Last week at a press conference, Temecia Jackson recalled the moment when police officers and child protection services agents had “stolen” her baby from her Dallas home. Her words, and her story of how her newborn baby was taken from her because she opted to follow a midwife’s recommendation over a physician’s, sparked outrage across the country.
When University of Pennsylvania law professor and activist Dorothy Roberts first heard about the case, which captured national attention, she remembered that that was what happened to singer Syesha Mercado in Florida in 2021.
Less than two years ago, while the former American Idol finalist had been fighting for custody of her toddler, Mercado surrendered her breast-feeding newborn daughter to Manatee county sheriff’s deputies after a welfare check was performed on the side of a road.
The cases reflect a common feature of what Roberts calls the family policing system, a structurally racist apparatus that disproportionately separates Black and Indigenous children from their families, one that traces its origins to chattel slavery.
“Children are taken on grounds of neglect where there isn’t any evidence of severe abuse,” said Roberts, the author of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families – and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. “We could imagine a better way of dealing with the families’ and the children’s needs without resorting to this traumatic intervention of seizing children. We shouldn’t think of them as aberrant cases.”
Jackson, who opted to give birth at home with a licensed midwife, had her newborn daughter Mila taken from her just days after she was born on 21 March. Mila had developed a severe case of jaundice, and the family’s longtime pediatrician, Dr Anand Bhatt, recommended that she receive phototherapy treatment at Baylor Scott & White hospital in Dallas. But Jackson and her family opted to have the same treatment at home with their midwife.
Concerned the family had the wrong idea about the treatment, Bhatt wrote in a letter to child protective services (CPS) that he had trouble getting in touch with the family, whom he described as “very loving” and who “care dearly about their baby”. Still, he wrote, he authorized CPS to “get this baby the care that was medically necessary”, noting: “Their distrust for medical care and guidance has led them to make a decision for the baby to refuse a simple treatment that can prevent brain damage.”
Mila remains in a foster home – the family’s next hearing has been delayed until 20 April.
As were Bianca Clayborne and Deonte Williams’s five children. Tennessee authorities “kidnapped” them in February after a highway police officer stopped the family as they drove to Chicago for a funeral and found a small amount of marijuana in their car.
The couple has since regained custody of their children, more than a month and a half after the kids were seized, the family’s attorney Courtney Teasley confirmed on Friday. Teasley told the Tennessee Lookout that the family had returned to their home in Georgia and would return to Nashville in a week after they “reclaim so much unnecessary lost time”.
Roberts argues that although the families’ circumstances differ, the outcomes remain troublingly similar: in the course of their lifetimes, more than half of Black children – 53% – will face an investigation by child welfare services before they turn 18. In 2018, Black children were overrepresented in foster care, accounting for 23% of kids in the system but only comprising 14% of all US children. By comparison, white children, who make up roughly half of the nation’s child population, were underrepresented.
“This form of state intervention and family separation is the common experience for Black children in America,” Roberts said.
What’s driven those disparities, she said, is the racial stereotyping of Black families, who are seen as unfit to take care of their own children. Because of structural racism in other facets of US society, Black families are disproportionately impoverished and therefore encounter a child welfare system that, Roberts added, was designed “to handle the problems and struggles of impoverished families and to handle them in a very punitive and a cruel way by accusation, investigations and separation – and in many cases, termination of parental rights.”
Roberts found that racist stereotyping influences how child welfare workers and mandatory reporters such as teachers and doctors make decisions on reports of suspected child mistreatment. The foster care population has skyrocketed since the 1960s, driven by the separation of Black children from their families as civil rights activists demanded more government aid during the civil rights movement. Southern states in particular engaged in policies that linked allegations of unfit treatment at home to child removal toward foster care.
By 1974, after the US Congress enacted the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, the federal government broadened state welfare agents’ powers to investigate both child abuse and neglect, which is, by definition, easily conflated with poverty and focused on “parents’ failure to meet the material needs of children”, Roberts noted, adding: “That is easy way to punish people for being poor.”
The families’ cases in Texas, Tennessee and Florida shows just how those racial biases within the American carceral system, along with the medical racism that pervades hospitals, creates an environment that puts Black families at heightened risk of separation.
A traffic stop – a type of police interaction which disproportionately affects Black Americans – and the subsequent arrest of Deonte Williams after authorities found a small amount of marijuana in his car, led to his and Bianca Clayborne’s five children, including a newborn, being taken from them.
“What’s the basis for accusing the parents of child maltreatment? And the decision to remove a child?” Roberts asked.
Temecia Jackson and her family’s conflict with their doctor in Texas about their newborn’s medical treatment raised a similar question about whether the Black parents’ decision-making – to choose at-home care instead of hospital care – had been devalued, Roberts added.
At a time when Black women are between three and four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, that decision in the face of medical mistrust matters. Roberts has also found that doctors are “more likely to suspect … child maltreatment on the part of Black families” than white families for the same conduct. Roberts noted that doctors were more likely to test Black newborns for drug exposure, particularly at private hospitals, than white newborns.
“It’s not just a question of what’s the best medical care for the child. It’s also a question of ‘Are we taking into account the harm to children of a family separation and figuring out a way to care for children that doesn’t include that harm?’”
The American “family policing system”, Roberts argued, is an extension of the carceral system and fails to address the harms other social policies have on children.
“It doesn’t do anything about the high rates of child poverty in America, it doesn’t do anything about the need for affordable housing in America. It doesn’t do anything about the inequitable education system we have, and all the other structural inequities that are the biggest harms to children,” Roberts said. “It diverts our attention from them, and instead blames supposedly pathological parents, who are stereotyped as not caring for their children.”
These cases represent the troubling reality in America: who deserves to remain a family is “deeply shaped by white supremacy and racism”.
“It continues to be a status-force norm in America that the only really legitimate family is the white, hetero sexist, hetero patriarchal family that is led by a white man,” Roberts said. “That is what the plantation family was.”
