book reviews
Mother’s Grief Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families— and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World By Dorothy Roberts Basic Books
REVIEW BY MICHELE GOODWIN
IN 1851, SOJOURNER TRUTH delivered a stirring speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. It was brilliant in its execu- tion and, even now, chilling to the soul. History has
recorded the speech as primarily a plea for women’s equality and a critique on the boundaries of femininity and womanhood that prioritized and centered the con- cerns of white women and excluded Indigenous and Black women from view. One essential thing missing in most references to the speech is the centuries-old plea by Black mothers addressing how their children were literally being torn from their lives. Truth not only denounced slavery but also exposed its
horrific underbelly—a legally inscribed system that ripped apart Black families, trafficked their children and left mothers, fathers, their children and communities with intergenerational pain. In her famous speech Truth grieved, “I have borne 13 children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me. And ain’t I a woman?” Now, 171 years later, University of Pennsylvania law
professor and scholar Dorothy Roberts issues a searing critique not unlike Truth’s, exposing devastating realities in the contemporary child welfare system whose separa- tion of Black children from their families bears a striking resemblance to the legacies of American slavery—not only symbolically but substantively. Torn Apart describes the U.S. child welfare system as one of “benevolent terror,” which leads to the destruction of Black families. Chapter by chapter, Roberts explains in copious detail how a sys- tem that originally served only white families morphed into one of policing and punishment of Black families. She describes a system that’s “rotten at the root,” in
which caseworkers are essentially “professional kidnappers.” She argues that this is not a problem of individual case- workers; rather, the child welfare system in general weaponizes family surveillance and embraces strong- armed tactics designed to punish Black and Brown fami- lies, leading ultimately to what she describes as a carceral web of harm that criminalizes Black children. The arrest of Vanessa Peoples is a striking case in point. Peoples was a 25-year-old cancer patient, mother of two
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(ages 2 and 4) and nursing student living in Colorado. The child welfare system began its investigation of Peoples after a family picnic, during which her 2-year-old wandered away, following a family member. Almost immediately upon discovering this, Peoples found him in the arms of a stranger and demanded the return of her son. However, the stranger called police, refusing to release the boy to his mother, even as he reached for her. Police demanded Peoples’ identification, ignoring that
her son continued to reach and cry out for her, and despite the fact that several family members at the picnic attested to her identity. Rather than the matter ending with reunification, police issued Peoples a ticket for child neglect, ensnaring her in the child welfare system. One month later, police were called again—this time
by a caseworker who observed through a window at Peoples’ home that one of the children was undressed. Cleaning up downstairs, Peoples couldn’t hear the knock- ing at the door; suddenly she was confronted by three officers who came into the house, guns drawn, without a warrant or her permission. What ensued is nothing short of a nightmare: The officers refused to allow Peoples to be alone with her children, wrestled her to the ground, “hog-tied” her (cuffing her hands and tying them to her feet) and placed her in a squad car. Torn Apart is a compelling study of the child welfare
system and its close connection to policing and criminal punishments. Roberts shows how such a system fails all youth, but particularly degrades the life opportunities of children of color, especially Black kids. They comprise almost half of the children in the foster care system despite constituting less than one-fifth of the total chil- dren in the U.S. Worse, at 18 and with limited resources, they “age out” of the system after state-enforced estrangement from their families, and after experiencing deep traumas often inflicted by the system that purports to care for them. Roberts notes that children in foster care are more likely to experience arrests and incarceration, endure homelessness and not graduate from high school. With Torn Apart, Roberts reissues her call for
“America’s destructive child welfare system” to be abol- ished. In its place, she urges a radically “reimagined way of caring for families and keeping children safe.”
MICHELE GOODWIN is executive producer of Ms. Studios.
www.feminist.org
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