We suggest that the National office for the Court-Appointed Special Advocates program use this item from The Daily Show as a training video
In 2018, responding to former Today Show anchor Megyn Kelly’s appalling attempt to justify blackface, (for which she has apologized) her colleague Craig Melvin noted that, as a CNN story put it, “this controversy is an opportunity to inform people — but [Melvin] said most people already knew how offensive blackface is.”
Most people, but apparently not one chapter of that most sacred cow in child welfare Court-Appointed Special Advocates. Oh, they’ve learned in the years since they included a blackface act in a fundraiser, especially since they apparently eventually apologized – but that is just one example of the racial bias that plagues CASA. And that, of course, raises fundamental questions about the role of CASA in deciding the fate of children who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately children of color. Even more questions are raised by the latest study of CASA's effectiveness. And there's much more about CASA in NCCPR's presentation at the 2021 Kempe Center conference. and in this 2024 story from The Imprint.
So every Halloween, I plan to reprint this post from 2017:
This Halloween, The Daily Show offers a useful history lesson. The topic: why it’s a really bad idea for white people to dress up in blackface:
But the lesson isn’t just useful for Halloween. It’s also something that anyone involved with that most sacred cow of child welfare – Court-Appointed Special Advocates -- needs to know.
CASA is a program in which minimally trained volunteers, overwhelmingly white and middle-class, are assigned to families who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite. Then they tell judges if the children should be taken from those families, sometimes forever. That, of course, raises problems of inherent bias. But some CASA chapters have made their biases depressingly obvious.
Consider what happened nine years ago in Arkansas City, Kansas. To raise funds for the local CASA chapter, they held a talent competition. The winning act featured the mayor of Arkansas City – dressed in blackface. The head of the local CASA chapter couldn’t understand why that was a problem. "It wasn't black black," she said. "It was all really just tan." That’s only the beginning. All the awful details are here.
It would be one thing if this were just an isolated example of racial bias. But it’s not.
● There was the CASA chapter in Marin County, California, which fell apart when the state CASA association merely asked that they strive for more diversity among the volunteers.
● There was the appalling racist rant by someone who says he volunteered in a scandal-plagued Washington State CASA program for 20 years.
● There’s the fact that the most comprehensive study ever done of CASA, a study commissioned by the National CASA Association itself, found that CASA volunteers spend significantly less time on a case if the child to whom they are assigned is Black.
● And then there’s the question of whether the very structure of CASA makes it, in the words of a law review article, “an exercise of white supremacy.”
Showing the Daily Show video won’t solve all these problems; not even close. But it might help prevent the worst excesses of racial bias in CASA programs.
Originally published, Oct. 30, 2017
Originally published, Oct. 30, 2017
