Abstract
Child welfare-affected parents of color (CW-PaoC) are often described using language that is deficit-focused, their families depicted as fragile and living in a near constant state of crisis and need. This commentary challenges the stereotypes created by hyper-attention to these parents’ struggles and situates them, and their families, within the broader context of the American appetite for family separation, wherein specific types of families are targeted for scrutiny, intervention and regulation. The concept of fragility within families is dissected to illustrate the ways in which racism and classism demarcate certain families for separation. Excerpts from two separate interviews conducted with Black mothers in 2014 and 2020 are used to illustrate how the appetite for family separation is currently fed. Familial and cultural strengths that counteract the prevailing deficit-focused narrative of CW-PaoC, particularly Black parents, are discussed. This commentary ends with a call for the dissolution of the CW system in its current regulatory form and the rebuilding of family-centered supports that center familial strengths.
Highlights
Genealogy 5: 11. https://doi.org/Time suspended, his pleas for his life amplified by the crowd—the seconds counting upward on the video screen
The impunity with which that officer took Mr Floyd’s life, apparently believing there would be no consequence for the baseless violence he perpetrated, is a hallmark of systemic racism
A child welfare (CW) system which intensively involves itself in families across generations, using separation as a primary tool of intervention, can no longer claim to be helping those families
Summary
His pleas for his life amplified by the crowd—the seconds counting upward on the video screen. In the eight minutes and forty-six seconds (8:46) that the police officer knelt on Mr Floyd’s neck, America’s carefully cultivated legacy of racial violence was captured, frame by awful frame. Assured of his place and protections in American society, the White officer stared remorselessly into the camera lens, offering America an unfiltered view into a world known intimately to many Black Americans. This is a world of violence at the hands of and decisions made by people and institutions sworn to protect them, which instead stifle the breath and potential from their lives. Implications for policies and practices that unearth and uproot systemic racism in CW are detailed
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