The Foster Care Problem

Today again, for the umpteenth time, I learned of 2 children being removed for neglect when that neglect was fixable! It’s criminal these kids are removed.

Being part of the Foster Care System in a non-kinship capacity makes you part of the problem:

If being a foster parent is such a good thing, if they are doing right by these kids, then why do we have these statistics?

Half of foster youth will never graduate high school

One in five will enter the homeless population

One in four will be involved with the criminal justice system

The False Belief: Neglected, abused children are pulled from their home and placed in welcoming environments that are stable and safe

The Reality: More than 1/3 of youth in foster care have documented abuse in foster homes. The act of removal adds additional layers of trauma

So you, who are wanting to become a foster parent, are thinking you are one of the good ones right ? You would not abuse a child – so fostering is the right thing to do because you’re a good guy.

Awesome, but to fight for these kids, you often have to really fight and you are at the mercy of the state. You really have no leverage. You are a glorified babysitter in many cases.

That means your fighting for these kids could be one mis-step away from crap with the caseworker that will cause you to lose that child to a home that WILL abuse them considering how high the likelihood of abuse in foster care is.

So before someone else says it – let’s talk about “what’s the alternative, just let children be abused by their parents ?”

The False Belief: Children removed from their homes are removed “for a good reason”; otherwise they would not be removed

The Reality: “Neglect” is cited in 76% of the cases but what is considered neglect runs the gamut: lack of proper supervision, food insecurity, housing/utility issues, medical challenges, safety issues, assumed neglect due to poverty level, assumed neglect due to the race of the family.

What would solve the “Neglect” issues cited above ? These are ALL solvable issues and addressing them would reduce the number of removals by 76% !!

Why do so many NOT see how the money, time and energy, that goes to Foster Parents and/or the Foster Care system, could be put to programs for family preservation. Doing so would vastly reduce the number of removals and keep children with their families.

What is it going to take for John Q Public to get this and advocate for change ? What is it going to take for foster caregivers to do better and put their time and efforts behind helping families keep their kids out of foster care.

Jarvis Jay Masters

Jarvis Jay Masters is a former foster care youth and long time inmate on Death Row in San Quentin Prison. His story is now getting a lot of attention since Oprah chose his book That Bird Has My Wings for her book club. Rebecca Solnit has also taken up his cause and his Buddhist choice for sustenance has brought him additional attention. It may seem strange with so much attention given to his situation that I am only just now learning about him but I had read a book some months, maybe a year ago, about how unequal our criminal justice system is and how overwhelmingly unfair to black men. And as part of my learning about all things adoption, foster care has also come to my awareness many times.

He was born in 1962 in Long Beach, California. At the age of five, after watching his father almost beat his mother to death, while he tried to keep his sisters safe, he was taken by the system from her. The children were living in filth and hunger when they were finally found. Someone (perhaps the old lady who set out food for them) reported them to the cops, who brought in social services. The sight of how ragged their clothes were then led social services into their house. The situation was so bad they were removed from both the house and their parents.

This is how from the age of five, he was in and out of foster homes and institutions, enduring violence and trauma in a system meant to provide some measure of protection for him. Here is the story of one such memory of the kind of care he was receiving.

One morning when he was nine, while eating breakfast and hating the yolk from the fried eggs he had been fed. As he usually did, he went to dump that into the trash without his foster mother knowing he had done that. Only this time her daughter saw him. At the trash can, he was met by his foster mother’s hand as she hit his face. She had slapped him so hard, his ears rang and he could taste blood bubbling in his mouth. After that, she grabbed his head and stuffed his face down into the garbage, all the while yelling at him to find the eggs and eat them. During this abuse, he passed out.

I will make a long story shorter (you can read much more at the LINK> to the Free Jarvis website) – he ended up at the California Youth Authority, the last stop before adult prison. After his release, he soon found himself sentenced to 20 years in San Quentin Prison at the age of 19. Hooking up with a childhood friend of his uncle’s, he was involved in an armed robbery trying to grab sacks of money being collected by a store employee from the registers. He says, the whole scene was a disaster and in less than a day later, there were warrants out for their arrest, even charging them with crimes in towns he had never even heard of. Even so, he actually felt lucky to have been caught and thereby stopped as his life had spun so far out of control.

Four years after entering prison, a guard was killed and he was one of three charged in that crime. He was innocent as all of the other prisoners were well aware but a jury found him guilty of a conspiracy to murder and he was sentenced to death by lethal injection. That is why he has spent more than 21 years in solitary confinement, which longer than any other prisoner in San Quentin history. A woman judge was assigned to the case, and this brought back memories that he had a woman judge the first time he was taken away from his mother.

When he was a child, he had been made a ward of the state as they told him, they only wanted to protect him but never did. Now, he found himself in the same kind of room, with dim buzzing lights, as the law was deciding how to kill him. He describes that life in San Quentin – “To find home in San Quentin I had to summon an unbelievable will to survive. The roaches, the filth plastered on the walls, the dirt balls on the floor, and the awful smell of urine left in the toilet for God knows how long sickened me nearly to the point of passing out.”

Now his Buddhism and his legal case, thanks to his writings, have made him a bit of a celebrity, perhaps on the verge of finally being acquitted, or at least pardoned, and released into freedom as a changed man with so much to offer others in similar circumstances to the ones his life brought him into. Wisdom gained at a great price.

