Black Parents Fight to Keep Their Children: Foster Care Bias Splits Black Families (cont.)

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Child welfare advocates and experts will tell you how to fix an ailing system: create financial incentives for foster care agencies to reunite children with parents; supply more money and services to solve the problems of struggling families; and carry out more studies to measure how that money is spent. But when it comes to racial bias, the efforts to provide solutions – like cultural awareness training – are few and far between, especially when so few recognize bias even as they perpetuate it.

“Willie Horton, ‘welfare queens’ and other cultural icons have affected these people as much as everybody else,” said Martin Guggenheim, a professor at New York University School of Law, referring to the decision makers in child welfare cases. The danger, said Guggenheim, and expert on juvenile and family law, is when the decision makers “are unaware that they perceive people differently based on where they live, their color and the fact that they’re poor. And there’s an unspoken understanding by many that parents of these children are not worthy people.”

Roberts explores this disconnect in her book Shattered Bonds. “Standards for abuse and neglect leave a lot of room for people to import their own cultural biases,” she said in an interview. “What the home should look like, how the mother should act. These affect the decision for removal, and once a child is removed, there is pressure to keep them out of the home.”

Jones knows this pressure first-hand. When I met her, she had just returned from visitation with her middle daughter, whom everybody had always said was bright. The girl is in a psychiatric ward of a down-town hospital. She was taken there after she threatened her guardian, a cousin, with a knife and started talking about killing people. She was 6 at the time. The child is bloated from medication to control her behavior and anger, Jones says. Her left arm is swollen, from a fall, the mother was told. At 7, the girl is still in kindergarten when she should be in second grade.

As the ranks of foster care swell with Black children, the stories of other parents like Nicolie Jones become too common. For Amanda Sherman, her story started with a call for help. In August 1995 she placed her 4-month-old granddaughter in foster care after, she says, her cocaine-addicted daughter left the baby with Sherman and disappeared. Sherman’s hands were already full with her daughter’s 2-year-old son, and she wanted to try to find her own child.

 

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