Only Because They Are Poor

So much could be said – here is just a sampling.

From a 2021 story in The Seattle Times LINK>Taking Too Many Children From Their Parents. They share this story . . . Esther Taylor remembers everyone tensing up. She was 8, and didn’t understand everything going on. But she knew a social worker had confronted her mom about the way Taylor and her siblings were living, in a house with faulty wiring and a rat problem, ostensibly home-schooled but not taught frequently of late. And she could see her mom getting upset.

Then, confusion as what she thought would be a routine errand at a state office turned into an all-day affair. Why are we still here? Eventually, Taylor, a sister and a brother were led to a supply of clothes, where she picked out a Lilo & Stitch jacket and other items. They would not be going home, not even to grab pajamas.

Now 22 and a college student in Walla Walla, Taylor said she wishes state workers had asked how to help instead of sending her and her sister to one foster home, her brother to another. She is still haunted by the two-and-a-half-year separation from her mom, whom she remembers as kind and funny, and who died of cancer seven years ago. Taylor said she struggles with abandonment issues and sometimes wonders: “Am I not worthy to have a mother?”

Even agencies overseeing foster care are recognizing that separating children from their parents may be unnecessary in many cases to resolve problems often linked to poverty, while causing lasting trauma and disproportionately affecting people of color.

From a law office, of course (blogger’s note – this doesn’t address the issue of poverty !!) LINK>5 Things You Need To Do If Your Children Are Taken By Div of Children and Families (DCF) –

Contact an Attorney
Before you contact anyone else or even give yourself the chance to cry, reach out to a family lawyer. The family court system is extremely complex and does not favor parents who have lost temporary custody of their children.
Review Your Safety Plan
Jot Down Everything You Remember
It’s particularly important to note any threats or warnings made by DCF.
Request That Children Be Placed With Family Members
If you have family in the area who can care for your children, request that they care for your children until they are returned to you. Being separated from parents is a traumatic event for children, and it can cause even more lasting damage if they are placed with people they don’t know. Limit the damage by ensuring that children are with someone you and they trust.
Begin the Appeals Process
To get your children back from DCF, you may need to appeal their original decision to take custody. This often involves proving that you provide a safe, stable, and healthy home life.

Finally this from The Center for Public Integrity – In some states you can go golfing but LINK>you can’t visit your child in foster care. A Public Integrity survey found 20 states restricted visitation for parents of children in foster care.

ADOPTIVE PARENT FRAGILITY SELF-TEST

Thanks to LINK>The Adoptee Diary.

Ask yourself the following:

1. Do I feel defensive when an adoptee or (birth/first) mother says “adoptive parents tend to…?”

2. Do I feel angry when people tell me I benefit from Adoptive Parent privilege — that the adoption industry works in my favor, or that my socioeconomic class and/or race enabled me to adopt?

3. When an adoptee or mother talks about adoption, do I feel defensive because they’re describing things that I do or think?

4. Do I feel angry or annoyed by the above questions?

5. Do I have a history of embracing Hopeful and/or Adoptive Parent behavior that I now feel ashamed of, so I need to show people that I’m no longer “like that”?

6. Does saying “not all adoptive parents” or similar phrases make me feel better when someone calls Adoptive Parents out for something?

7. Do I expect an apology when I feel like I’ve been unfairly accused of poor Adoptive Parent behavior?

8. Do I feel better when I say, hear, or read, “every (adoption) experience is different?”

9. Do I try to convince adoptees and mothers that they’re wrong about adoption by pointing out people from their position in the triad who agree with me?

10. Do I feel the need to talk about my own hardships (such as infertility, a “failed” adoption, or a difficult childhood) when an adoptee or mother talks about their pain?

11. Do I think the adoption community would benefit if people stopped talking about the hard stuff, were more supportive, learned from “both sides,” or focused more on the positive?

12. Does being told that something I say, think, do, or otherwise value is harmful make me want to shut down, leave, or express my discomfort/displeasure in some way?

13. Do I feel the need to state that I have friends/family who are adoptees when someone points out problematic behavior?

14. Do I feel the need to prove that I’m one of the good ones?

15. Do I feel that my opinions and perspectives about adoption should be given equal weight to that of an adoptee or mother, that I have something unique and important to contribute to the adoption conversation, and/or that it is unfair to be told to listen more than I speak?

