Set to See Us Fail: Debating Inequalities in the Child Welfare System of New York 9781800737914

Table of contents :
Contents
Acronyms
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Guilty of Being Poor: A Brief Itinerary in the Recent History of American Welfare
Chapter 2 What Does “Racial Disproportionality” Mean and How Is It Tackled? Genesis, Interpretations, and Practices
Chapter 3 Revolving Door Th e Work of Child Welfare in Making Parents Chronically Unfit
Chapter 4 Contesting Child Welfare Perceptions, Negotiations, and Counternarratives
Chapter 5 The Moral Economies of Community Participation: New Forms of Governance and Representative Ambiguities
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Set to See Us Fail

Anthropology at Work Series Editors: Jakob Krause-Jensen, Aarhus University Emil André Røyrvik, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) Editorial Committee: Ann Jordan, University of North Texas Michael Blim, City University of New York, Graduate Center Marina Welker, Cornell University Brian Moeran, University of Hong Kong We dedicate much of our lives to work, and work defines both people and their relationships to a great extent. The social and cultural processes of work require investigation, not least in our time of globalization and crises in capitalism. The series offers ethnographybased, anthropological analyses of work in its diverse contexts and manifestations. Volume 3 Set to See Us Fail: Debating Inequalities in the Child Welfare System of New York Viola Castellano Volume 2 The Moral Work of Anthropology: Ethnographic Studies of Anthropologists at Work Edited by Hanne Overgaard Mogensen and Birgitte Gorm Hansen Volume 1 Management and Morality: An Ethnographic Exploration of Management Consultancy Seminars Erik Henningsen

Set to See Us Fail Debating Inequalities in the Child Welfare System of New York

KKK VIOLA CASTELLANO

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Viola Castellano

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2022045368 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-803-4 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-791-4 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800738034

Contents

KKK List of Acronyms Acknowledgments Introduction

vi viii 1

Chapter 1. Guilty of Being Poor: A Brief Itinerary in the Recent History of American Welfare

29

Chapter 2. What Does “Racial Disproportionality” Mean and How Is Tackled? Genesis, Interpretations, and Practices

52

Chapter 3. Revolving Door: The Work of Child Welfare in Making Parents Chronically Unfit

72

Chapter 4. Contesting Child Welfare: Perceptions, Negotiations, and Counternarratives

99

Chapter 5. The Moral Economies of Community Participation: New Forms of Governance and Representative Ambiguities

122

Conclusion

142

References

154

Index

169

Acronyms

KKK ACS

Administration of Children Services

ADC

Aid to Dependent Children

ADHD

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

AFDC

Aid to Families with Dependent Children

ASPE

Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation

ASFA

Adoption and Safe Families Act

BLMM/M4BL

Black Lives Matter Movement/Movement for Black Lives

BPNN

Birth Parent National Network

CASA

Court Appointed Special Advocates

CAPTA

Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act

CBOs

Community Based Organizations

CCC

Courts Catalyzing Change

CCWIS

Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System

CEO

Chief Executive Officer

CPI

Community Partnership Initiative

CPS

Child Protective Services

CSC

Child Safety Conference

CWOP

Child Welfare Organizing Project

DMR

Disproportionate Minority Representation

FAP

Family Assistance Program

Acronyms

vii

NAACP

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

NWRO

National Welfare Rights Organization

OBRA

Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act

PRWORA

Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act

SPCC

Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Humane Association

TANF

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families

Acknowledgments

KKK

F

irst, I would like to thank the Anthropology at Work series editors and the Berghahn editorial team, for their commitment to this publication, in particular Emil André Røyrvik, Jakob Krause-Jensen, Antony Mason, Tom Bonnington, and Keara Hagerty. I am much obliged to Junior Publishing and Stefano Nutini for carefully following the first version of the book in Italian, and later kindly agreeing to give the volume a second life in English. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their crucial suggestions and comments. I am grateful to Daniele Castellano for his beautiful drawing on the book’s cover. To Bruno Riccio, Federica Tarabusi, Giovanna Guerzoni, Dorothy Zinn, Alessandra Gribaldo, Francesca Decimo, Chiara Pilotto, and Giovanna Cavatorta, whose helpful feedback and appreciation of my work provided me with opportunities to share this research through publications, seminars, and lectures. I give heartfelt thanks to Bruno Riccio for his mentorship during and after my Ph.D. This book would not have been possible without the generous support of the University of Bergamo, the University of Bologna, and the São Paulo Research Foundation, who have financially and institutionally supported my work over these years. As the pages of the book document, the discussions I had with and the input I received from professors and colleagues of the City University of New York during my short but intense period as Visiting Scholar in 2013 proved to be decisive for the theoretical and interpretative tools I developed to read the ethnographic materials. In particular, the exchanges with Dána-Ain Davis, Jeff Maskovsky, Michael Blim, and Leith Mullings were of fundamental importance. A special thanks goes to Michael Blim and Dána-Ain Davis for their encouragement and support. My family, friends, and colleagues were the people who, during these years, motivated me to continue my research, even when precar-

Acknowledgments

ix

ity delayed, interrupted, and complicated my work as an academic. I am most grateful for their intellectual, affective, and emotional backing. I want to thank Olivia Casagrande for always being “there” as an academic and friend, and Nicole Goodwin, Tommaso Manfredini, Baya Yantren, Alice Wadström, and Francesco Fanoli for the insights and reflections they gave me over the years through our conversations on my research. To Davide Zucco, for always being on my side all these years, and for making my path cross with New York in the first place. Finally, this book could only exist thanks to all those research interlocutors who decided to take me and my research seriously, engage with my questions, and dedicate time to them. Although I chose to keep their names anonymous, due to the sensitivity of the book’s topics and to protect their privacy, they will probably recognize themselves in the book. My biggest thanks are owed to them, both those I am still in contact with and those I lost track of. I hope these pages won’t disappoint you and will be capable of giving you back even a fraction of the insights and knowledge I got from you. I want to remark that this book’s content, views, and interpretations are solely mine. Any misunderstandings, unclarity, and imprecisions this book might contain are my exclusive responsibility.

