Black Families Matter: Ending Family Regulation Systems (with Dorothy Roberts and Lisa Sangoi)

Dorothy Roberts, acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare joins the WBI show with co-founder of Movement for Family Power, Lisa Sangoi, to discuss the history of the American child welfare system. Better understood as a family regulation system, the state began systematically targeting Black families for punishment and surveillance as a matter of *child welfare* policy in the 1960s coinciding with mainly Black mothers demanding inclusion into public assistance programs.

Why do so few people know about the multibillion dollar surveillance apparatus able to knock on the door and remove your child on the basis of racist stereotypes with not even as much as miranda rights being read? How can we begin to dismantle a system that articulates its violence in the language of care and benevolence?

Hosts: J. Khadijah Abdurahman and Stanley Muñoz

Links for the Episode:
Strengthened Bonds:  Abolishing the Child Welfare System and Re-envisioning Child Well-Being March 26, 2021 symposium – Columbia Law School
Abolishing Policing Also Means Abolishing Family Regulation
Black Families Matter: How the Child Welfare System Punishes Poor Families of Color
Children as Chattel: Invoking the Thirteenth Amendment to Reform Child Welfare Note 1 Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal 2003
Black Families Matter: How the Child Welfare System Punishes Poor Families of Color

Recommendations:
Lisa Morning Raggas (Spotify Playlist)
Dorothy Prison by Any Other Name by Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law
Khadijah Catching a Case Inequality and Fear in New York City's Child Welfare System by Tina Lee
Stanley Fela Kuti - Water no get enemy