16. Do I feel the need to defend myself on any of the above points?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are dealing with Adoptive Parent fragility. Take time to reflect on why you feel the way that you do. Take time to listen to adoptee and mothers’ perspectives. Adoptive Parent fragility is a hindrance to healing because it prevents adoptees/mothers from being able to engage Adoptive Parents in honest conversation without also having to bear the burden of catering to Adoptive Parents’ emotional comfort. At its worst, Adoptive Parent fragility can cause an emotionally unhealthy situation for adoptees/mothers because of the power dynamics and the weight of being responsible for Adoptive Parents’ feelings, while not having space to express their own. If we cannot talk honestly about the issues, then we cannot make progress.

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.

Hasty Accusations

Syesha Mercado and Tyron Deener

I stumbled on a LINK> Change.org petition and thought – there must be a larger story here. Because of her high profile as an American Idol alumus (season 7), her story got more attention nationally than it may have otherwise. Because wrongful child/parent separations concern me, I cared to look further.

Dr Sally Smith is said to have wrongly accused more than a dozen parents of child abuse. There are hundreds of child abuse cases tied to her, where parents were proven innocent but suffered irreparable trauma and harm due too her accusations. This doctor is said to hastily diagnose child abuse which rips families apart. Dr Smith is the medical director for the Pinellas County Child Protective Services team and is a contracted child abuse Pediatrician at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital and Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Syesha’s nightmare started when her 15-month-old son, Amen’Ra, was ripped from his family, and placed in foster care, following a hospital visit. Mercado and her partner, Tyron Deener, had taken their baby boy to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg on Feb. 26 for a routine check-up. The couple had become concerned about the possibility of malnutrition when Mercado’s breast milk started to run dry. She was pregnant (later delivering her newborn daughter) and her son, Amen’Ra, stopped accepting fluids. I remember the challenges of weaning my own children off breast feeding.

During their legal battle for custody of Amen’Ra, Mercado and Deener were in the car with their 10 day old daughter. They were subjected to a police conducted roadside welfare check in the middle of the highway. The result was their newborn baby was also taken away by Child Protective Services. The couple said that they directed all communication to their attorney who had not been given a warning about the safety check.

The Change.org petition has a summary of just a few of the other cases that Smith has been involved in, which pointed to significant inconsistencies in Smith’s medical notes. Florida’s Second District Court of Appeal said as it overturned one such removal – Smith’s conclusions were based “primarily on her assessment of the father’s credibility, not on the available medical reports.” In another case, a wrongfully accused mother committed suicide due to Smith’s trumped-up claims. One Marine Corps veteran spent 300 days in jail on Smith’s allegation that he killed his girlfriend’s son and was freed when a neuropathologist contradicted her findings.

Dr Smith has long been criticized by defense attorneys, parents and child welfare employees for her aggressive way of interrogating parents. Oftentimes, she sees injuries that other doctors do not.

Mercado said, “He wanted mama’s breast milk, like a lot of breastfeeding babies do, and I went to the hospital in the middle of this entire process, in the middle of the weaning process, which I know a lot of mothers out there experience all the time. I was met with a lot of judgment and accusations that literally just started to spiral out of control.” Deener noted that every person who has handled his child’s case has been white, from the case manager to the guardian ad litem to the judge.

Every day in America, parents are separated from their families and mistreated, they are mishandled and they are misquoted, by a very oppressive system. Since 2004, there have been 7,425 claims of medical neglect reported in Pinellas County. Of those,1,490 were verified, representing about 20 percent, according to the Florida Department of Children and Families. The agency verified 16% of medical neglect claims statewide in that time frame, with 14% of claims verified in the Suncoast Region, an area that covers Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee and Sarasota, among other counties. Experts say parents like Mercado and Deener are often confused about their rights, when dealing with pediatricians in cases of alleged child abuse. They are talking to the equivalent of the police without knowing their rights.

In August of 2021, the couple regained custody of their baby daughter after only a few days. It took the couple 7 months to regain custody in October 2021 of their toddler son. At that point, they were still faced with six months of supervision by the state, coming to their home to check their competency and ability to raise their own children. Their children should have never been taken from them in the first place. The couple are vegans who live holistically. They have maintained that the doctors didn’t understand their lifestyle. They also believe there is a racial element to their case. In fact, the children of people of color are more often removed from their families than the children of white people.

Reproductive Justice

Yesterday, this blog was about the rights of fathers, today it is about the Reproductive Justice Movement. Reproductive justice includes the right to abort a pregnancy but also the right to raise a child in a safe and supportive community.