Introduction

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n 8 April 2022, I received an email from a member of the Child Welfare Parent Organizers group of New York, addressed to the whole mailing list. It reported the news that the New York State Bar Association found, with their last report, the child welfare system to be “replete with racism,” identifying the necessity to push for reform “to prevent the breakup of Black families” (Andrus 2022). Even if ten years had passed since I last participated in one of their meetings, it seemed like the main topic of our discussions was still prevalent. This book investigates racial and social inequalities in the New York child welfare system, retracing through the ethnography I conducted from 2011 to 2013 how they are reproduced, measured, represented, regulated, and contested between families and professionals in the child welfare system in New York City.1 In so doing, it analyzes the concurrent factors that make the child welfare system an important context for the reproduction and strengthening of inequalities, how these are embedded and interlocked within professional practices and institutional action, and which forms of dissent they generate about and within the system. The child welfare system—the institutional apparatus responsible for the protection of minors and for administering rehabilitation to parents before returning children to their full custody—has rarely been explored in anthropology, but it is a crucial arena for examining how race, gender, and class intersect, and shows how families are treated by child welfare professionals when they don’t comply with “correct citizenship.”2 The intention for conducting this research dates back to 2010, when I moved to New York for six months with the goal of doing an internship at an organization that aimed to fight against racial discrimination. The ethnography I had previously conducted in Italy on housing policies for Roma groups had brought me closer to the issue of racism, and I intended to explore how this was defined and confronted in a completely different national context like the United States. Move-

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ments for racial and social justice in the United States had and have visibility all over the world, and a crucial role in defining global antiracist struggles and agendas. Scrolling through a list of activist and nonprofit associations on a website dedicated to social initiatives, my attention was immediately captured by one that focused on “structural racism.” I contacted them and they invited me to attend one of their meetings. This was my first step on the path that would lead to, eventually, writing this book. When I first attended their meeting, an almost completely new way of codifying and talking about race, racialization, and racism opened before me. My initial difficulty in thinking through these new categorizations seemed confusing enough to consider it an anthropologically advantageous starting point for further exploration. The organization was mainly made up of people working in the public sector, and one of the areas in which they were most active was through the child welfare system because of its over-representation of Black children in the system. As the rich North American scholarly output in the subfield of critical urban anthropology demonstrates, issues related to the reconfiguration of the panorama of inequality in US cities has long been present in anthropological reflections (Brash 2011; Mollenkopf and Castells 1991; Mullings 1987; Morgen and Maskovsky 2003; Susser 1996). It has therefore become increasingly important to examine not only the dynamics of socioeconomic stratification in urban centers but also how citizenship has become a more fragmented concept, with sets of rights and practices in which population groups are treated differently by the legal and administrative framework (Ong et al. 1996) and the multiplication of citizenship practices in the global city (Sassen 2005). The shift from an “isomorphic” idea of citizenship (Çağlar 2016) to one accounting for its unstable and contested terrain could indeed be more fruitful in showing how inequalities are reproduced in cities and how the gaps between apparatuses of the state and civil society are generated. In Western countries, particularly the United States, the 2008 financial crisis exacerbated a series of social tensions, which then translated into movements criticizing global financial and economic infrastructures (such as Occupy Wall Street) or denouncing oppressive and discriminatory practices adopted by law enforcement against racialized population groups (like BLMM/M4BL).3 Within this renewed geography of contestation, cities are doubly relevant. On the one hand, cities exacerbate inequalities, and on the other hand, they become the incubators for protest movements that then expand and are articulated nationwide, or even globally. This book aligns itself to the strand of research interrogating this productive tension, exploring the forms of

Introduction

3

inequality and dissent that are generated within the child welfare system in New York City. Although the United States is a country where some of the most important theoretical and methodological anthropological approaches were and are developed (Ortner 1984), research and contributions to North American anthropology are usually within national borders and are an almost exclusive prerogative of US-based academics. In the last twenty years, several US researchers have focused on the new ethnic, racial, and cultural reconfigurations in Europe derived from migration processes related to globalization, (post)colonialism, and the North–South divide (Cabot 2014; Cole 1997; Silverstein 2004; Ticktin 2011). However, the analysis of similar processes in the United States have usually remained within US political and urban anthropology, critical race studies, and ethnic and racial studies, while very few non-American anthropologists have engaged in long-term ethnographies in and on the United States (Dominguez and Habib 2016). Approaching the themes of North Americanist anthropology from the slightly decentralized position as an Italian scholar, I decided to use my relative “estrangement” to the US social and political context to interrogate the historical and cultural processes manifesting through the interactions I observed between citizens and institutions in child welfare. These processes refer to the national administration and practices of the welfare state (chapter 1); the dynamics of racial formation in the United States and the debate about race and racism in public and institutional spheres (chapter 2); the way in which neoliberal policies reshaped the relationship between the impoverished and racialized population, the city, and its administrative apparatuses in the case of families served by social services (chapter 3 and 4); and the role of advocacy and community participation in the interactions between citizens and institutions (chapter 5). Throughout the book, the voices of parents, professionals, advocates, and activists intertwine in describing the system and the various ways in which it encounters the broader dynamics I just described. The child welfare system is represented in different services and administrative sectors. These include the following: •

•

The Administration of Children Services (ACS) is the main public agency that coordinates services and administers procedures related to child protection and conducts investigations into alleged abuse or neglect toward a minor. Numerous private and nongovernmental agencies are coordinated and financed by ACS and provide the various services its

Set to See Us Fail

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•

•

users need, from preventive services for families to those aimed at specific categories of users (children and parents with special needs, drug addiction, etc.), as well as the numerous parenting classes included in the child welfare rehabilitation program. Some of these organizations manage foster care, selecting temporary families and mediating between them, the child, and the biological parents. The Family Court is the court where cases of neglect and abuse are discussed, along with the services that could be needed, before evaluating the rehabilitation efforts of parents and then choosing whether to terminate parental rights. Advocacy- and community-based associations were created to defend and support the rights of families and assist them in navigating the child welfare system. They are distributed across the five boroughs of the city and can participate in the institutional path of child welfare in various fashions. These include the three main providers of free legal representation for parents who cannot afford a private lawyer.

