Dorothy Roberts

Forty-two percent of all children in foster care nationwide are black, even though black children constitute only 17% of the nation’s youth. And once black children enter foster care, they remain there longer, are moved more often, and are less likely either to be returned home or adopted than white children. Those are a few of the statistics that bolster arguments in a recent book, Shattered Bonds: the Color of Child Welfare (2001) by law professor and IPR faculty fellow Dorothy Roberts.

Roberts argues that the overwhelming number of black children in foster care points to the disturbing reality of racial bias that is rarely addressed in child welfare discourse. “Today’s child welfare discourse is marked by an abysmal failure to grasp the racial harm inflicted by the child welfare system,” Roberts says. “Most white children referred to child protective services are permitted to stay with their families, whereas most black children are taken away from theirs.”

In her book, Roberts examines how the politics of race and class profoundly affect which children become involved in the system. She describes the racial imbalance in foster care; the concentration of state intervention in certain neighborhoods, including the alarming percentages of children in substitute care; the difficulty that poor and black families have in meeting state standards for regaining custody of children placed in foster care; and the relationship between state supervision and continuing racial inequality.

Child protection policy has conformed to the current political climate, which embraces punitive responses to the seemingly intractable plight of isolated and impoverished inner cities, according to Roberts. In recent years, federal and state policy have shifted away from preserving families and toward “freeing” children in foster care for adoption by terminating parental rights. Black families, who are disproportionately poor, Roberts says, have been hit the hardest.

Neglect, usually linked to poverty — not physical or sexual abuse — is the main reason that most children end up in foster care. (There are twice as many cases of child neglect as cases of physical abuse.)

High rates of poverty among black families, bolstered by stereotypes about black parental unfitness, create the system’s racial disparity, according to Roberts. The racial harm profoundly affects the black community, extending well beyond the obvious injuries to blacks involved in the child welfare system, she argues.

Roberts proposes a child welfare system that would radically change the nature of state involvement by redefining child welfare to generously support children in their homes:“I don’t see why as a society we are not willing to give generous supports for families, but we are willing to spend billions to remove children from their families,” she says.