An insightful Columbia Journalism Review essay on covering race and politics goes double for covering race and child welfare
The current print issue of Columbia Journalism Review is about
exactly what any journalist would expect it to be about: Donald Trump and the
press.
But one essay in that issue applies as well, if not better,
to covering child welfare. It’s called “Covering a
country where race is everywhere.”
“Race and racism are everywhere, and in everything,” writes
Collier Meyerson, who covers race and politics for The Nation. “We are the product of a violent history that
privileges one race over all others. And in order to tell that truth, we must
look for it everywhere.”
Notice that she did not
say “everywhere except the American child welfare system, which, of course, is
run by such wonderful people that it is magically immune.”
Sadly, a lot of Americans who consider themselves liberals
and would agree with Meyerson when it comes to politics, the police, and just
about everything else, carve out a great big, unwarranted exception when it
comes to child welfare.
Child welfare’s caucus of denial
In that field, there is anentire coterie of self-proclaimed liberals, a kind of caucus of denial, who
insist that the disproportionate rate at which children of color, especially
Black and Native- American children, are investigated for child abuse and torn
from everyone they know and love has
absolutely nothing to do with racism. (Just for the record, here’s a
summary of some of the studies showing that it
does.)
Indeed, child welfare is a field so blind to the problem of
racial bias that a prominent leader in the field can declare that the states
doing the best job of curbing child abuse are the ones that have “smaller,
whiter populations” and face no censure for it from the Left.
Giving constant aid and comfort to those in denial about the
role of racial bias in child welfare is the Fox News of child welfare, the
so-called Chronicle of Social Change.
It’s not just that the Chronicle
publishes – and promotes – the dissemination of pernicious racial stereotypes, as
is documented in detail here. It’s not just that they’ve published column
after column promoting the denial idea.
The problem goes deeper.
Chronicle
publisher Daniel Heimpel works hand-in-glove with the leader of the denial
movement, Elizabeth Bartholet. He co-authored op-ed columns with her, provided
her with research assistance for a paper and then promoted her “findings” in
the Chronicle (he did disclose his
role). Heimpel’s work with Bartholet is discussed
in detail here.
Heimpel joined Bartholet and others in the “denial caucus”
in a so-called symposium on “The Liberal Dilemma in Child Welfare Reform” – to
which only “liberals” who shared the Heimpel/Bartholet perspective were invited.
(The “dilemma,” according to these “liberals” is that other liberals, with
their pesky notions of due process, civil rights and civil liberties, are
insufficiently willing to tear apart families.) Then Heimpel wrote up a summary
in a paper called “Child Welfare’s Parental Preference.”
At a time when The New
York Times is breaking new ground with stories about foster
care as “the new Jane Crow” and a piece about what some lawyers for the
city’s child welfare agency really
think, the Chronicle ignores all
that (except for publishing an attack on the Times story) and showcases the deniers – exactly as one would
expect from the Fox News of child welfare.
If he really considers himself a journalist, Heimpel should
be paying close attention to CJR essays such as the one from Meyerson, who
writes:
Not only do our racial identities as reporters matter, but so does our understanding of how race functions in the United States. It is everywhere, and in everything. It is in what we eat, it is with whom we eat, and it is in what we talk about while we’re eating. It’s where we live and whom we live with. It is in the absence of living around those who are of a different race, and it is living in close proximity to those who are of a different race. It’s in the conversations we have, or don’t have, with our neighbors, our parents, our friends. Race is as much a part of our lives as breathing, and its consideration must be integral to our reporting.
As long as the Chronicle
of Social Change doesn’t get that, it will be part of the problem, not part
of the solution.