These all belong to the institutional complex regulating citizenship that sociologists and anthropologists have long described (Mullings and Wali 2012; Ong 2006; Piven and Cloward 1971; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011; Susser 1996) and offer an empirical context to analyze how inequalities in the United States have been reproduced and maintained. These studies have been invaluable in identifying the historical and economic processes participating in “the realities of impoverishment” (Morgen and Maskovsky 2003: 325) and the dehumanizing and ideological discourses on the poor and on welfare recipients in the public sphere. However, the child welfare system seems to locate itself in a different realm from that of impoverished population groups and consequentially has not been the focus of ethnographies about inequalities and poverty in US metropolises, with the exception of the book by Tina Lee, Catching a Case, which was published in 2016 and was also grounded in fieldwork conducted in New York. Social services for minors and their families are addressed not only to low-income populations, as in the case of financial assistance, but to all of society. Yet this book documents how the child welfare system has always interacted with economic welfare and has always almost exclusively involved the economically disadvantaged section of society. The child welfare system began as an antipoverty measure for minors, founded by charitable associations and private citizens. It later

Introduction

5

transitioned into a federal apparatus and is now an extensive network of services for families and children, structured slightly differently from state to state. Simultaneously with its philanthropic genesis, the abuse and neglect of minors began to be recognized and described with specific medical and legal categories. Their full formulation appeared in the mid-1960s, becoming the reference paradigms of the child welfare system (Hacking 1991; Nelson and Knudsen 1986). Despite the formalization and professionalization of the child welfare system now, what emerged as the most revealing aspect of my ethnographic analysis is its political dimension, as its practices are contested both inside and outside child welfare institutions. As I met the individuals and organizations involved, it became clear how critical families and communities are of the system. The widespread opinion is that the intervention of social services into a family crisis intensifies problems rather than solves them. My interlocutors identified this problem in the authoritarian, punitive, overly rigid, and bureaucratic functioning of child welfare. Since the actions of the child welfare system are concentrated in specific areas of the city, where the population is, for the most part, non-White and low-income, the type of tension that occurs between social workers and parents is often associated with that marking the relationship between racialized communities and apparatuses of surveillance (e.g., the police, the criminal justice system, and the juvenile justice system). Therefore, an institution designed to preserve the welfare of the most vulnerable members of society—children—is perceived as hostile to families, and especially to parents. It is seen as either exploitative and oppressive or simply as dysfunctional, bureaucratic, and deaf to the real needs of families. This widespread perception, which has earned Child Protective Services (CPS) a reputation for being “baby snatchers,” often leads to a lack of commitment to the parental rehabilitation path. While this happens, their children are temporarily placed with relatives (kinship care) or strangers (foster care) until the Family Court declares that rehabilitation has been completed and the problems originally identified by the CPS solved. In my research, I observed how the many parenting rehabilitation classes are often seen as ineffective and are not incorporated because parents are forced to attend them in order to regain custody of their children and/or close a case with CPS. Furthermore, in a child welfare system that is divided into preventive services, foster care, and rehabilitative services, and fragmented into public and private agencies, parents often have to “juggle” several commitments in order to reunite with their children. Parents feel

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trapped and blamed in the child welfare system and are disempowered by the complexity and length of the bureaucratic/rehabilitative procedures to which they must conform. For these reasons, several self-help associations, including those I describe in this book, began to appear, aiming to support parents with information and emotional understanding, creating spaces to share an experience that is associated with shame and failure. Child welfare agencies, on the other hand, are also constantly exposed to negative public opinion when a child’s death caused by a family member breaks in the media. When a child’s death occurs, government agencies are usually held coresponsible, and their practices and policies are questioned with accusations of being ineffective and shallow. The risk that similar tragedies could occur constantly undermine the legitimacy of child welfare institutions, which are charged with the protection of a highly moralized and abstract subject: the neglected or abused child. This dreaded possibility is one of the reasons social workers move with caution, preferring a preventive approach. One of the techniques most implemented in the last decade (2010s) is a formalized questionnaire for risk assessment aimed at reducing the chances of a case worker’s misjudgment by reconstructing the family history to identify risk factors.4 In doing so, however, the risk assessment reinterprets the whole family situation as potentially dangerous, even amplifying what the real risks could be, which can have a damaging effect on family cohesion (Scherz 2011). Child welfare is one of the institutions low-income and racialized urban communities experience the most, and it—together with the penal system—heavily shapes their interaction with governance, which is judged as invasive, biased, and unfair. Child welfare can therefore be read as a good example of the technology of subjectification (Ong 2003), given its mission to regulate the most intimate aspects of social life. The ideal of nuclear family unity “does not even exist anymore,” as one of my interlocutors told me, but imposes its normativity only on a specific category of the population, which has always been portrayed in the public and institutional sphere as problematic. The analysis of child welfare, therefore, helps understand how institutions construct and administer “social deviance” through moral ideals rooted in certain cultural, economic, and racial orders. As Black feminist scholars have convincingly argued, Black motherhood has long been denied and dispossessed in the course of US history, as Black women did not fit into patriarchal tropes of femaleness because of the de-humanizing process enacted by the Atlantic slave trade (Spillers 1987; hooks 1981).

