Public Defense

Although the Black Lives Matters movement encompasses a wide narrative that includes affirming Black families, Black women, and Black villages, in popular culture it has become synonymous with reform of police violence and the criminal justice system only.

We assert that exclusively linking BLM with criminal justice reform minimizes the impact this movement could have on similar systems of
oppression of Black people, such as the child welfare system.
We further contend that Family Defense work, politically, belongs next
to the fight against police brutality and criminal justice reform.

The perceived threat of the Black body to the sanctity of mainstream America is just as palpable in the child welfare system as it is in the criminal justice system. In the criminal justice system, the fear of Blackness justifies police officers’ use of state-sanctioned tools, such as “Stop and Frisk,” mass incarceration, and deadly force to remove Black men from mainstream America. In the child welfare context, the fear of Blackness justifies child protective workers’ use of so-called “intervention” tools to displace Black children from their homes in order to fill – at least in New York City –one of the most segregated institutions in our country: the foster care system. In order to make this case, after this introduction, Section II argues  argues that
child welfare interventions, which are largely argued to be “social work”
interventions, are better understood to be racially-driven practices that
frequently inflict irreversible violence and damage on Black children and Black families. Section III contends that Black parents are being systematically attacked and legally “killed” through implementation of the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act (“ASFA”), which currently ensures that parents of children in foster care, who are disproportionately Black, are swiftly deemed legally dead to their children through fast-tracked termination of parental rights proceedings. Finally, Section IV proposes targeted political interventions that can be incorporated into the BLM tenets in order to expose and reform the oppressive racism of our current child welfare system.