Tag: Black Families

Neglect Is A Vague Term

Today’s blog started with a news item. A Black couple traveling from Georgia to Chicago for the funeral of the mother’s uncle were stopped in Tennessee for having a “dark tint” on their vehicles windows and for “traveling in the left lane while not passing.” Yikes, I often drive in the left lane, feeling it is safer as cars in the right lane are exiting or entering. If a car approaches behind me, I move over to the right to allow them free space to go on ahead. Upon searching their vehicle a small amount of marijuana was found. Currently, recreational marijuana is now legal in 21 of the 50 United States – though not in the couple’s home state of Georgia or the state of Tennessee, where they were stopped.

The father was arrested and the mother followed with their 5 children to await his release on bond. During the time she was waiting, state officials arrived to take custody of the four children ages 2-7 and the couple’s four-month-old baby, who was still breastfeeding. The Tennessee’s Children’s Services Department (DCS) had received an incorrect report that both parents were arrested. Had that been the scenario, it would have required the involvement of DCS to ensure the children were cared for. An emergency custody petition was obtained based on the allegation that “the children were neglected and there was no ‘less drastic’ alternative to taking the children from their parents.”

Court records related to the removal show a state case worker brought in after the stop had “discovered only the father had been arrested.” Since then, the parents have been subject to multiple drug tests as they seek to reunite their family. Their children are in foster care and they travel frequently from Georgia to Tennessee to visit them. The children are incredibly distressed by the separation. Their mother says they “cry when she speaks to them on the phone, and grab onto her when she ends her visits with them.”

US child welfare services have a historical pattern of separating the children of Black and Indigenous families on the grounds of alleged neglect and abuse. Racist stereotyping influences the way child welfare workers and policymakers approach the investigations of families of color, finding that one in 10 Black children are forcibly removed from their families and put into foster care by the time they are adults. More than half of US Black children would face some form of a child welfare investigation by the time they are 18, while fewer than a third of white children would.

Tennessee’s DCS is not doing a good job taking care of the children they have already taken away from their families. Children are subjected to poor living conditions with some children sleeping in offices and staffing shortages. Millions of parents and caretakers who have been placed on state-run child abuse registries across the country. “Neglect” is often cited but it is a vague term for which there is no fixed legal definition. Being placed on a registry can cast a decades long shadow, ending careers, blocking the chance of getting hired for new jobs, and people of color (especially if they are living in poverty) are several times more likely to be placed on these registries and suffer the consequences. People can be placed on these registries on the sole judgment of a caseworker and a supervisor from a child protective services agency, without a judge or similarly impartial authority weighing the evidence.

Reproductive Justice

And Reproductive Justice MUST include adoptee voices because adoptees are intimately familiar with the same systems of white supremacist violence that make reproductive justice necessary. Today’s blog is thanks to an op-ed by Tina Vasquez in LINK>Prism. The goal of this series about reproductive justice and adoption was simple – disrupt the adoption storytelling that has become the norm in mainstream media. These feel-good stories from the perspective of adoptive parents rarely include the voices of adoptees or question the preponderance of “cheap, easy, and fast” transracial and international adoptions by evangelicals that amount to little more than child trafficking.

No more salvation narratives. No more narratives of gratitude. No more framing adoption as a “win-win.” No more white saviors. We will question adoption as a system—its power dynamics, its economics, and its privileging of certain “reproductive destinies.” “Out of the Fog” is a phrase adoptees often use to describe facing the reality of their adoptions.

LINK>Operation Stop Child Protective Services (CPS) was founded by Amanda Wallace. She spent 10 years as a child abuse investigator before realizing that “she had become the silent enforcer for an oppressive system.” She now lends her insider knowledge to families navigating the system and trying to regain custody of their children.

About 27% of adoptions are transracial, according to a recent survey from the Department of Health and Human Services: birth mothers are disproportionately women of color, and adoptive parents are overwhelmingly white. Low-income Black and Native American children are the most likely to be separated from their families. Poverty is often interpreted as neglect when applied to these people.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned in June, white evangelicals wasted no time communicating their desire to take the babies that result from forced pregnancies. Never mind that most people denied abortion care simply become parents and that there is little evidence linking abortion bans to increases in adoption.

Time and time again, the solution offered to state violence is adoption, yet we fail to center adoptees whose lived experiences and areas of expertise touch every injustice and systemic problem our movements battle against. This is especially true when it comes to reproductive justice. While efforts are being made to explicitly discuss adoption as a reproductive justice issue, adoptees’ voices are still not being uplifted in these conversations. Adoptees are building their own movements—including Facebook groups like LINK>Adoptees for Choice—but will movements for sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice invite them into the fold?