Our member, Prof. Alan Dettlaff (University of Houston, US), talks about his new book, Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System: The Case for Abolition (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System presents a call to abolish the American child welfare system due to the harm and destruction it causes Black families. The book traces the origins of the modern child welfare system to demonstrate that the harm and oppression that result from child welfare intervention are not the result of “unintended consequences” but rather are the clear intents of the system and the foreseeable results of the policies that have been put in place over decades.
By tracing the history of family separations in the United States since the era of slavery, the book demonstrates that the intended outcomes of those separations—the subjugation of Black Americans and the maintenance of white supremacy—are the same intended outcomes of the family separations done today. What distinguishes contemporary family separations from those that occurred during slavery is that today’s separations occur under a facade of benevolence, a myth that has been perpetuated over decades that family separations are necessary to “save” the most vulnerable children.
Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System presents evidence of the vast harms that result from family separations to make a case that the child welfare system is beyond reform. Rather, the only solution to ending these harms is complete abolition of this system and a fundamental reimagining of the way society cares for children, families, and communities.
My background is in the child welfare system. Before entering academia, I worked for several years as a child protective services caseworker and investigated allegations of child maltreatment. I witnessed the tremendous harm the system causes Black children and families, which led me to understand that eliminating family separation and foster care was the only solution to ending this harm. I began studying the deep body of abolitionist theory, and in 2020 worked with colleagues to launch the upEND movement, a collaborative effort dedicated to abolishing the child welfare system and building alternatives that focus on healing and liberation.
This book is designed to provide an understanding of the harm and oppression that result from the modern child welfare system. For decades, this harm has gone unrecognized due to the myth of benevolence perpetuated by those in power. Yet this has not always been the case in our history. The horror associated with family separations during slavery was known to all, so much so that recognition of the pain and trauma experienced by enslaved mothers and children became pivotal in facilitating slavery’s abolition.
What if this shared understanding was understood once again? What if we could see past the mirage of benevolence and recognize family separations for what they truly are—state-directed, state-sponsored terror? This book is dedicated to moving us closer to that reality.
There is a disconnect in our public consciousness. During the era of human chattel slavery, the horror of family separation was known to all. The cruelty of this practice and the grief and trauma that resulted was felt so strongly by all Americans, the practice of family separations became the issue that ultimately led to slavery’s abolition. Similar responses to the cruelty and trauma of family separations have occurred throughout our country’s history, most recently during the Trump administration’s blatantly cruel practice of forcibly separating children from their migrating parents as a means of curbing immigration at the southern border. During this brief period of extensive family separations, the trauma children experienced following separation was so clearly painful and visceral, both legal and medical experts proclaimed the trauma caused to children due to family separation was tantamount to torture. Yet the child welfare system forcibly separates over 200,000 children from their families every year in every state across the country and these separations go largely unnoticed.
Similarly, the use of family separations for the specific purpose of maintaining white supremacy has been clear throughout our history. During the era of slavery, family separations were used both as punishment to force compliance and as a deterrent to quell rebellion. Beyond simply an act of cruelty, the primary purpose of family separations was to maintain the subjugation and enslavement of Black Americans through the cruelest form of punishment their enslavers could employ. Following the abolition of slavery, decades of Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws allowed family separations to continue through the incarceration of Black parents and forced indentured servitude of Black children, both for the purpose of maintaining their oppression and to recreate a system of labor exploitation that prevented any form of wealth accumulation among Black families.
It is not a coincidence that during the same decade that saw the end of Jim Crow Laws through passage of the Civil Rights Act and the expansion of voting rights through the Voting Rights Act, child welfare systems across the country shifted their models of practice from one that focused primarily on poverty relief for white Americans to one that focused on surveillance, investigation, and separation of families living in poverty. This shift in focus, bolstered by the rapidly expanding use of foster care as a response to children living in poverty, resulted in a rapid growth of Black children in foster care and the beginning of what the system now refers to as “racial disproportionality,” or the overrepresentation of Black children among children in foster care. This phenomenon has existed since the 1960s when the shift in child welfare services occurred.
Today, the oppression of Black Americans is maintained through a vast system of social control with enormous power to surveil, regulate, and punish families. At every stage of child welfare decision making, Black children are significantly overrepresented due to racist ideologies that reinforce the idea that families must be regulated or made to fit into norms created by those in control of society. The idea of a white, middle-class parenting standard by which all other families are judged against has been embedded in modern child welfare policy since the 1960s. Due to these racist policies, as well as explicit and implicit biases among decision-makers, Black children are significantly more likely to be reported to child protection hotlines than white children and significantly more likely to be the subject of a child welfare investigation than white children. In fact, it is estimated that more than half of all Black children in the United States will be the subject of a child welfare investigation by the time they turn 18. Once investigated, Black children are significantly more likely than other children to be forcibly separated from their parents and placed in foster care.
The harm that results from this level of forcible family separation is immense. The very factors that maintain the oppression of Black Americans in the United States—poverty, houselessness, unemployment, low educational attainment, extreme rates of arrest and incarceration—each are the outcomes that result from the trauma of family separation and foster care. Every actor within the child welfare system knows of these outcomes, yet they have done nothing to fundamentally alter their practice of family separations. Thus, today’s child welfare system acts as one of the United States’ most powerful agents of racial oppression by knowingly and purposely perpetuating the conditions that facilitate this oppression. This has been the purpose of the child welfare system since its earliest origins and remains its purpose today.