Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Roberts (Killing the Black Body), a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a searing look at racial injustice in the U.S. child welfare system. Alleging that "more than one in ten Black children in America will be forcibly separated from their parents and placed in foster care by the time they reach age eighteen," Roberts explains that government funding for foster care far outstrips funding for family preservation efforts, that children are often placed in group homes or residential treatment centers instead of with families, and that abuse in these "prisonlike facilities" is rampant. Horror stories of parents trapped in the bureaucracy of the system include one cancer-stricken mother whose child wandered off in a park during a family picnic, causing a passerby to call the authorities. When a caseworker later knocked on the mother's door and she didn't answer right away, the police arrived and proceeded to hog-tie and arrest her, dislocating her shoulder in the process. Roberts buttresses her impassioned call for dismantling the child welfare system by skillfully situating it within a larger web of institutions intended to surveil, control, and punish Black Americans. This illuminating and alarming study shatters the "facade of benevolence" surrounding foster care. Agent: David Halpern, the Robbins Office. (Apr.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
The U.S. child welfare system is so fundamentally flawed that abolishing it is the only way to end its destruction of Black children and Black families, argues Roberts (law and sociology, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare). The system rests on racist myths and operates with a long legacy of oppressive policies originating in slavery to monitor, regulate, and punish Black families, she explains. Her chapters reveal the disproportionately racial dimensions of government agents invading poor and low-income communities, casting children into a foster-care-industrial complex where they are routinely entangled in the carceral state. Punctuated with poignant cases of systemic horrors, the compelling narrative delivers data-rich analysis that reflects decades of research, observation, and advocacy for Black children and mothers. It exposes the ugly demographics and politics of America's destructive family-policing child welfare system that Roberts conjoins with oppressive policies of mass incarceration and welfare-restructuring that seek to entrench Black subordination. VERDICT Readers at every level, especially policy-makers and -implementers, might well embrace this work as a primer for moving past a harmful system and creating a reimagined ideology and infrastructure to humanely care for families and keep children safe. Roberts's latest is necessary reading.--Thomas J. Davis
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A professor of law and sociology renews her well-founded criticism of the child welfare system in the U.S. Picking up threads from--and updating the analysis of--her work in Killing the Black Body (1998) and Shattered Bonds (2001), Roberts writes that, "this time…I argue for completely replacing [the system], not with another reformed state system, but with a radically reimagined way of caring for families and keeping children safe." Rather than providing "protective" services, the author argues that the current system delivers "policing" services similar to law enforcement, and "family policing is most intense in communities that exist at the intersection of structural racism and poverty." Of course, this means that "Black families are disproportionately subjected to state intrusion." In many underserved communities, writes the author, "all it takes is a phone call from an anonymous tipster to a hotline operator about a vague suspicion to launch a life-altering government investigation." Despite the fact that most accusations are frivolous, investigations proceed as if the parents are guilty. As a result, parents and other caregivers must support their families while also meeting numerous government-imposed requirements, including parenting classes, psychological evaluations, counseling, and supervised visits. Roberts also discusses the lifelong consequences for families that are separated, including the link between foster care and future incarceration, and she recounts the history of the nation's "destructive approach to child welfare." The author, director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society, demonstrates how the current system serves as a continuation of the widespread earlier policies that perpetuated Black enslavement and Indigenous displacement. A compassionate guide, Roberts clearly explains the relevant research and includes heartbreaking testimonies from accused parents. Not content to merely criticize, she lays out the elements that must be addressed in any new system: income support, housing, nutrition, education, child care, and health care. A compelling argument that will hopefully prove useful to policymakers, activists, and concerned citizens. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
