The Façade of State Benevolence: Child Welfare and Policing Black Families

The Façade of State Benevolence:Child Welfare and Policing Black Families Jamil W. Drake Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World( New York: Basic Books, 2022). A significant sector of the American public was outraged by news reports about the Trump administration's "family separation" immigration policy in 2020. Since 2017, the administration deliberately separated (or, more accurately, "kidnapped") over 5,000 children from their asylum-seeking parents as a political technique to curb immigration at the southern border of the US. In a released statement, the American Academy of Pediatrics voiced its opposition to the policy by highlighting its physiological effects on children. Separating children from their parents, according to the Academy, "generates toxic stress and causes irreparable harm, disrupting a child's brain architecture, which could have lifelong consequences for children" (47). Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton aired her disdain in a tweet: "There is nothing American about tearing families apart." End Page 225 But for Dorothy Roberts, a prominent law professor and prison abolitionist, these critics—the Academy, Clinton, and the broader American public—despite their best intentions, overlook how child removal is a very American phenomenon that continues to persist in the everyday experiences of racialized and low-income demographics. Child removal has been a standard and regular political tool throughout American history, particularly in supporting and maintaining colonial settlerism and enslavement, reservation, and segregation policies and practices. Roberts understands this history as informing how the present-day child welfare services disproportionately remove Black children from their parents and consequently tear families apart. Trump's zero-tolerance policy is not an exception to American democracy. For Roberts, the outrage from the public evinces a failure to make the necessary geographical and political connections to see how child removal is a state sanctioned practice to maintain racial capitalism. Thus, Roberts argues, the tragic occurrences at the southern border must be connected to child welfare services' policing of other racial geographies, such as Harlem, Chicago, Aurora, and others that have borders too. Zero-tolerance immigration policies aimed at Central American and Caribbean families are inseparable from the domestic welfare and punitive policies and procedures that also remove children and tear apart families. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) works with federal and state child protective service as they partner with state and local police departments. Roberts notes, "There is a noticeable discrepancy between the condemnation rightly directed at the Trump administration's family separation policy and the relative silence regarding the breakup of families that occurs every day in America's Black neighborhoods" (49). The US removes approximately "250,000 children from the homes annually, and one out of ten Black children will be forcibly separated from their parents and placed in foster care by the time they reach age eighteen" (22). Torn Apart painstakingly dispels myths surrounding US child welfare/protective services. The central myth is that these state agencies protect and promote the wellbeing of children. Benevolent titles—"welfare system," "child protective services," and "foster care"—safeguard the services' work from public scrutiny and dissent. For Roberts, these benevolent titles mask what she calls the "brutal regime" or "terror" intentionally aimed at Black and low-income families for the preservation of racial and economic inequality. Hence, Roberts argues, child welfare services should more accurately be called and understood as a "family-policing system." The service "weaponizes children as a way to threaten families to scapegoat parents for societal harms to their children and buttress the racist, patriarchal, and capitalist status quo" (24). Through the painful lived experiences and racial geographies of Black and brown and low-income communities, End Page 226 the "chief modus operandi" of the services is not protection and/or welfare, but to "surveil, coerce, and punish families" (24). Torn Apart rightly offers a critique of the welfare state politics and its war on Black mothers and the poor (including Native American and Latinx communities), and not on poverty itself. This critique connects this book to her other works, such as Killing the Black Body (1997) and Shattered Bonds (2001). Roberts shows how state governments spend...