We suggest that the National office for the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program use this item from The Daily Show as a training video
UPDATE: October 25, 2018: News accounts this morning suggest that NBC is demonstrating the right way to respond to trafficking in racial stereotypes. The so-called Chronicle of Social Change - the Fox News of child welfare still doesn't get it.
UPDATE, October 24, 2018: Responding to Today Show anchor Megyn Kelly’s appalling
attempt to justify blackface, (for which she has apologized) her colleague
Craig Melvin noted that, as
a CNN story put it, “this controversy is an opportunity to inform people —
but said most people already knew how offensive blackface is.”
Most people, but apparently not one chapter of that most
sacred cow in child welfare Court-Appointed Special Advocates. Oh, they’ve probably learned in the years
since they included a blackface act in a fundraiser, especially since they apparently eventually apologized – but that is just one
example of the racial bias that plagues CASA.
And that, of course, raises fundamental questions about the role of CASA
in deciding the fate of children who are overwhelmingly poor and
disproportionately children of color.
So I’m reprinting our blog post on this topic from last
Halloween:
This Halloween, The Daily Show offers a useful history lesson: The topic, why it’s a really bad idea for white people to dress up in blackface:
But the lesson isn’t just useful for Halloween. It’s also
something that anyone involved with that most sacred cow of child welfare –
Court-Appointed Special Advocates -- needs to know.
CASA is a program in which minimally trained volunteers,
overwhelmingly white and middle-class, are assigned to families who are
overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite. Then they tell judges if
the children should be taken from those families, sometimes forever. That, of course, raises problems of inherent
bias. But some CASA chapters have made
their biases depressingly obvious.
Consider what happened nine years ago in Arkansas City,
Kansas. To raise funds for the local CASA chapter, they held a talent
competition. The winning act featured the mayor of Arkansas City – dressed in
blackface. The head of the local CASA
chapter couldn’t understand why that was a problem. "It wasn't black black," she said. "It was all really just
tan." That’s only the beginning. All
the awful details are here.
It would be one thing if this were just an isolated example
of racial bias. But it’s not.
● There was the CASA chapter in Marin County, California, which fell apart when the state CASA association merely asked that they strive
for more diversity among the volunteers.
● There was the appalling
racist rant by someone who says he volunteered in a scandal-plagued
Washington State CASA program for 20 years.
● There’s the fact that the most
comprehensive study ever done of CASA, a study commissioned by the National
CASA Association itself, found that CASA volunteers spend significantly less
time on a case if the child to whom they are assigned is Black.
● And then there’s the question of whether the very
structure of CASA makes it, in the words of a law review article, “anexercise of white supremacy.”
Showing the Daily Show
video won’t solve all these problems; not even close. But it might help prevent
the worst excesses of racial bias in CASA programs.
Originally published, Oct. 30, 2017
Originally published, Oct. 30, 2017
