There’s a pervasive stereotype – especially in Texas - about
those of us who think there should be less coercive intervention into families.
It goes like this:
If you want to take away fewer children you must be one of
those right-wing extremists who doesn’t care if parents beat up their
kids! This stereotype has been
reinforced for at least 20 years by the most prominent liberal in Texas child
welfare -- a “Godsource” for Texas journalists -- who has crusaded endlessly to
tear apart more families. (I see no
reason to name him here, but you’ll find plenty about him in the report we released about Texas child
welfare in 2005.)
So mainstream media coverage consists almost entirely of the
following “master narrative”: Texas spends too little on child welfare, the
only mistake Texas child welfare makes is to leave children in dangerous homes,
Texas should take away more children and anyone who thinks otherwise must be
one of those right-wing spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child “parents rights” fanatics.
One of those themes actually is correct: Texas should spend
more. The rest is Texas-sized
misrepresentation. It misrepresents not
only those of us on the Left, but also many smart, principled conservatives
with whom I disagree on almost everything but who care passionately about
protecting children and see that the current approach isn’t doing the job.
Greetings from the Family Values Left
Speaking only for myself, I’m a lifelong tax-and-spend
liberal who proudly cast his first vote in a Presidential election for George
McGovern and his last vote in a Presidential primary for Bernie Sanders. And one look at the Board of NCCPR (go ahead,
have a look) makes clear
we’re not exactly a right-wing bunch.
But that stereotype also may explain some interesting findings
about racial disproportionality in Texas child welfare, discussed in an
excellent story that, itself, breaks the mold for Texas media.
The story, by Julie Chang of the Austin American-Statesman, reports that statewide, African American
children are, proportionately, twice as likely to be torn from their families
as white children. But in the liberal
bastion of metropolitan Austin, Travis County, they are eight times more likely
to be taken away.
Statewide, Latino children were less likely to be removed
than white children, but in Travis County they were three times more likely to
be removed.
“I was really
appalled when I saw [the data],”Aurora Martinez Jones, an associate Travis
County district judge who oversees child welfare cases told the Statesman. She added:
“Ultimately, racism still exists, and it’s
alive and well in Austin. We like to look at ourselves as a very liberal and
progressive community, and we can be in a lot of respects, but ... people still
haven’t acknowledged the implicit bias and explicit bias they may experience
when interacting with other people in our community.”
Indeed, that progressive tradition actually might contribute
to the problem.
Because many on the Left have
a blind spot when it comes to child welfare, they are not as vigilant And because they see an
intervention by Child Protective Services as benevolent, they are less
sensitive to both racial and class bias, and more likely to needlessly call a
child abuse hotline and trigger a child abuse investigation. Of course, all
that winds up hurting
the very children my fellow liberals want
to help.about protecting civil liberties as they are when confronted by the abuses of law enforcement.
But most notable is Chang’s refusal to simply accept the
usual excuses from child welfare’s “caucus of denial” – those who insist that
people in child welfare are so much better than the rest of us that they are
magically immune from the racial bias that permeates every other aspect of
American life. As Chang notes:
Financial pressure in part caused by the rising cost of living, limited community resources such as affordable housing, and institutional racism drive the differences in Travis County, which have widened over the last decade, according to child welfare advocates.
In other words, it’s both the confusion
of poverty with neglect and racial bias. The story also notes that
Two Texas studies conducted in 2008 and 2011 found that even though African-American children were considered at lower risks of maltreatment than white children, CPS workers were more likely to remove an African-American child from the home.
Other studies have shown that when controlled for income, African-American children are still more likely to be involved with CPS than their white peers.
This of course jibes with a
wealth of other research that the denial caucus chooses to ignore.
But remember how I said one part of the media’s “master
narrative” – the part about Texas spending too little on child welfare – is correct?
That, too, is borne out by the Statesman story:
Advocates fear that the disparities will worsen with the loss of the state’s Office of Minority Health Statistics and Engagement, which had shared data with the child welfare agency but was shuttered Sept. 1 after the Republican-led Legislature cut funding.
But this also illustrates another point: Texas doesn’t just
need to spend more, it needs to spend smarter, on everything from tracking
racial bias in child welfare to actually doing something about it.
All of which leads Aurora
Martinez Jones to conclude:
We have to admit that this child welfare system was not created for African-American children. We did not have African-American children in mind when we started looking at a state agency that would intervene in a parent’s right to be a parent. We were looking mostly at Anglo children and how we could support their families. This system needs reform.
The rest of the media in Texas should pay attention.