Introduction

7

Nevertheless, this ethnography tries to avoid an exclusive focus on social suffering and oppression, documenting the efforts to discuss and deactivate them with a focus on the network through which I navigated fieldwork, made up of groups and organizations that have an explicitly critical stance on ACS operations. With this opportunity, I explored the objectives and strategies of these organizations, as well as the degree of legitimacy they were able to build both in the institutional archipelago and among the families they aim to support. The analysis of discourses and practices they adopt to defend and support families and parents, and to differentiate themselves from other services, led me to address the images of the system and of families that they construct and circulate. These images are based on the central issues of class and racial biases in child welfare and the structural inequalities affecting the system’s recipients. As a result, the organizations’ strategies to transform the system are based on the decentralized, community-based management of child welfare services. In their vision, it is necessary to foster a greater awareness of the social and economic obstacles faced by families with an ACS case and to construct a safety net through local solidarity to collectively act against any form of oppression exercised by institutional apparatuses. The analysis of how these groups interpret, narrate, and reimagine social services sheds light on the dialectic between the state, social policies, and civil society. Ethnography thus becomes a tool for investigating how multiple discourses, practices, and sociopolitical entities participate in crafting the role of institutions centered on citizenship. The peculiarity of this case study, therefore, does not lie in its analysis of the child welfare system, per se, but in how the inequalities expressed and reproduced in this context are grafted onto preexisting ones, and how they are understood within the professional field and the families for whom they work. If symbolic power is “the power to act on the world by acting on the representation of the world” (Bourdieu 1992: 25), then the child welfare system possesses great symbolic and material power in reinforcing a stigmatizing representation of marginalized communities as being made up of abusive and neglectful families. While these representations point to morally and ethically deviant behaviors, they strengthen the inequalities from which such communities suffer. At the same time, as we will see, its users try to weaken the system and develop counternarratives to its real intentions. Therefore, while symbolic and material violence exercised by governmental functions are widely shown and discussed in my ethnography, the volume will also show the inherent contestation that goes with it, circulated and negotiated among those subjected to institutional prescriptive

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power, as well as those who translate the system’s goal in their work practices—an aspect I emphasize as a potentially transformative force (Clarke 2009; Herzfeld 1992). In my analysis, the data I treat as emic is related to the overrepresentation of Black families in the child welfare system compared to White families and to the debate this aspect has generated in the area of social policies.5 New York represents one of the most striking cases of disproportionality. In 2011, 56 percent of children in state custody were African American (African American children make up 28.3 percent of the total child population), 28.4 percent were Latinx (32.5 percent of the total child population), and only 4.1 percent were White (26.9 percent of the total child population). These statistics partially reflect the poverty indexes of the city but do not represent a faithful reflection of them. The Latinx population, which is proportionally reflected in the child welfare pool of recipients, is classified as the poorest and this fact makes the question of racial disproportionality more complex than the directly proportional relationship between poverty and race, which is often used as an approximation of reality in public debate. What factors are involved in determining this disproportion? My ethnography is not equipped to provide a thorough discussion for a question with such vast implications and which would necessitate an in-depth investigation of how the afterlife of slavery, antiBlackness, and racial capitalism interacted with social services throughout the history of the child welfare system. The discussion is also not elaborated through quantitative analysis but limits itself to the use of statistical data to contextualize the narratives of inequality that I present. This volume deals instead with the way citizenship is produced as a stratified and differentiated set of relations through the daily interactions between professionals and welfare recipients.

The Organization of the Ethnographic Field and the Ethical-Epistemological Positioning During my fieldwork, I moved between these organizations and agencies, touching on many issues. The main ethnographic sites in which I conducted participant observation were the following: •

The Brooklyn Family Court and the Bronx Family Court, where I attended hearings with lawyers working at two of the three nonprofit agencies providing free legal representation to parents

Introduction

• • • •

9

The Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) and advocacy association led by parents Parenting skills courses organized by the association Antiracism groups and institutional initiatives to reduce racial disproportionality Professional and community forums on the child welfare system

In addition to these and other less-structured contexts for participant observation, I collected fifty-two interviews from thirty informants, each lasting an average of two hours. I conducted longitudinal interviews with four specific interlocutors because of their key roles within the field of relations in which I moved. The interviews involved a fairly wide range of stakeholders: parents, parent advocates, social workers, and other professionals, activists, and policymakers.6 Moreover, many informal exchanges informed the research, mainly with members of the various associations and with the many parents I met at CWOP and in court. I attended weekly support groups for parents in a grass-roots association and monthly meetings of antiracist workgroups and racial disproportionality committees for fourteen months, conducting participant observation. I shadowed parents’ attorneys in the Brooklyn Family Court and the Bronx Family Court, following the cases of twenty families. I participated in policy and community forums, initiatives, and workgroups created to reform the child welfare system, and I took part in workshops and parenting-skills classes held by two organizations, switching from more active and engaged participation to more discreet observation, depending on the context I was researching. I conducted semistructured and in-depth interviews with forty-seven people whom I encountered moving in and out of the intricate child welfare institutions. They included parents, parent advocates, social workers, policymakers, psychotherapists, family court attorneys, and racial- and social-justice activists. I conducted repeated interviews with four privileged interlocutors, selected for their key role in the system (a parent, a nonprofit director, a psychotherapist, and a parent advocate) and for the close relationship I had developed with them. My access to the field was facilitated by my previous experience as an intern in the antiracist organization that conducted workshops with social services and institutional professionals. During that period, I encountered various social workers, activists, and parent advocates working in the child welfare system, and I became aware of its “racial disproportionality.” In building on such a network, I constructed my

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fieldwork around a core of interlocutors who were parents, activists, advocates, and child welfare professionals who shared a social and political commitment to reforming the system. This group of people, who knew each other for the most part, regularly participated in meetings, forums, and child welfare initiatives in which I also took part. This network, committed to questioning the procedures and functioning of child welfare, traversed the whole system so I was able to meet, interview, and shadow the daily routine of a variety of people working and interacting with all four sections of child welfare service administration. In courtrooms and in the support group lead by parent advocates in East Harlem, I met parents involved in the system. Throughout the research period, I participated as a scholar and supporter of the various initiatives promoted to discuss inequalities in child welfare, especially those that were connected to or organized by the antiracist organization with which I interned and with whom I discussed the goals and objectives of the research on various occasions. When moving through the various sections of child welfare administration, services, and advocacy, I was constantly introducing the overall topic of my research to my interlocutors, sharing how I was working “on issues of inequalities in the child welfare system and in particular on racial disproportionality.” Being affiliated with and accessing the field through this specific network alienated some potential participants, especially case workers, who were afraid they may be criticized in my research, and who automatically placed me in a specific category of social actors in the polarized debate surrounding the child welfare system. By contrast, parents were very receptive to the topic of my research and willing to collaborate with my research and be interviewed about their own experience within the child welfare system. Despite their enthusiasm, I often wondered while writing about the research if I was fostering a negative image of marginalized families and communities. Was my focus on racial disproportionality reinforcing rather than challenging the pathologizing and racialization of Black motherhood? Does attention to multiple perspectives and interpretations of an institutional apparatus allow the researcher to escape the pitfalls of “speaking for others” (Davis 2010)? I was by no means an “innocent bystander,” a position that is always impossible in the field as it erases the political weight of the researcher within a particular power structure (Davis 2010). As scholars are increasingly pointing out, and as efforts to decolonize anthropology and ethnography point toward (Harrison 2011; Bejarano et al. 2019), there are important questions an ethnographer must reflect on before, during, and after their fieldwork. These pertain to the ethical and political responsibil-

