When the System Is Broken...



Thank you NYT for publishing this article; Foster Care as Punishment, the New Reality of 'Jane Crow'. Can’t stress it enough, the double standard in our child welfare system is blatant and negligibly sanctioned by the courts. A state receiving Title IV funding from the feds is dependent upon not how many children receive services but how many children are in court ordered, out of home placements. So whose children end up in foster care and whose children do you think receive in home services? In NYC less than 4% of the children in foster care are White. Are we to believe that is by accident??? Only a fool...


Securing funding, keeping folks gainfully employed, providing a feeder for mass incarceration and validating a negative narrative that has been told incessantly for generations are the justifications for removing Black children from their homes. Often I am left to wonder just when did Black Mothers become so negligent, so incapable of parenting when is it Black Mothers who raised everyone else’s children? Hmmm….


 

Dating back to slavery when suckling Black babies were mercilessly pulled from the breasts of their screaming Mothers who were being sold to parts and persons unknown, never to see her babies again, there has been no regard for the humanity or maternity of Black Mothers, no sense that her heart was being ripped out, no regard for the sanctity or value of the Black Family so easily separated with even less regard given a litter of dogs.


Still, it is sentiments such as these that drive a very cruel system interested not in the welfare of children but instead punishment of their Mothers, punishment for being Black and/or poor and voiceless, overpowered by and mostly not represented in a system vested first in maintaining it’s own survival, perpetuating and validating the continuity of a lie of inhumanity and ultimately in destroying the Black Family. Job well done says a former social worker in both child welfare and corrections who absolutely abhorred both broken systems...

It is NOT a myth...