In Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System, Alan J. Dettlaff presents a call to abolish the American child welfare system due to the harm and destruction it causes Black families. Dettlaff traces the origins of the modern child welfare system, which emerged following the abolition of slavery, to demonstrate that the harm and oppression that result from child welfare intervention are not the result of "unintended consequences" but rather are the clear intents of the system and the foreseeable results of the policies that have been put in place over decades. By tracing the history of family separations in the United States since the era of slavery, Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System demonstrates that the intended outcomes of those separations--the subjugation of Black Americans and the maintenance of white supremacy--are the same intended outcomes of the family separations done today. What distinguishes contemporary family separations from those that occurred during slavery is that today's separations occur under a facade of benevolence, a myth that has been perpetuated over decades that family separations are necessary to "save" the most vulnerable children. Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System presents evidence of the vast harms that result from family separations to make a case that the child welfare system is beyond reform. Rather, the only solution to ending these harms is complete abolition of this system and a fundamental reimagining of the way society cares for children, families, and communities.
The forcible separation of Black children from their parents was first used as a means of controlling Black families in the United States over 400 years ago as a practice of human chattel slavery. This practice of forcibly and involuntary separating Black children from their families was used by the state as a means of maintaining power and control by a system of White supremacy that is foundational to this country's origins. This foundation was firmly established hundreds of years earlier through the philosophy of settler colonialism upon which the United States began. This philosophy required both the removal and dispossession of the Indigenous population from their land, which included the separation of children from their families, and the importation of forced labor to work in and profit from the land. The philosophy of settler colonialism also firmly established the White settler, and thus Whiteness, as the normalized identity of those who would become citizens of the United States-with all others established as the "Other," disposable and exploitable, whether indigenous or enslaved. This legacy of violence and exploitation that began through settler colonialism and continued through human chattel slavery laid the foundation for the violence and exploitation that occurs today through the modern child welfare system"--
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