Columbia Journal of Race and Law最新文献

{"title":"Twentieth Century Black and Native Activism Against the Child Taking System","authors":"L. Briggs","doi":"10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8746","url":null,"abstract":"This Article argues that the historical record supports activism that takes the abolition of the child welfare system as its starting point, rather than its reform. It explores the birth of the modern child welfare system in the 1950s as part of the white supremacist effort to punish Black communities that sought desegregation of schools and other public accommodations; and Native communities that fought tribal termination and the taking of indigenous land. Beginning with the “segregation package” of laws passed by the Louisiana state legislature in 1960, the Article shows how cutting so-called “illegitimate” children off the welfare program, called Aid to Dependent Children, (ADC) and placing those whom their mothers could no longer support in foster care was an explicit response to school desegregation. While the National Urban League initially mounted a formidable national and international mutual aid effort, “Operation Feed the Babies,” its ultimate response—appealing to the federal government to reform the welfare and child welfare systems— backfired in disastrous ways. The Eisenhower administration responded by providing federal funds for a program it called ADC-foster care, giving states resources to dramatically expand the foster care system, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Black children in foster homes within a year. Native Tribal nations, in contrast, fought throughout the late 1960s and 70s to get states out of Indian child welfare. After a decade of activism, in 1978, they succeeded in passing the Indian Child Welfare Act, which put American Indian kids under the jurisdiction of tribal courts instead of the states’. Over the next decades, the number of Native children in foster care shrank dramatically. While history rarely offers clear guidance for the present, these two stories strongly suggest the limits of reform for state child welfare systems, and the wisdom of contemporary activists who call for abolition.","PeriodicalId":212657,"journal":{"name":"Columbia Journal of Race and Law","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123988924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Abolition, settler colonialism, and the persistent threat of Indian child welfare","authors":"Theresa Rocha Beardall, Frank Edwards","doi":"10.31235/osf.io/mqgtc","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/mqgtc","url":null,"abstract":"Family separation is a defining feature of the relationship between the U.S. government and American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) families and tribal nations. The historical record catalogues this relationship in several ways including the mass displacement of Native children into boarding schools throughout the 19th century and the widespread adoption of Native children into non-Indian homes in the 20th century. Child removal was commonplace, and explicitly directed at the elimination of Native cultures and nations through aggressive assimilation. This violent legacy eventually prompted the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978. The ICWA introduced federal protections for Native children, families, and tribes against unnecessary removal and affirmed the role of the tribe as an important partner in child welfare proceedings. To what extent has this landmark legislation changed the prevalence and frequency of Native family separation since 1978? What can be done to reduce the threat of the child welfare system on the well-being of Native families today? In this Article, we use administrative and historical data to statistically evaluate the magnitude of change in AIAN family separation since the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act and locate the institutional pathways by which AIAN families are funneled into the child welfare system. Our findings reveal that despite long-standing treaty responsibilities to support the health and well-being of tribal nations, high rates of separation among AIAN children persist. In particular, we find that the frequency of AIAN children's placement into foster care has remained relatively stable since the passage of the ICWA, that AIAN children remain at incredibly high risk of family separation through the child welfare system, and that the post-investigation removal decision by child welfare agencies is a key mechanism of inequality in family separation. We situate these findings within theories about settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession to illustrate that the continuous removal of Native children from their families and tribal communities is not an anomaly. Instead, we argue that the very intent of a White supremacist settler-state is to dismantle Native families and tribal nations. Based upon these findings, we shift our focus away from the particularities of Indian child welfare and argue that the child welfare system more broadly must be abolished in order to stop the routine separation of Native children from their families by the state. Left intact, child protection systems prioritize surveillance and separation over welfare and support, affecting non-White children and families in immeasurable ways. We suggest that the ICWA has provided, and will continue to provide, a necessary intervention to protect Native families so long as this intrusive system remains. We conclude by exploring how an abolitionist approach to child welfare might positively impact Native families by","PeriodicalId":212657,"journal":{"name":"Columbia Journal of Race and Law","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130278704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How Racial Politics Led Directly to the Enactment of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997","authors":"Martin Guggenheim","doi":"10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8749","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8749","url":null,"abstract":"This Article is part of a celebration of the magnificent work of Dorothy Roberts who, more than any other scholar, has brilliantly demonstrated both the highly