Why Reproductive Justice ? The experiences of Black, brown and Indigenous women who have been sterilized, abused, or punished for bearing children. Welfare laws based on misleading impressions of so-called welfare queens – Black women who allegedly had babies to collect welfare checks but wasted the money. These stereotypes have led to welfare policies that discourage welfare recipients from having more children by reducing their benefits.

The white-dominated reproductive rights movement’s “choice” framework privileges the most socially advantaged people in society. Those who have the ability to make choices. It doesn’t take into account social structures, power arrangements of race, class, gender, heterosexism, immigration status, religion – all of which shape one’s ability to have reproductive autonomy.

High Black maternal mortality is a matter of reproductive justice. States that have passed or will soon pass abortion bans have the worst healthcare systems, the highest maternal mortality, especially Black maternal mortality, and the highest infant mortality. As a result of [the supreme court decision] Dobbs, we’ll see increases in maternal mortality – deaths of pregnant people who intended to carry to term – because their health will be compromised.

It includes ending police violence, abolishing prisons, and all the inhumane carceral approaches to meeting human needs that have a profound impact on one’s reproductive life. Prisons are a major impediment in the United States to reproductive freedom. People who have had their children taken away by a discriminatory child welfare system that targets Black neighborhoods for family separation do not have reproductive freedom. To me, reproductive justice is inextricably linked to the fight against the prison industrial complex and the family policing system.

The reproductive justice framework is more effective than the reproductive choice approach. the movement for reproductive justice must be aligned with movements for housing, abolishing the prison industrial complex, environmental justice, and economic justice, because all of those movements are essential to supporting freedom, including reproductive freedom.

Movements seeking to limit or abolish the power of the criminal legal system and the prison industrial complex are relevant to opposing Dobbs’ assault on reproductive freedom. People are already being arrested and imprisoned for stillbirths and miscarriages; that standard will be applied to abortions as well. Recognizing the interconnected nature of these challenges is essential.

Today’s blog leans heavily on an interview in LINK> The Guardian of Dorothy Roberts. She is an internationally renowned scholar of race, gender, and the law at the University of Pennsylvania, who has dedicated her career to exposing attacks on Black women’s reproductive rights dating back to slavery and persisting to the present.

You can learn more about Reproductive Justice at this LINK> SisterSong. Reproductive Justice combines reproductive rights and social justice.

Torn Apart by Dorothy Roberts

The horror stories regarding Child Protective Services (CPS) abound in my all things adoption group which includes former foster care youth. So when I read about Dorothy Roberts new book Torn Apart in Time magazine last night, I knew I would write about this for my blog today. Roberts believes that CPS needs to be abolished and she has found that it is shockingly easy for CPS to destroy poor, Black families. I would add ANY poor family. However, racial inequality and systemic racism are real.

Mother Jones has published an excerpt which begins with the story of a young mother who has health challenges, is married and has two young sons. Her family lives with her mother and everyone pitches in to care for the rambunctious little boys. The family was enjoying a picnic in a park in Aurora, Colorado.

When my own sons were very young, I lived in fear that some do-gooder would misunderstand some situation and report us. There is a Simpson’s episode where this happens to Bart, Lisa and Maggie and they are taken away and given to the Flanders family as temporary caregivers while Home and Marge struggle against the system. I would refer to that episode with my sons so that they would not exhibit some overly challenging behavior in public that would end with unintended consequences.

So it was that this woman’s 2 yr old ran after her cousin as she was leaving. The mother grabbed the 4 yr old and ran after her son. Before the mother could reach him, a woman who happened to be passing by had snatched the young boy by the arm, worried that he was wandering off. The mom could see the woman talking on her cell phone as she and her other son approached. When she caught up to them, only a minute later, she told the stranger holding her child, “Ma’am, that’s my son.” But the woman refused to let him go. She had called 911 to report that the boy was unattended.

Before the policeman who responded left, after the woman’s relatives gathered around to affirm that she actually was his mother, he gave her a ticket for child abuse and reckless endangerment. A month later, as the mom was cleaning up in the basement, her husband gone to work and her mother at a doctor’s appointment, the Social Services Department white caseworker accompanied by a Black female trainee, unexpectedly knocked on the front door, part of a surprise follow up from the citation issued.

The boys were in the front room, the 2 yr old still naked as he had just been bathed. When the mom did not immediately answer the door, the caseworker called for police assistance. Two male officers arrived first, soon followed by a female officer. The caseworker asserted the 2 yr old was neglected as he stood looking at them through the front window.