A Miscarriage of Justice

The origination of many adoptions is the traumatic experience of having a miscarriage. One miscarriage leads to another miscarriage – that of taking a woman’s baby for one’s own self. It is often an act of trying to overcome honest grief and sorrow by inflicting a lifetime of grief and sorrow on another woman. Our society condones this behavior by creating mythic stories that adoptees often call the rainbows and unicorns narrative of how wonderful adoption is. In truth it is not more wonderful than the realistic slings and arrows of everyday life and for some (the adoptee and the birth mother) wounds to carry forever. Some eventually experience a reunion with one another and while these are mostly happy stories (but not always), there is no way to make up for decades of life going on with different trajectories for each person.

If this society was a just one, we could be taking care of our mothers and our children instead of allowing money to drive the exchange of human beings to fulfill the thwarted desires of the people with the financial means to purchase a baby. Oh I know, most adoptive parents don’t view it that way. I know most adoption agencies and facilitators don’t want to view themselves from a perspective that they are baby sellers in it to make a profit. It is so easy for people to delude themselves with feel good stories.

I don’t have a lot of optimism that the profit motivated adoption industry will end any time soon. I am only heartened that some of us keep trying to make the point that children belong with the people who conceived them. Children need to grow up within the genetic, biological familial roots from which they emerged. Yes, sometimes parents die. This has happened to my own grandmothers – both of them – and we’ve lost more than one mom in my little mom’s group that has existed a bit more than 17 years now. We’ve also lost a couple of fathers too.

Orphans do deserve care within a family structure but there is no need to change a child’s original identity or name in order to provide for them. Some parents in our modern society get messed up – with drugs, with violence, with the criminal justice system. These people need intensive restoration into functioning members of our society. It is complicated and not a quick fix. I’ll readily admit that.

Why Would She Say This ?

Though Abby Johnson is best known for her anti-abortion activism, I am mystified by what I learned. How could she say this ? Not entirely leaving aside the problematic situation of this white woman raising a Black son born to a Black mother or father (however that came to pass). So okay, he isn’t 100% Black, he’s biracial but a lot of white people lump them together equally.

The speaker at the current RNC convention said that the police are “smart” to target her ADOPTED Black son because he is “statistically” more likely to commit a violent offense.No wonder Black people are more likely to die during encounters with law enforcement, if this is the prevailing point of view.

Admittedly, Abby Johnson is a controversial figure. She has a long history of making racist remarks on Twitter and in video blogs. How can it be the most beneficial placement for this Black young man ?

Johnson once said in a video posted as recently as last June (after the killing of George Floyd) that, “I recognize that I’m gonna have to have a different conversation with Jude than I do with my brown-haired little Irish, very, very pale-skinned, white sons, as they grow up.” She certainly has no problem viewing “her” boys from different racially based perspectives. What is in this woman’s heart ?

Her husband blogged in 2015 about the couple adopting the boy at birth. She is quoted as saying, ““Right now, Jude is an adorable, perpetually tan-looking little brown boy. But one day, he’s going to grow up and he’s going to be a tall, probably sort of large, intimidating-looking-maybe brown man — and my other boys are probably gonna look like nerdy white guys.”

So let me get this straight, she is projecting this boy into becoming an “intimidating” man ? Why do they have him at all ? I don’t understand this.

In explaining her comment about police profiling her son, she adds, “Statistically, I look at our prison population and I see that there is a disproportionately high number of African-American males in our prison population for crimes, particularly for violent crimes. When a police officer sees a brown man like my Jude walking down the road — as opposed to my white nerdy kids, my white nerdy men walking down the road — because of the statistics that he knows in his head, that these police officers know in their head, they’re going to know that statistically my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons.”

I can’t help but call racial bias on this woman and I am sad that sweet little boy is being raised by her. She had had some ignorant and factually incorrect things to say about Black fathers. She says that Black fathers have not taken their place in the home. According to her, 70% of Black homes do not have a father present.

I don’t know, it is not something I have researched; but of course, if more Black men are incarcerated than their percentage of the population would represent, that may be true. She makes a statement about activists in the Black community trying to redefine what Black fatherhood is. I was also aware of such initiatives but from a more positive perspective than she goes on to assert. She claims that Black fatherhood looks like a Black man coming in and out of the home. I am white also and I would never attempt as a white person to define anything about the Black community and I believe that is where she also oversteps her bounds.

And wow, she really steps into it saying that “culturally, it is accepted for Black men to be with multiple women.” I had to stop listening to her youtube rant at that point. There are just as many white and men of other races out there messing around with multiple women – our current president included. We would not even have a MeToo movement if men had not gotten lost in their sexual values along the way. And of course, not all men, but just saying what is obvious to me. So I am done with Abby Johnson.

I remember my family watching If Beale Street Could Talk. I believe this gives an honest portrayal of the close knit nature of Black families, even when the father is incarcerated. The movie was adapted from a James Baldwin novel about 1970s Harlem. I trust Baldwin’s perspectives on Black issues more than I trust this woman’s perspective. In the movie, the young man is arrested for a crime he did not commit. The social indictment of our institutionally racist justice system is a thread in the plot.

I could go on and on but I do recommend this movie to anyone who believes Abby Johnson is justified in her opinion of Black families and especially Black fathers. It may just change your opinion enough to open your mind a little bit.