Introduction

11

ity associated with producing and circulating social representations and descriptions, especially in sensitive areas in fieldwork. More recently, several scholars have highlighted the mechanism of silencing engrained in the academic structure, which decreases the public impact and engagement of anthropology, a process that passes through publishing, funding, resources, and the tenure process (Nader 2019). Questions of “who speaks for whom and about what” (Ryan-Flood and Gill 2010) are essential to disentangle the epistemological, methodological, and ethical stakes in any ethnography. In this regard, the anthropological analysis of racism has highlighted how the liberal Boasian tradition of cultural anthropology has been crucial for deconstructing and contesting biological racism; but, on the other hand, it has become race and racism “avoidant,” seeing racism as a product of ignorance and marred by the fear of indirectly reinforcing the concept of race when analyzing it as a social construct (Brodkin 2000; Harrison 1995; Mullings 2005a).7 However, as Visweswaran notes, “If race is only epiphenomenal, how does it continue to ground material reality?” (Visweswaran 1996: 73). In this way, anthropology has failed to recognize the structural and institutional dimensions of racism as a force and how “race and manifestations of racism are historically contingent and shaped by many interrelated processes, including conquest and state-making” (Mullings 2005a: 673), which is a tendency that has been increasingly confronted in anthropological debate (Wade 2015; Anderson 2019). As I approached my fieldwork, I became aware that touching on issues of racialization and racism in the child welfare system was, as the Director of an advocacy association told me, “political dynamite.” A similar remark came from a professor of anthropology I met at Columbia University, who compared these issues to a “hot stove,” something that, as a researcher, he preferred (understandably) not to touch. Despite these warnings, I kept my focus on racialization/racism in the child welfare system, as I perceived its presence as an unspeakable and unmanageable object that requires anthropological analysis “to identify the subterranean mechanisms through which racial hegemony is both perpetuated and deconstructed” (Mullings 2005a: 689). To do so, I addressed racial disproportionality as a policy-related concept, acknowledging “policy as a space of contestation where differently positioned people across different sites, albeit with different access to resources and forms of power, were all active participants” (Wright 2019: 115). To avoid reifying race to a category and instead exercising an epistemic interrogation and ethnographic excavation of how racialization/

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racism were reproduced in the child welfare system, I tried to differentiate between the object of observation and the object of study (Fernando 2014; Trouillot 1995). If my object of study departed from the data of racial disproportionality to look at structural inequalities, the object of observation was the institutional arrangement that produced it and the response professionals and targeted communities developed to confront and react to its inequalities. In other words, my attention was directed to detecting how “institutional racism characterizes a system in which policies that do not necessarily refer to race nevertheless reproduce and sometimes intensify racial disparities and hierarchies” (Bornstein 2015: 53).This feature was evident in the racial geography of the New York child welfare system where, especially in the district where I worked (East Harlem), the mothers I met were both African American and Latina, and strongly identified with the issue of racial disproportionality, redeveloping their social positioning as women of color through their experience in the child welfare system. In line with this methodological and epistemological tension, I decided not to follow the stories of parents closely but to pay attention to their commitments and engagements with various initiatives and the resilient practices through which they questioned the functioning of the system. During the course of the research, I thought about the ways in which my racial, gender, and class identity was projected by research participants, how I showed it in different settings, and how my presence in the field slipped into the same unequal geographies of power that pervaded the child welfare system. This could take the shape of a radical existential distance from some of the interlocutors, which had multiple dimensions and could not exclusively be referred to through race. What created a distance between myself and the mothers I interviewed, for example, was not simply race and class but also the fact that I have never had to live the culturally and materially specific ways in which impoverished and racialized people do in the United States. In addition, I have not experienced motherhood, a position of which I needed not only a rational but also an affective and intuitive understanding. Nevertheless, I had to confront my unquestioned cultural assumptions and expectations about motherhood and parenthood, inherited through my cultural upbringing, family relationships and biographical trajectory. At the same time, throughout the various sites I traversed, I noticed that how my identity was perceived and played out in the field was not at all fixed. The fact that I was a PhD student, economically unstable, on a temporary visa, and partially estranged from the particular

Introduction

13

“racial formation” (Omi and Winant 1994) affecting society and the self in the United States intervened in the process of negotiation entailed by the field. These factors, together with the facts that I come from a Southern European country, , and, finally, my affiliation to antiracist activist groups, structured the terms of my positionality and articulated my potential to interact with the people and worlds with which I came into contact. My positionality in the field affected my presence (Fabian 2001) and influenced how I observed and participated in it (Haraway 1988). However, the precarious conditions structuring it partially limited the power asymmetry embedded in my “formal” identity as a young, White, educated woman, representative of an institution like academia, which—even if peripheral to many of my interlocutors everyday life—often created representations of marginalized groups and the policies addressed to them. I noticed how these terms were not fixed anyway, of course, and depended on the relational field and the interlocutor. For example, when interviewing an African American child’s advocate, he told me that he was at first a little dubious about the interview because I introduced myself as an Italian scholar in my email, and he had had traumatic experiences of racism growing up in an Italian American neighborhood. By contrast, an African American foster mother asked me (in an informal conversation in a bar months after we met) if I considered myself White, implying that her perception of my racial identity was somehow different. Nevertheless, my positioning affected my relationship with others in the field, my capacity to read and access data, and played out in the messiness of fieldwork politics in ways I was not always conscious about. For example, I tended to have longer and more open conversations with White child welfare practitioners, who accepted my invitation to critically discuss their work in child welfare, and who let me interview them several times. The core of my informants were the parents, activists, advocates, and child welfare professionals who shared a social and political commitment to reforming the system. This group of people, who knew each other for the most part, regularly participated in meetings, forums, and child welfare initiatives in which I also took part. I had the opportunity to meet and follow them during the research and to explore their connections, benefiting from their various networks. My access to the field gave me an insight into what commitment and activism in child welfare meant to my interlocutors, and how these were translated into practice. Reflecting on the experiences of my interlocutors and the knowledge they shared, I wanted to avoid represent-