After the officers entered the house, without a warrant or permission, the mom became angry at the way she was being confronted so aggressively. She called her mother at the doctor’s office and asked, “Mom, can you get here, I got fucking social services and the goddamn police here, they’re really pissing me off.” Two of the officers then engaged the mom in an increasingly combative exchange.

The woman’s mother had arrived and had taken the boys to their bedroom, guarded by an officer who would not let the boy’s mom join them. One officer lunged at the mom and violently pushed her face down into a large beanbag on the living room floor. The female officer and a fifth officer now on the scene now assisting him, pinned her arms were yanked behind her back, cuffed her wrists and cuffed, restrained her head and shoulders. Two more officers arrived, bringing the total count to seven.

Then, they restrained the mom with a hobble—hand and ankle cuffs that shackled her wrists behind her back and chained them to her shackled legs and carried her off to a police car, her stomach and face toward the ground. She cried, “I can’t breathe,” and so, paramedics were called and her restraints loosened by order of a sergeant who had also now arrived.

The officer reports varied as to the condition of the house from “in fair condition with food” to “very dirty, with no food in the refrigerator, and very little food in the pantry.” On the advice of her public defender, the mom pleaded guilty (many legal cases today never reach court but end in plea deals) to child abuse and reckless endangerment to avoid prison and was ordered to take parenting classes and sentenced to one year of probation. Before the first incident in the park, the mom had never been in trouble with the law. Now she had a record as a child abuser. Her attorney was later able to obtain a monetary settlement from the police department for excessive use of force.

The mom was now ensnared in a giant state machine with the power to destroy her family. With the threat of child removal at its core, the child welfare system regulates a massive number of families. In 2019 alone, CPS agencies investigated the families of 3.5 million children, ultimately finding abuse or neglect only in one-fifth of cases, or for the families of 656,000 children. Yet the families of these children are put through an indefinite period of intensive scrutiny by CPS workers and judges who have the power to keep children apart from their parents for years or even to sever their family ties forever.

In the Time magazine article by Janell Ross, on the racial disparities in the child welfare system, interviewing Dorothy Roberts, she notes that more than half, 53%, of all Black children will experience a child-welfare investigation by the time they reach the age of 18, compared with less than a third of white children. However, white children from very impoverished areas, such as rural Appalachia, also experience extreme amounts of state involvement. Black children are more likely than white children to be taken from their families and put in foster care. They’re less likely to go on to college and more likely to end up in prison.

I completely agree with her – our society does not support families well enough. She notes income support, health care, affordable housing, an equal, high-quality education would keep most of these children out of foster care. She asks, why is child welfare’s response to the greater needs of Black children this very violent, traumatic approach of family separation ?

The facade of benevolence associated with Child Protective Services makes most Americans complacent about this colossal government apparatus that spends billions of dollars annually on surveilling families, breaking them apart, and thrusting children into a foster care system known to cause devastating harms. Dorothy Roberts notes – after 25 years of studying family separation as a legal scholar and author, I’m convinced that the mission of CPS agencies is not to care for children or protect their welfare. Rather, they respond inadequately and inhumanely to our society’s abysmal failures. Far from promoting the well-being of children, the state weaponizes children as a way to threaten families, to scapegoat parents for societal harms to their children, and to buttress the racist status quo.

White Tears, Brown Scars

I promised myself that I would not buy any more books this year. However, this book was mentioned in my all things adoption group as merging racial inequality and adoption. My two passions, so how could I resist ?

A reviewer admits – “I am always a bit weary of how I am received when I talk about race in feminist spaces. I fear that I might be “causing a division in the sisterhood” as journalist Ruby Hamad describes in her debut book, White Tears/Brown Scars. I am afraid of being divisive; for calling things out when most people prefer to sweep snarks or discriminations under the veneer of polite conversation. When I bring attention to a remark, I don’t do it to mark a line between me and white women (if I did, I’d be separating myself from 90% of my friends). I loved Hamad’s book for its unapologetic rigor and sharp threading of racial history in both the United States and Australia. Since its release last week, commentators have called it ‘incisive’, ‘courageous’, ‘a work of depth and scholarship,’ and ‘well researched and informative’.”

Still from the review linked above – Racial trauma is a term used to describe the physical and psychological symptoms that people of color experience after exposure to particularly stressful experiences of racism. Similar to survivors of other types of trauma (e.g., sexual assault survivors), people of color may frequently experience fear and hyper-vigilance, self-blame, confusion, memory difficulty, shame, and guilt after experiencing racism.

