The New York Times
published a satirical video on its opinion pages yesterday that, on the surface, has
nothing at all to do with child welfare.
But actually, it has everything to do with child welfare.
The video offers a number people can call – 1-844-WYT-FEAR as
an alternative to calling 911 when African-Americans are simply going about
their daily lives doing things that are nobody else’s damn business:
The Times supplements
the video with links to “39 known instances just this year when someone
called the police to complain about black people doing everyday activities.”
Parenting is also an everyday activity. And the data are clear: You are more likely
to be falsely accused of child abuse if you are Parenting While Black. It’s especially true if you’re also poor, as
documented by the Times in its story
about foster
care as the new “Jane Crow.” But you don’t have to be poor to be accused of
child abuse for Parenting While Black. Just
ask Shaun King.
But here’s what makes the cancer of racial bias even more
malignant in child welfare than in other fields. In most of those other fields almost everyone
at least admits there’s a problem – at a minimum, those calling themselves
liberals will admit there’s a problem.
But in child welfare, there’s an entire “caucus
of denial” – mostly self-proclaimed liberals, who insist that they are
simply so much better than their
counterparts in any other line of work that there is no racial bias in child
welfare.
How pervasive is this liberal blindspot? Consider:
● In what other field could a white man tell a Congressional
committee that the places that are most successful are those that have “smaller,
whiter populations” and still be an influential figure in the debate?
● In what other field would it be acceptable to hold a
fundraiser featuring
a blackface act?
Now consider how all that denial stacks up against common
sense. The Times just documented 39 separate elements of day-to-day life in
which people of color are victims of racism.
But somehow, in some way, the denial caucus says, child welfare is the
magic exception!
Excuses at the ready
Sure, the denial caucus says, people of color – especially African-Americans
and Native Americans -- are more likely than white people to be called in to
child abuse hotlines, more likely to have the calls accepted for investigation,
more likely to have the allegations “substantiated” (which can mean only that a
caseworker guesses it’s slightly more likely than not that the allegation is
true) – and, of course, more likely to have their children consigned to the
chaos of foster care.
But the denial caucus has excuses at the ready. Their
favorite is: It’s not race, it’s poverty!
I actually rather like that one.
For decades the child welfare establishment denied taking away children
because of poverty. But they’ll actually
cop to class bias to avoid facing up to racial bias.
In fact, it’s both.
There is indeed rampant class bias in child welfare and that results in
the widespread confusion of poverty with
neglect. But there also is racial
bias over and above the class bias – as is documented by study after study.
The uglier claim is that, well, yes, there used to be racism in America -- and that
made African- Americans and Native Americans bad parents. So we’re really, truly sorry about all that past racism, but we’re just going to
have to take away huge numbers of children of color.
But here again, the research shows otherwise. Give caseworkers identical hypotheticals
except for the race of the family and they will rate the child at higher risk if s/he is Black. Or look what happened when the child welfare
agency in Nassau County, New York, required workers to present cases of
children they wanted to remove but leave out information that identified the
race of the family and the neighborhood where the family lived: Removals of
Black children declined
substantially.
Help is on the way!
There is no cure for child welfare’s deep denial, but now at
least there is help:
Next time you see a Black child whose family is living in makeshift
housing, or who wandered
out of the house without her mother knowing about it, or who is eight-years-old
and selling water in front of her own apartment building (an actual
example on the Times’ list) or a
Black mother who is smoking
marijuana to keep food down so she can gain weight during pregnancy, or a
Black man babysitting white children (another
actual case on the Times list)
don’t call the child abuse hotline or the police. Instead, call 1-844-WYT-FEAR!
This post has been updated to delete references that are now out of date.