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Set to See Us Fail

ing child welfare as an unassailable monolith, or a sort of composite organism that swallows up the lives of families before returning them to pieces. At the same time, the decision to look at the system through the perspective of parents, and those who defend them, has shaped my ethnography, situated my research, and, consequently, affected my analysis. In conducting fieldwork and in the writing process, I mainly represent the difficulties and challenges parents and families face to regain custody of their children and to become legitimate parents again. But what about the harm caused by these parents to their children, and its severity? Could I just believe the parents’ version of the story? Could I run the risk, in a way, to justify their noncooperative attitude toward the system if social services had identified relevant family issues? Did listening to parents without collecting their children’s voices put me at risk of underestimating the consequences of their behavior? Did this choice expose me to the possible silencing and manipulation of the children involved? The possibility of also doing research with children in the system was something I immediately excluded, despite my awareness of their absolute importance. I was dissuaded from collecting their voices because I was not trained to do ethnography with children, and I did not feel suited to such a delicate task, especially when the topic was the intimate relationships already marked by conflicts, institutional intervention, and custody issues. Also, I was aware that legal issues such as supervisors’ authorization to conduct interviews with minors would make my work difficult to accomplish, especially as a non-US researcher. There are clear limits in this volume as it does not directly engage with the subjects whose protection and well-being are the institutional system’s aim. As children do not speak for themselves in any institutional setting and are instead mediated by figures who are juridically charged with their custody and/or to represent them (as in the case of law guardians), it would have been extremely complex to engage with them as interlocutors, not just juridically but also epistemically. When approaching parents, I tried to be mindful of the fact that their conditions and stories needed to be handled with extreme care and with an awareness of the limits I had in confronting and relating to them.8 The exasperated behaviors and psychological states I often observed in the parents showed their intense desperation and suffering, and an interview would inevitably touch their wounds. For this reason, I often preferred to give space to their voices within the support group, a setting that left them free to interact with others as they

Introduction

15

liked and in which group participation provided a new perspective of their experience. From there, I started meeting some of them individually; and with some of these, I built relationships that went beyond the contingencies of research and accessed a more personal and intimate relational sphere. As the intense scrutiny and judgment of their parental adequacy left them feeling undermined, I preferred not to run the risk of increasing their suffering with questions that could echo those asked during official investigations, and which would have been perceived as a reiteration of surveillance and control. Their suspicion of anyone interested in their history stemmed from the idea that the system confused legitimate educational practice and the violent abuse of children’s rights. This ambiguity played on very thin boundaries and on the arbitrariness of the contingencies, such as the way the case was reported to the Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment, the precise moment Child Protective Services entered the reported household, the personal inclination of the social worker on duty, or the judge’s decision whether to consider the allegation reported by the ACS as a case of abuse or neglect. This produced circumspection in parents, who were always frightened by the risk of saying too much or too little. The system thus created a certain confusion between those instructed to listen and those instructed to control, similar to other contexts where social policies operate (Fassin 2011). In this opaque, conflicted, and uncontrollable context, I preferred not to pressure the participants who did not want to relate their experiences. The parents I met were sometimes experiencing intense battles with drug addiction and mental illness, and they were always at risk of relapsing and postponing reunification with their children, or even having their parental rights terminated forever. The fragility of their condition was such that it was shaken by even the most trivial and apparently innocuous comment. Relating to parents, such as parent advocates, who had somehow overcome this critical point represented an ethnographic strategy that allowed me to mitigate the sense of intrusiveness and voyeurism intrinsic to a context of an investigation so heavily marked by social suffering and structural violence (Das, Kleinman, and Locke 1997; Farmer 2006). The book, on the other hand, does not discuss in-depth specific individual cases but looks at the power configuration generated by the child welfare system, at the discursive environments built by the interactions between its different actors, and at the process of subjectification that its practices enact. Nevertheless, in the various chapters, the volume touches on the contradictions inhabiting the system’s goal

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of protecting the best interests of the child, as it can appear difficult to discern and to disentangle from a condition of social suffering affecting the whole household. The parents who speak throughout these pages, as well as the practitioners I interviewed, do not gloss over the severity of the harm caused to minors, although in the research I rarely encountered such cases. In this regard, it is crucial to point out that according to the New York State Bar Report, parents were accused of intentionally harming their children in only one-quarter of child protective cases in the United States and that the vast majority (74.9 percent in 2017) of cases lodged with Child Protective Services are for neglect rather than abuse. I hope therefore that the book, even if not directly involved in a discussion on child abuse and neglect, is capable of restoring the complex and difficult situations in which families and professionals interact (and from which most accusations of neglect take shape) and the deep ethical dilemmas they trigger. With this volume, it is not my intention to suggest a more tolerant attitude toward child abuse or neglect, the seriousness of which I do not wish to question in any way. I would rather show how an institutional system that does not consider the local representations of its functioning (which circulates among service recipients and even professionals involved) could reproduce social, racial, and economic inequalities without effectively tackling the social problems for which it was created.9 In this book I anonymized the name of people and of organizations to protect the privacy of my interlocutors. The only organization I refer to with its real name is CWOP, but have still anonymized those who worked there at the time of my research, because of its central importance in my research. I wrote about CWOP in other occasions (Castellano, 2021) and the decision to keep its name is motivated by the fact that, as the organization doesn’t exist anymore, to write about it is a way for me to acknowledge its important work in the past and its legacy for the future.