The woman who posted this in my all things adoption group said – This author touches on orphan trains and adoption throughout history and connects it all back to white feminism & saviorism. It’s a tough read, but worth it.

I’ll write more after I have had a chance to read this one on my Kindle.

So Many Questions

Today’s blog is thanks to Elle Cuardaigh – If Adoption Is Beautiful.

*Adoption, meaning the current concept of it in the Western world. The complete legal severing of the natural relationship between child and parent(s), replacing the original family and (sometimes) culture with another, including changing the child’s identity and sealing the original records, keeping information from everyone involved.

If adoption is beautiful…

Why do people lie about it?
Why isn’t it the first choice for couples who want children?
Why has it been this way for less than one hundred years?
Why doesn’t everyone give up a baby to someone who can’t have one?
Why does rehoming not only happen but is completely legal?
Why does Biblical scripture have to be twisted in order to justify it?
Why does the Quran condemn it?
Why isn’t it done this way all over the world?
Why are people in other countries horrified when they learn what adoption means here?
Why have several “sending” countries banned international adoption?
Why are adoption agencies being sued or forcibly shut down?
Why do adoptees turn to DNA testing to avoid dating a sibling?
Why is family medical history still the first question asked at doctor appointments?
Why are records kept from the very people they pertain to?
Why is a court order needed to see the records?
Why are adoptees terrified to ask their adopted parents questions about it?
Why do adopted parents swear their families to secrecy?
Why did the Catholic church get rich off its corruption?
Why is coercion routinely employed to get “birth mothers” to relinquish?
Why are there consistently over 100,000 eligible children waiting years for “their forever families”?
Why do white children cost more than black children?
Why is it okay to think of children as commodities as in the above question?
Why do the American Adoption Congress, Adoptee’s Liberty Movement Association, Bastard Nation, Concerned United Birthparents, and numerous other organizations like them exist?
Why do so many adoptees search?
Why did the Australian government officially apologize for its role in it?
Why are adoptees who are murdered by their adopted parents still considered “lucky”?
Why were adoptees used for medical and psychological experiments?
Why are adoptees the punchline of jokes?
Why is it recognized as a childhood trauma?
Why are adoptees considered “as if born to” their adoptive family, yet are subject to conditional terms for incest?
Why in cases where the baby goes back to the natural mother is it called “failure”?
Why are teen adoptees overrepresented in mental health services?
Why do so many rely on it as an industry for their paycheck?
Why is it patterned after the system Georgia Tann – a known kidnapper, trafficker, child killer, and pedophile – developed?
Why is it used as a tool of war and cultural genocide?
Why can’t all adoptees get a passport? Why are others deported?
Why are adoptees four times more likely than the non-adopted to attempt suicide?
Why can’t we have this conversation?

And again, Why is it that we can’t have this conversation?

Elle Cuardaigh is author of The Tangled Red Thread.

Racially Determined Adoptions

I spent most of last summer educating myself about racial inequality and reform issues. Now I see this advertisement. First of all, $13,000 tax credit for adopters??? Think if poor mothers got $13,000 to keep and raise their own babies. The newborn adoption industry would totally collapse. In Canada, they pay single parents so that they are not burdened with having to find a job and child care. There are no losers in that scenario. This program lasts until the child is 18. The amount per month decreases as the child gets older.

Note that African American babies are less valuable at Everlasting Adoptions. One could ask – Doesn’t this somehow directly violate anti-discrimination laws? Besides the smell of human trafficking in this brochure. No one regulates this business. It’s truly the wild west at this time in human history as regards adoption. This one isn’t even an adoption agency, its like a “travel agent” for people who want to pay someone to find a birth mom for them. If found, the parties then go to an adoption agency to draw up the paperwork but on Everlasting Adoptions website, they proudly take credit for successfully completed matches.

NPR did a story back in 2013 titled Six Words: ‘Black Babies Cost Less To Adopt’. The title for this one came from a Louisiana woman. Other contributors have also addressed the skin-color based fee structure for many adoptions, NPR noted – The intersection of race and adoption has prompted many people to submit their six words to The Race Card Project. Americans adopt thousands of children each year. And as the nation has become increasingly diverse, and with the growth of international adoption in recent decades, many of those children don’t look like their adoptive parents.

