Last week I discussed the scathing report by Massachusetts’ Child Advocate revealing the many opportunities that the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF), Juvenile Court, and schools missed to prevent death of David Almond and the serious physical and emotional injuries to his brothers.” All of these agencies were aware of multiple red flags in David’s case but somehow, unbelievably, managed to disregard them all. The report describes seven months of abuse, starvation and denial of their right to education of two autistic boys, as the family systematically lied to school and DCF staff and kept the boys out of their sight. The family’s efforts to use the COVID-19 pandemic to avoid any scrutiny of the boys’ well-being apparently transparently obvious to readers of the Advocate’s report but apparently raised no red flags for those paid to care for and educate these vulnerable children.
On May 4, Massachusetts Child Advocate Maria Mossaides testified about her 107-page report. If her testimony was anything like reading the report itself, it should have been devastating and left little room for questions other than “How could this happen?” and “How can we make sure it never happens again?” But Committee Chair Sen. Adam Gomez did not seem touched by the suffering of the boys and failure of any agency to protect them. As described in Shira Schoenberg’s May 6, 2021 article, Gomez’s first question had to do with race. What he wanted to know was “Did Mossaides’s analysis of the Almond case….incorporate a racial equity lens and consider whether there was a ‘racial difference in the treatment of the Almond family with similarly situated families of color?’”
How could this be the first question asked by the legislator tasked with protecting the most vulnerable Massachusetts children? As I stated in an op-ed published by Commonwealth Magazine, Gomez appears to be in thrall to a dominant narrative that has taken over the child welfare world with the help of some very wealthy foundations. in this view, CPS workers take children away from their capable and loving parents, especially parents of color, and often refuse to give them back. In this narrative CPS is likened to the police, interfering in families of color based on racial bias. Some of these advocating this view argue that both the police and CPS should be abolished.
It is true that Black and indigenous children are more likely to be placed in foster care than White children. National data indicate that Black children represent 23 percent of the children in foster care, compared to only 14 percent of children in the general population. Native American children are approximately two percent of the children in foster care compared to one percent of the child population. Latino children are actually underrepresented in foster care at the national level, though they are overrepresented in some states, including Massachusetts, as Commonwealth Magazine recently reported.
There is considerable evidence that the disparities in foster care placement between Black, Indigenous and White families are due to differences in the underlying rate of child abuse and neglect. However, that is actually beside the point that Senator Gomez was making. He was asking if David Almond would have been reunified with his family had he been Black. Studies do indicate that families of color wait longer to reunify with their children. But new research indicates that after adjusting for other relevant factors (like the cause of removal and the length of stay in foster care), there are no differences in the likelihood of reunification with their families for Black or multiracial children and White children. Hispanic children are more likely to reunify with their families, and indigenous children do have lower odds of reunification than White children. Moreover, a state’s degree of disproportionality in representation of Black and Hispanic children in foster care did not affect its reunification rates for these children. So there is no evidence that David would not have been reunified with his father had he been Black or Hispanic.
But let us set aside the research and follow Gomez’ thinking to its logical condition. Let us say he is right, and David would not have been returned to his parents had he been Black, Indigenous or of color (or “BIPOC,” as he put it). In that case, David would have been saved. The only logical conclusion is that Massachusetts ought to take steps to ensure that White children receive the same level of protection from deadly parental abuse as is currently afforded “BIPOC” children. Yet somehow this does not appear to be the point Senator Gomez was attempting to make.
Perhaps one key to Gomez’ apparent paradoxical thinking is that he and other child welfare “racialists” like to focus on the rights of parents, not children. According to this thinking, David’s parents benefited from White privilege by being given the benefit of the doubt over and over again. Perhaps if David’s parents had been Black, they would have lost custody of David earlier- before he had been removed from them and returned to them four times. But thanks to their White privilege, David’s parents got to keep (and kill) their child while Black parents would not have been afforded the same privilege.
Of course taking a child-oriented perspective flips the script, so to speak. Where David was allowed to die, a Black child in his his shoes might have been saved by a system that Gomez believes is harder on parents of color. But Gomez is not worrying about Black children dying at the hands of their parents. He and his allies are worried about the unfair treatment of Black parents who might not be extended the privilege of keeping their children long after compassion and common sense dictated a removal to a safe place.
I’m not sure why Gomez and his friends have chosen to focus on the treatment of parents rather than children. Perhaps the answer is that if they talked about children instead, they would have to make clear that they want lower standards for how children of color can be treated compared to White children. And that would hardly be a compelling argument for for anyone who cares about children of any race.
This is an expanded version of an op-ed published in Commonwealth Magazine on May 13, 2021.
Child Welfare Monitor 