Dorothy Roberts is the author of Killing the Black Body (Vintage, 1997) and Shattered Bonds (Basic, 2002), both critically acclaimed explorations of Black motherhood and the racial politics of child welfare. She is widely recognized as an expert on transracial adoption and Black children, foster care and the Black family, and is Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is Fatal Intervention: How Science, Politics, and Big-Business Recreate Race in the 21st Century (The New Press, 2012).
In the second part of this interview, conducted via Skype in December 2013, I talked with Roberts about recent disturbances in the narrative of transracial adoption, our dominant child welfare philosophy and its malcontents, and the urgency of cross-movement building.
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Dorothy Robers (DR): We were talking about the colorblind philosophy that tends to be promoted around transracial adoption. Not to say that that’s true for all white parents, because there are some who do question their own racial privilege, who do try to understand the experiences of their children of color in a white-dominated society. They make an effort. It’s where there’s no effort made, where parents try to pretend that race doesn’t matter, where there’s the problem. And some advocates for transracial adoption promote it as a colorblind experience that will transcend race. So it’s promoted in a way that actually harms children. That’s the personal level.
There’s also a disturbing argument that transracial adoption is a panacea at a more political level, which is looking at the fact that when you have both domestic adoption in the U.S. and internationally, it’s always the people from the most privileged group, by and large, with rare exception, who are adopting children from a less privileged group. It is not as if this is a truly racially equal process. You do not find African Americans who are sometimes even allowed to adopt a child who is white. We keep hearing a lot about the supposed barriers to whites adopting black children, but there are many more barriers to blacks adopting white children. And those numbers are very few.
So, by and large, if you look at transracial adoption at the macro-political level, both domestically and globally, it is a process where children are transferred from the least privileged to the most privileged. And that means something. That involves power arrangements. I don’t think that we can just ignore that that’s what going on. And all of the potential for exploitation that comes out of that power relationship, that is also being raised as a critical interrogation of both transracial and international adoption. So on those two levels, the more personal and the more macro, I think it’s all political because it all comes out of a political racial hierarchy. It’s all to support a hierarchy where whites remain in power and have the ability to subordinate others. This is what racism and the racial order is about, both in the U.S. and around the world. Again, without saying that individual families are deliberately trying to promote that racial order, it’s still the case that transracial adoption is occurring within that racial order. And you can’t ignore it. There are harms that occur, both to children and to the broader hope for racial equality, when you ignore the real power arrangements that shape adoption, and have always shaped adoption in this country.
Even when we were talking about poor, immigrant white children being brought into the child welfare system and being shipped out on orphan trains across the country, it had to do with inequities of power. There, it was more of a class basis. Even before African American children came to make up so much of the child welfare system, these power relations and hierarchies of privilege and disadvantage have structured child welfare and adoption.
And I would be remiss not to point out the government policy of removing Native American children from their homes and placing them in white adoptive homes as a way of assimilating them into white U.S. culture and attempting to decimate their tribes. Some tribes were actually decimated as a result of so many children being removed from their families and communities. Of course, they did not succeed in destroying Native American tribes, but that was the deliberate policy of the U.S. government. An attempt to correct it with the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) has not been successful in ending the large percentage of Native American children who are placed in foster care.
Shannon Gibney (SG): In Shattered Bonds, you also write, “I believe that the main reason for preferring extinction of parental ties in foster care is society’s depreciation of the relationship between poor parents and their children, especially those who are Black.”
On the one hand, you write that the discourse of the child welfare system says that it is really about helping the children. But at the same time, at least in the American system, it’s never really been about supporting the parents so that they can actually successfully raise their children. We actually want to penalize the parents for being poor. This is evidenced by the fact that the majority of child welfare cases come out of neglect, versus any isolated act that the parent might have committed. So, I’m wondering if you could talk about those kinds of tensions. How do you see this punitive apparatus operating on poor Black families, predominantly, and have there been any changes in that apparatus since you wrote the book?
DR: The philosophy of the U.S. child welfare system from its very inception was a child-saving philosophy. It was a philosophy of removing a child from a situation of either danger or depravation, rather than looking at the societal, systemic reasons why the child was in a situation of danger or deprivation. So even before it became as punitive as it is today, it was still very much the idea of saving the child from the parents, family, and the community, as opposed to supporting them. It became, though, much more punitive than that, even though you hear the child-saving philosophy coming out a lot more from people who support even more government intervention into homes, or just want to paint the child welfare system as if it’s only a benevolent institution.
But during the 1970s and ’80s, it became more of a punitive institution. I think it’s not coincidental that this is a period of time in which more and more Black families became involved in the child welfare system. But the philosophy became more and more that the reason why children were in dangerous and deplorable situations was entirely the fault of their pathological parents. At least at the time of Jane Adams, for example, there was the idea that child welfare was linked to social inequality — linking together child saving and child labor laws, and other kinds of progressive reforms. That isn’t the case, by and large, in the dominant child welfare philosophy today. It became much more of a psychological explanation than a societal explanation, and much more of an individualized explanation than a social one. These children had to be removed because their parents had some flaw that perhaps could be removed through parental training.
But there has been a move to change that to a philosophy that more holistically looks at the systemic reasons for inequities in the welfare of children and that also is more community-focused. This is another theme that many scholars and even agencies are looking at – to involve communities where there is more child welfare involvement in more of the decision-making about policies and practices. And also more of a recognition that it cannot just be the child welfare system in isolation that deals with the needs of families. Even if it’s non-punitive, it has to be in coordination with other systems, like the health care system and the education system, to try to more holistically care for and support children.
And then there’s another piece to it, too: More recognition of the need for more anti-racist, anti-poverty, anti-sexist changes in society that are required to really change the way that America treats its children and families, even with a holistic approach to government agencies that provide services for families – that is not the answer, either. So, yes, it would be better to have a more generous welfare state that provides more resources for families. But there are also structural inequities of race, class, and gender that have to be addressed as well. I think more and more people are recognizing the need for change along all these lines. But it hasn’t changed yet, the dominant focus on child protection, on relying on removing children and then trying to “correct” the parents because the child is harmed due to parental flaws. That is so ingrained in child welfare philosophy; it’s going to take a lot of effort to change it.
But I think if there can be a movement along all these lines, to work toward a different philosophy about the needs of children and families, it can be done. It’s just like all the problems and injustices and inequities we see in this country, like mass incarceration, and the huge gaps in income and wealth, or huge gaps in educational outcomes – all of this is going to require a broad-based movement of progressive people who understand the connections among all of these issues.
SG: Where do you put your hope in all of this? It’s kind of a grim picture, in some ways.
DR: I see hope in connections that people are making. For example, people are seeing the connection between the prison system and the foster care system. They’re seeing connections between disability rights and reproductive justice and anti-racism work. These connections are coming up more and more.
I think that child welfare is behind. I was just tweeting the other day that people understand that prison is to punish people, but most people think that foster care is good for children.
The next step is for advocacy and even movements around these issues that seemed separate, at one point, to come together to push for really fundamental changes in the way in which this country treats families, especially poor families of color, because it’s all connected. Being in prison puts you at risk of losing your children, losing your children puts you at risk of being in prison, and being in foster care puts you at risk of being in juvenile detention and prison. The images that support the over-incarceration of Black mothers are the same images that support the over-removal of their children and placing them in foster care. All of this is connected, and my hope is that people who are dedicated to social justice, to ending these hierarchies of power along race, class, and gender lines, are seeing those connections and coming together to advocate for a more equal and humane way of living in this country.
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