Contests of Analysis and Recurring Themes What I have described above is the broad epistemological framework that informed the construction of the ethnographic field. From the collected data, some recurring topics emerged, which I discuss extensively throughout the book. These topics include the construction of deviance in welfare-related working cultures, the structuring of inequalities and the dynamics generated by their intersection, the dia-

Introduction

17

lectic between public interest and family intimacy, and the recognition of new political and professional actors in the context of welfare governance. This volume tries to depict the intersubjective, social, and historical entanglements not only of the forces structuring the relational field of the child welfare system but also of the various figures who move within it, looking at them through the framework of political subjectivity to overcome the dichotomy between structure and agency. Focusing on the political subjectivities elaborated within the child welfare system means exploring the contrasting narratives and representations of it from which they depart. If the exploration of child welfare shows one thing, it is how the outcomes planned and expected by its protective and rehabilitative tools do not correspond to its empirical outcomes. The reactions of the people who experience its programs and procedures radically differ from those of the rational social actor imagined by social policies, highlighting instead how people’s interpretations, material conditions, intentions, desires, and affections play out in the policy field. The procedures of child welfare, which are standardized for the sake of case management, do not take into account a subject’s response to an event as disruptive as the removal of a child from the household, and demonstrate a form of blindness that could become deleterious and counterproductive. Moreover, the system also underestimates the role state agents can play in overlooking the discretionary ways in which individuals translate such delicate and intense work into everyday practices and relationships. Indeed, as noted by Lipsky, “Street-level bureaucrats characteristically work in jobs with conflicting and ambiguous goals” (Lipsky 2010: 59). The people who work in child welfare are never neutral and are not interchangeable parts of a harmonic mechanism, but always present as an irreducible resistance, resulting from their individuality and the forces mutually conditioning and positioning them in the social spectrum. This can be constituted by socioeconomic status, racial identity, personal biography, and political and cultural affiliations. My work aims to show, therefore, how the spurious practices and interactions inhabiting the child welfare system, and the fact its actions intervene on already precarious and deeply unequal lives, do not conform to the planning that social policies are aimed toward. In other words, this study wants to show how the everyday practices of child welfare policies generate confusion among their recipients while contributing to generating unfair outcomes and producing unstable juridical grounds. If the parents are not rehabilitated, the system fails to address its second most important task, intimately entangled to the primary one of child protection: correcting parental behavior that can be seriously dangerous for

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the child. The suspicion espoused by the system of any attitude that departs from an unreal and untraceable middle-class family ideal ends up being perceived as more harmful than beneficial by the same families who are in a difficult situation. This outcome results from the mandate of Child Protective Services, highly ambivalent and extremely complex in practice, that is eternally strained between two goals: protecting minors and preserving families. No matter what efforts policymakers put into developing rationalizations and standardizations of the decision-making process, through technocratic devices such as risk assessment, the social, racial, and class-based frames around child-welfare users matter, as well as the subjective assessments made by social workers and even more by court professionals (Scherz 2011). The tendency to divorce child protection from family preservation is indeed well documented in the child welfare system (Lee 2016), becoming more intense depending on the political climate of the time and the pressures CPS must face in the aftermath of a particularly tragic and mediatized episode of child abuse. In addition to the formalization of risk assessment practices I have discussed, the medicalization of parents and their children is a widespread practice to reduce the degree of potential conflict to avoid the political backlash to which they can be subjected in case they fail to protect child safety. In this volume, I focus on how medical diagnosis can frame the behavior of parents as pathological and certifies the damage suffered by the child, but the topic has such profound and complex consequences that it deserves to be properly explored in a specific ethnography. The ease with which family members are diagnosed with psychiatric problems and syndromes is a fact, like that of racial disproportionality, that is omnipresent and hypervisible. A discussion of how “deviant behavior” is constructed and addressed through clinical paradigms has long been present in anthropological literature, even in contexts similar to what I have investigated (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2000; Taliani 2012; Tsing 1990). Nevertheless, the critique of a biomedical approach in the field of child protection is particularly challenging because any alleged mental disorder not only affects the parent but can dramatically compromise children’s safety. I have therefore not downplayed this issue, while retracing the cultural and historical continuity of the debate on the pathological nature of African American families and the “undeserving poor” (Katz 2013) and the way it intertwines with the medicalizing discourses and practices. The attention toward mainstream narratives and representations of Black motherhood and parenthood is crucial to fully grasp how dis-

Introduction

19

criminatory decision-making is enacted throughout the progression of a child welfare case. In this regard, Tina Lee documented how professionals can see mothers through the lens of the over-sexualized Black women stereotype and that “decision makers at all levels assume they are irresponsible and careless mothers” (Lee 2016: 133). The conflation of race, class, and gender also generates connected archetypical figures of child welfare, such as the “angry Black woman” incapable of controlling herself or the “deadbeat father,” whose “culture of violence” also extends into the family sphere. Other anthropologists who have dealt with the medical-legal system of child protection in other national contexts have likewise examined the forms of pathologization and primitivization of Black and Indigenous mothers (Briggs and MartinBriggs 2000; Scheper-Hughes 1992; Taliani 2015, 2012). Despite the powerful impact these stereotypes can have, and the way in which they become “ideological conductors” (Hall and al. 2017) of child welfare practices and their related social imaginaries in the public sphere, the research does not aim to emphasize exclusively the oppression they embody and enact. It also aims to account for the multiplicity of opinions and positioning present in the system as a consequence of conflicting interactions between families and professionals, using it as a case study to investigate the forms of contestation and dissent generated by policies aimed at managing the “social” (Foucault 1988). John Clarke (2004) noted that the will of governance is always an attempt to limit the horizons of meaning of a community through the imposition of certain hegemonic narratives: an attempt that never completely succeeds because of the continuous manipulation and disavowal of such narratives operated by those who are governed. Child welfare is a striking example of this dynamic, as its subjects are constantly questioning its functioning. The permeability of its hegemonic field is demonstrated by the emergence of collective subjects, such as the network of parent advocates, who fight to overcome the stigmatizing narratives and powerlessness that affect parents in the child welfare system. As Piven and Cloward (1971) highlighted, the way people experience oppression shapes their discontent against specific targets, and the child welfare system offers one of the most concrete and shocking examples of oppression because it physically separates parents from their children. While describing the pervasive phenomena of state contestation in the case of child welfare, I nevertheless grounded the discussion in an in-depth analysis of the fundamental asymmetry between families and the institutional apparatus, and the almost total lack of negotiation and advocacy left to its subjects. I also point out how contestation that

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is not collectively channeled into families’ advocacy or activism can become a more dysfunctional element, especially when it generates parents’ opposition to an apparatus that nevertheless has the fundamental purpose of protecting children.