destructive qualities of the United States’ family regulation system and its relationship to the country’s legacy of slavery. The most vicious feature of the current family regulation system is the almost routine destruction of families resulting from an overly zealous enforcement of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, through which the federal government pays states to permanently banish parents from their children and legally sever the parent-child relationship when children have remained in foster care for fifteen months. This Article tells some of the racialized history that led to the enactment of the Adoption and Safe Families Act.","PeriodicalId":212657,"journal":{"name":"Columbia Journal of Race and Law","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130571791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Surveillance Tentacles of the Child Welfare System","authors":"Charlotte Baughman, Tehra Coles, Jennifer Feinberg, Hope Newton","doi":"10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8743","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8743","url":null,"abstract":"The family regulation system identifies families through the use of widespread, cross-system surveillance for the purported purpose of keeping children safe. But the system does not surveil all families equally, leading to the disproportionate impact of family regulation on Black, Brown, and Native families, and fails to protect while causing more harm to children and communities of color. We examine how institutions and professionals that are meant to provide necessary services to the community—medical providers, social services agencies, the police, and schools—act as tentacles of surveillance, entrapping families in the family regulation system. We argue that engineering service and community providers as surveillance agents perpetuates inequality and leads to unnecessary family separation and trauma, and that genuine support for families can only thrive outside of the family regulation system and its surveillance tentacles. ","PeriodicalId":212657,"journal":{"name":"Columbia Journal of Race and Law","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124400083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Calculating the Souls of Black Folk","authors":"J. K. Abdurahman","doi":"10.52214/CJRL.V11I4.8741","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/CJRL.V11I4.8741","url":null,"abstract":"In 1995, there were nearly 50,000 children removed from their families into the New York City Administration for Children’s Services’ (ACS) foster care system.1 The NYC ACS’ forcible transfer of children from a protected group into another group may amount to genocide under Article 2(e) of the Genocide Convention if formal review can demonstrate an “intent to destroy” the group “as such” or at least “in part.” Rather than pursuing a citizen’s tribunal, or truth and reconciliation committee to assess the historic transfer of Black children to other groups during this period by the child welfare system, ACS has focused on collecting data from currently targeted populations in order to “predict who needs prevention” services. This paper examines the Family First Prevention Act’s legislative mandate to calculate the “souls of Black folks” and the geographies of predictive analytics developed to serve this aim. Using an abolitionist lens grounded in the epistemology offered by W. E. B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folks, this argument moves beyond the Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAT) framework to propose strategies for dismantling the “new modes of surveillance and social control” manifested in NYC ACS’ preventive turn. I propose a Get Out mathematics drawing from Katherine McKittrick’s proposal to “count it out different” as the fugitive’s alternative to state sanctioned datafication.","PeriodicalId":212657,"journal":{"name":"Columbia Journal of Race and Law","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116732553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toward Community Control of Child Welfare Funding","authors":"A. Burton, Angeline Montauban","doi":"10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8747","url":null,"abstract":"The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act mandates reporting, investigation,and prosecution of allegedly abusive and neglectful parents. Commonly known as child protective services (CPS), this family policing system uses the government’s  police power to disrupt, surveil, control, and destroy hundreds of thousands of Black families based on conditions of poverty framed as neglect.\u0000Centering a Black mother’s five-year long ordeal with New York City’s family policing system, we examine the carceral roots of CPS and its destructive impacts on Black families. We call for abolishing the CPS family policing system; diversion of the billions invested in the foster industry to investment in quality-of-life resources de-linked from so-called “child protection”; and monetary reparations for generations of CPS violence against Black families.","PeriodicalId":212657,"journal":{"name":"Columbia Journal of Race and Law","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121189586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Assimilation, Removal, Discipline, and Confinement","authors":"A. Rolnick","doi":"10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8752","url":null,"abstract":"A full understanding of the roots of child separation must begin with Native children. This Article demonstrates how modern child welfare, delinquency, and education systems are rooted in the social control of indigenous children. It examines the experiences of Native girls in federal and state systems from the late 1800s to the mid1900s to show that, despite their ostensibly benevolent and separate purposes, these institutions were indistinguishable and interchangeable. They were simply differently styled mechanisms of forced assimilation, removal, discipline, and confinement. As the repeating nature of government intervention into the lives of Native children makes clear, renaming a system does not change its effect. The historical roots of these systems must be acknowledged, and the current systems must be abolished and replaced. To answer