One adoptive parent, remembers a phone call with an adoption agency social worker. “And [she] was telling us about these different fee structures that they had based on the ethnic background of the child. And … they also had, sort of a different track for adoptive parents.” Moving through the process would be quicker, if the family was open to adopting an African-American (not biracial) child, the social worker explained to her. “And that is because they have children of color waiting,” but adopting biracial, Latino, Asian or Caucasian children could be a slower process because there were more parents waiting for them. “And I remember hearing this and just sort of being dumbfounded that they would sort of segregate — to use a loaded term — segregate these children by ethnic background before they were even in this world,”

It is a profit-motivated, supply and demand business. Thankfully, NPR also found that some states and agencies are using a different formula to make adoption more affordable for families, with a sliding scale based on income rather than skin color. In that system, lower-income families pay less to adopt. Some agencies are also moving toward a uniform cost system where all adoptive parents would pay the same fees. (Though I am still not in favor of adoption in most cases.) Still, back in 2013, the cost to adopt the Caucasian child was approximately $35,000, plus some legal expenses. I see upward of $40,000 in Go Fund Me efforts set up by hopeful adoptive parents today in 2021.

The Long Song

February is officially what is known as Black History Month. Some of my black friends joke about there being a month for something that has been going on all along – that being “history.” Never-the-less, after all the consciousness raising of last summer’s protests and my own significant efforts at self-education regarding racial inequality, as this month comes to an end, a story came into my awareness that seems to fit my blog’s topics and themes.

Here is the post that brought this story to my attention – “Today I watched The Long Song on PBS. **spoiler alert** When the recently freed black slave mother’s baby is stolen by her white master and his wife, I cried. So many thoughts came over me. My brain made a correlation. So many mothers get their kid’s ripped away. Sure, it may be due to drugs, neglect, violence and/or abuse. But I believe for most of these mothers, exposure to these things all come with ‘normal’ life in their world.”

“Often times, when their kids are taken, they don’t understand why. They were never rescued. Why do their kids need rescuing ? And despite all their parenting issues, I believe they most often deeply love their children. I do believe losing them, regardless of the state they are in, cripples them further. So, whether it’s right or wrong on the kid’s behalf, they are removed. It’s always a tragedy. It’s always traumatic. And there is always sorrow and grief. And today this 3 part series made me feel my sympathy for these mothers. Losing a child has to be one of the worst and longest lasting pains known to humankind.”

That true – one of the worst and longest lasting pains known to humankind.

The following is courtesy of Masterpiece theater’s What To Know Before You Watch –

Told through the eyes of July, a slave and spirited survivor, The Long Song is set in the 19^th century and explores the last days of slavery in British-ruled Jamaica. The story is about injustices humans inflict on each other and the unexpected ways in which people’s humanity can overcome harsh circumstances.

Born into slavery at the Amity sugarcane plantation, July gets taken from her mother as a child simply because the owner’s sister, Caroline Mortimer, spots her out in the fields and thinks she’s cute. There are many painful scenes yet to come, but this one is particularly crushing in its simplicity. Her kidnapping, which alters the course of her life and devastates her mother, is nothing more than a casual whim from people who have no awareness of their own cruelty.

The story unfolds with the strong-willed July working as a lady’s maid for Caroline . When Robert Goodwin, a new overseer at Amity arrives, both July and Caroline are intrigued by his revolutionary spirit and intent to improve the working conditions on the plantation. But the winds of change across the hot plantation fields end up not being without consequences.

Robert Goodwin is a white Brit who initially sweeps July off her feet with promises of fidelity and fair wages for all the recently freed slaves on the plantation. And yet, he sours the second the Black people in his employ stand up for themselves, twisting into a hard, gnarled version of the idealistic man July fell for.

Based on the award-winning novel by the late Andrea Levy, the fictional story is inspired by Levy’s family history. Levy was born in England to Jamaican parents who arrived in Britain in 1948. “I’ve always used my books as a personal journey to understand my Caribbean heritage – and with that sooner or later you have to confront slavery,” Levy said.

After the book was released, research by a family member proved just how personal The Long Song truly was. “It was all done and then my niece found out a lot about our own family history,” Levy explained. “She found out that my great grandfather was born a slave. His mother was a housekeeper on a plantation called Mesopotamia and her mother was a field slave called Minnie. We found out that my great, great-grandfather was from Gainsborough in Britain, his name was William Ridsguard and he was the attorney on the plantation, and he had a child with his house keeper…that child, Richard Ridsguard was my great grandfather.”

Regarding the 3 main characters it is said – “Andrea Levy really created three people who can be complete contradictions – I think you will find yourself doubting, hating, loving them. They are complete human beings.” The novel which was published in 2010 was the recipient of the Walter Scott Prize.