacks’ collective ability to overcome institutionalized discrimination. To enhance this critical race approach, we will refer to both structural discrimination and institutional racism. Structural discrimination, defined by Robert B. Hill, refers to the disparate adverse consequences of societal trends and institutional policies on racial minorities that may not have been explicitly designed to have racially discriminatory effects…structural discrimination shifts the focus from the prejudiced attitudes or malevolent intentions of individuals to the consequences or effects of systems or institutions. One example of this form of discrimination can be mainstream media and discourse representation and because black families are overrepresented among the poor, individuals often perceive of and treat them differently on the basis of class-related characteristics. There is an association in the minds of many Americans between being black and being poor and vice versa…These views extend to black children as well.
Institutional racism, defined by Andrew Billingsley and Jeanne M. Giovannoni, is the systematic oppression, subjugation and control of one racial group by another dominant or more powerful racial group, made possible by the manner in which the society is structured. In this society, racism emanates from white institutions, white cultural values, and white people. The victims of racism in this society are Black people and other oppressed racial and ethnic minorities. In other words, for this form of racism to occur, it is not necessary for a group of people to assemble in a backroom to consciously conspire against another group. They must only internalize the operating norms and values of the agency, institution or society in which they are situated (Better, 2002; Day, 1979). These terms are crucial in our understanding of the child welfare system through a critical race lens, because it is this lens that provides insightful nuance to the historical trends and evidence.
There are striking parallels that can be drawn between the child welfare system and the criminal justice system. As Roberts (2002) writes, “the two institutions are remarkably similar… both populated almost exclusively by poor people and by grossly disproportionate numbers of Blacks” (201). Black adolescents are more often referred to secure correctional facilities, while white youths with the same violent behavior and psycho-pathology are more often referred to mental health services as outpatients (McCabe et al., 1999; Stehno, 1982). In short, diagnoses based on racial prototypes by well-meaning clinicians are more likely to result in higher rates of placement of black children in foster care than white children (Stehno, 1982; Whaley, 1998). One of the most comprehensive analyses of the role of race in the child welfare system was based on the National Study of Protective, Preventive and Reunification Services (NSPPRS) Delivered to Children and Families, which was conducted by Westat in 1994 to update the findings of the 1977 National Study of Social Services to Children and Their Families. In fact, according to the NSPPRS, black children were twice as likely as white children to be placed in foster care (56% versus 28%). Or, 72% of white families received services with their children at home, compared to only 44% of black families in the child welfare system (U.S. Children’s Bureau, 1997).
It is also important to focus on the legislative component of the child welfare system and how, as Roberts described, this institution shifted from child welfare to child protection. One can look to one specific legislative change that galvanized this institutional shift; What was known as the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 was soon reversed by the passing of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. While the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 directed CWS toward family preservation and away from separating families (Pelton 1997), this was reversed when the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA) was passed. The ASFA represented a key shift in public policy by emphasizing “the primacy of protection of children over preservation and reunification,” and included provisions that made the process of removing a child from their home easier and sped up the process for terminating parental rights. This shift had significant implications for black children for many reasons: it diverted policy emphasis away from prevention and reunification and toward foster care and adoption; it shortened the time limits for reunification with birth parents, meaning parents with chronic problems could face termination of their legal rights after a shorter time period; it led to the pressuring of relatives to adopt related children in order to move them out of the system legally; and it no longer provided foster care maintenance payments for legal guardianship, instead providing funding only for adoption subsidies (Chipungu 2004).
Ultimately, we must study, analyze, and work to dismantle the child welfare system as what it truly is, a racist institution to the same extent we understand any other anti-Black institution: mass incarceration, policing, public schooling, etc. Dorothy Roberts brilliantly situates how we should frame the rights of Black children: The rights of Black children must be interpreted in the context of racial oppression. Individualized explanations of harm do not account for the particular injury inflicted on children by racially disparate state intervention in families. Without careful attention to social justice, rights tend to reinforce social hierarchies and benefit the most privileged members of society. To be just, children’s rights must be part of a broader struggle to eradicate oppressive structures that ruin the fortunes of the least privileged children and to create a more egalitarian society that cherishes all children.
LISTEN TO BLACK CHILDREN
LEARN FROM BLACK CHILDREN
LOVE BLACK CHILDREN
TEACH BLACK CHILDREN
PROTECT BLACK CHILDREN
Special Note: All titles of my written work are hip-hop lyrics and the title of this piece is a special one. My former student, friend, and “lil bro” Domo wrote and performed the song “Life So Hard.” The title of this piece is a lyric of his.
Keep grinding lil bro, you will always have my support.
REFERENCES
Roberts, Dorothy E. Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare. Basic Books, 2002.