the question of what a nonpunitive, non-assimilative system would look like, this Article looks to tribal courts and indigenous justice systems. It points to specific examples of how Native communities have reshaped ideas about caring for and disciplining children, including traditional adoption, kinship care, wellness courts, family group conferencing, and a “best interests” standard that emphasizes the link between individual and collective well-being. ","PeriodicalId":212657,"journal":{"name":"Columbia Journal of Race and Law","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126732564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ending the Family Death Penalty and Building a World We Deserve","authors":"Ashley Albert, Tiheba Bain, Elizabeth Brico, Bishop Marcia Dinkins, Kelis Houston, Joyce McMillan, Vonya Quarles, Lisa Sangoi, Erin Miles Cloud, Adina Marx-Arpadi","doi":"10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8753","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8753","url":null,"abstract":"U.S. history is rooted in the rationalization of family separation to benefit white supremacy, capitalism and mainstream U.S. values. Because of this dark history, the U.S. history has become the world’s leader of legal destruction of families through termination of parental rights. It is the only country in the world that routinely pays people to adopt children whose parents, often women, very much want to be their parent. The Adoption and Safe Families Act, enacted in 1997, wildly changed the legal landscape of the family regulation system. At that time 47% of the children in the system were Black, and the drug war had been targeting Black men for low level offenses, and labeling Black mothers as “crack moms”. The result was an extreme attack on Black families, for which we have yet to recover.  \u0000Abolition teaches us to unroot oppressive structures, disrupt and dismantle them while simultaneously supporting a praxis of imagination, healing, and building. In this paper, we encourage people not only to work to repeal ASFA, but to interrogate the imagination which entrenched the legitimacy of ASFA. Part I centers the discussion in our imaginations—the world we want to build, and the demands we are making. Part II moves into a discussion about the counter imagination, the ideas and mythology that created ASFA—the legal framework. In this section, we isolate ASFA as a target for abolition and organizing. Part III moves into a practical discussion about ethical ways to mobilize around ASFA. This section is intended to invite the reader to learn, and question, together. It invites questions, thinking, and problem solving in lieu of providing a recommendation.","PeriodicalId":212657,"journal":{"name":"Columbia Journal of Race and Law","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126073125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The White Supremacy Hydra","authors":"Miriam Mack","doi":"10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8751","url":null,"abstract":"Fundamentally, the so-called “child welfare system”—more appropriately named, the family regulation system—is a policing system rooted in white supremacist ideologies and techniques. From its earliest iteration, the family regulation system has functioned to pathologize, control, and punish the families entrapped in its web, most especially Black families. Nevertheless, among many, the myth persists that the family regulation system is one of child protection and family support. This is especially true when discussing the Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018, which—for the first time since the establishment of the modern family regulation system—opens up federal funding streams previously reserved for the removal of children to the foster system to provide prevention services for families in which children have not yet been removed to the foster system. While the Act is a course change in federal family regulation policy, this Article traces how it leaves undisturbed the pathology, control, and punishment central to the policies that preceded it.","PeriodicalId":212657,"journal":{"name":"Columbia Journal of Race and Law","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116005943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Political-Economic Roots of Coercion","authors":"Gwendoline M. Alphonso","doi":"10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8742","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8742","url":null,"abstract":"The Article argues that at the core of the American neoliberal policy regime, of which child welfare is a critical part, lies an enduring raced family policy logic of two racially stratified standards: a punitive Black economic utility family standard and a supportive white domestic affection family standard, whose policy roots and practices trace back to slavery in the antebellum South. Historically and contemporaneously, state regulation of poor Black families has been shaped by, and in turn perpetuates, the Black economic utility standard that normalizes and places political value above all else on the promotion of labor by Black mothers outside of their homes in service of a racially-discriminatory market order. By doing so, the state devalues the affective, nurturing labor that Black mothers perform within their households and towards their children. Long followed in Southern local policy practices and led by the efforts of congressmen from the South, the Black economic utility standard is shown to have been formalized nationally within the neoliberal policy regime through a repurposing of overtly racial ideas into behavioral values of work and self-sufficiency that are enshrined in social and child welfare reforms. The Article suggests that the deployment of the Black economic utility standard by the neoliberal policy regime pathologizes poor Black women’s childbearing and motherhood as economically irresponsible, obscures centuries-long structural inequalities and racial family coercion, and serves to perpetuate and justify Black family disruptions in colorblind ways.","PeriodicalId":212657,"journal":{"name":"Columbia Journal of Race and Law","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125919642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}