When you are a child welfare director, there is always the proverbial middle of the night call, and the news is always bad about somebody else’s child.
But what often does not get talked about is when the call is about your family and children you know and love. And when you are Black, the fear that grips the pit of your stomach stems from what you know about the policies, mandates and behaviors of child welfare systems and how they often react to people who look like you.
As a Black mother, grandmother and a former child welfare leader, I assure you it is no simple thing to stand in the public space and talk about these calls and what it means in terms of disproportionality and racism in the system. You know that knock on the door is not likely to result in anything good and that those answering the door, neither the children nor their parents, are likely to come out better for the experience.
There are few things more ominous than contact with the child welfare system, especially for parents who are already waging a noble — and often ineffective — struggle to stay on their feet amid the historical and structural harms that racism has left as a footprint in our society and its public systems.
I can tell you this: it is much easier to call this out than it is to end it. Perhaps that helps to explain why, despite decades of observations and data documenting disproportionality patterns for Black children and families inside child welfare, we have spent more time watching those numbers than we have understanding what it will take to significantly change them.
What if the numbers alone are not enough? What if we need to change our mind about the problem that needs to be solved?
While the persistent over-representation of Black families and their children in the child welfare system may make a compelling case for focusing change efforts largely on the Black experience, we may want to consider that the racism and patterns of bias driving disproportionality in this century may not be the same as 50 years ago. In this nation, race has always been a convenient political construct — a way to organize the social and economic fabric, doling out privilege and access based on the color of one’s skin. But in the 21st century, it is that same racial construct, now in tandem with a host of other exclusionary beliefs and biases, that persists in inflicting irrevocable harm on children and their families because they do not conform to a set of rigid and narrowly defined monolithic standards about what is normal.
And yes, very often, if those children and families are Black, they are more than likely standing at the front of the queue, but I assure you that today they are not alone. The vestiges of racism and bias are showing up in the marginalization of other groups of people, not because they are having the exact same experience Blacks are having, but because of a widening tide of exclusionism that is unwilling to embrace diversity and inclusion as national norms and values.
Are we willing to consider that the patterns of disproportionality we see inside today’s child welfare system are the fruit of a larger and more poisonous tree — a persistent set of biases and exclusions that show up as unforgiving and errant behaviors in public systems? A line of sight that judges people narrowly through the lens of the inequities and injustices that they are struggling to endure?
How else are we to explain how a nation full of the descendents of immigrants could not find a better way than cages to “rescue” terrified children who had just made the hazardous journey across the U.S. border, seeking a better life? Or how five Black police officers beat another Black man to death just because he ran?
Ultimately, we are all living in a nation marred by a history of racism, bias and exclusion, a history that we cannot change, but one which, if we choose, we can surely repair. It may be incumbent on those of us who are Black and who have had a long sojourn living in that history to widen our own line of sight on the problem. Otherwise, I fear we are apt to find ourselves inadvertently trapped in a one-dimensional narrative, either unwilling or unable to see that the poisonous tree driving current patterns of disproportionality and unfair treatment in child welfare have been fed not just by the Black experience in the Americas, but also by a string of wrongs and abuses that others are experiencing.
We must do something different. In the name of child protection, we cannot continue to accept that hotline calls, investigations and family separation are our highest and best response to people who are struggling to survive the multiple historical and structural inequities and injustices that inevitably bring them to the attention of child welfare.
The system’s rules and protocols are not just stacked against Blacks but against any whose differences make it easy for public systems to label them as invisible, flawed and unworthy. I keep hoping there is a broader political agenda here, a place to organize and gather like minds around those who our nation seems comfortable ignoring because of what they look like, how they talk, where they live, who they are, or what conditions they find themselves in.
Otherwise, as we used to say back in the day, “if they come for me today, they come for you tomorrow.”