Theoretical Directions and Interpretative Keys Used This book dialogues with the extensive literature on inequalities written by North Americanists in recent decades so to inform my analysis with the main theoretical tools and empirical research produced on the topics I discuss in my ethnography. The contributions of anthropology connected to critical race theory and in particular the scholarship of Black women who have critically examined the impact of US welfare policies on Black families and communities have been fundamental to my analysis of the field and to elaborate my fieldwork data (Bridges 2011; Cox and Davis 2012; Mullings 2005b). As an Italian scholar who was not familiar with the social, economic, and cultural contexts of US cities, I am also indebted to the literature developed from critical urban anthropology, which has provided a crucial lens to frame the social phenomena observed during my research (Brash 2011; Mollenkopf and Castells 1991; Mullings 1987; Morgen and Maskovsky 2003; Susser 1996). This ethnography can also be seen within the anthropology of social policies and institutional ethnography (Clarke and Newman 2009; Tate 2020; DeVault 2013). In this way I follow Shore and Wright’s (1997) indication to look at “policy as the guiding principles for social order, as political technologies for new categories of subjectivity and political relation, and as sites for analyzing the operation of power” (Tate 2020: 85). By focusing on how inequalities are reproduced by child welfare policies and how they are rationalized, treated, and contested within its policy field, my aim is to document the political processes in which actors, agents, concepts, and technologies interact across different sites, creating or consolidating new rationalities of governance and regimes of knowledge/power (Shore, Wright, and Però 2011). Using the work of anthropologists such as Leith Mullings, Ida Susser, Catherine Kingfisher, Jeff Maskovsky, Sandra Morgen, and Dána Ain Davis, my work has benefited from the richness and depth of their ethnographies, in which they examine how class, race, and gender intersect in structuring the inequalities in American society. In the early stages of my research, the volume The New Poverty Studies (edited by Goode and Maskovsky 2001) was key to focusing some crucial socio-

Introduction

21

economic factors when looking at urban poverty in the United States, such as the power of transnational neoliberal mechanisms and the changing dynamics of production and economic exploitation. They stress the importance of analyzing new forms of governance, which have replaced the rhetoric of rights and entitlement that come with individual autonomy and independence from public assistance (Morgen) and the investigation of the regime of invisibility that characterizes contemporary poverty (Goode; Maskovsky). The kind of moral panic surrounding governance and policy in the child welfare system led me to engage with the vast literature based on a Foucauldian reading of biopolitical technologies to regulate citizenship: technologies that are represented in the social arena of child welfare in an emblematic way. Family regimentation, the numerous and explicit programs aimed at rehabilitation, the pervasiveness of medicalization, and the construction of moral dichotomies such as the abused child and the monster parent can all be addressed through the interpretative keys provided by the literature on how governance techniques operate for the population. Here, the contributions of scholars such as Didier Fassin, Aihwa Ong, and Susan B. Hyatt, but also Loic Wacquant, articulate a discourse capable of revealing the complexity, intersectionality, and reciprocity of the disciplining apparatuses of citizenship. These scholars describe how the hierarchy of access to resources and the construction of social representations are produced in the social realm. While I am aware that combining these different theoretical traditions represents a challenge for the analytical rigor of my work, I am convinced that the epistemic framework should find a balance, especially in this specific ethnography. The anthropological literature on the production of inequalities provides a fundamental lens for analyzing how governance is experienced, grounding the analysis of subjectifying technologies, always defined with respect to the ethnic–racial, economic, and social variables of a given population. Without such integration, the Foucauldian approach could reproduce an abstract and partially obscure theory of governance and citizenship, with ubiquitous power relations that lack the depth necessary to reveal how they operate practically in different socioeconomic and national contexts. If governance is widespread, infiltrating, and leads to people becoming docile subjects of the state, then the way inequalities are produced is not fully comprehensible. Moreover, Foucauldian contributions cannot be applied indiscriminately to every national context, as this risks naturalizing the theoretical–methodological apparatus and presenting it as universally relevant. It is necessary to be careful using this approach for the contemporary United States, as it refers to a Eurocentric

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notion of governmentality, based on the French national context of the postwar period. The construction of the US nation-state and the ideals of its citizenship differ greatly from that of the French republican model. However, more contemporary publications on recent forms of governance can be of great help here, as they can relate local and national models of citizenship to current and globalized governance projects. An example of this interconnection is the shift in welfare administration toward a managerial perspective, where citizen-services relations are modeled on those of the consumer market, with increasing privatization and fragmentation of services (Clarke 2012), or the incorporation of a community-oriented paradigm in the administrative practices of local governance (Rose 2006), or again to a form of citizenship that is progressively defined as moral (Muehlebach 2012; Schinkel 2013). I use this literature to make sense of seemingly contradictory government demands, such as the requests to single and low-income mothers in New York City to be first and foremost workers, as the “welfare to workfare” shift implies, and, concurrently, first and foremost mothers, as the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) reform in child welfare seems to point at.10 To understand these contradictions, I argue that it is necessary to know what directionality, intentionality, and forces are articulated in— and outside of—state devices, and how these construct a context in which the subjects of the state are asked to legitimize their conduct and their choices (or lack thereof). Morgen and Maskovsky have pointed out how ethnographies that examine the relationship between changes in urban political economies and new ways of survival and politicization of poor urban groups integrate Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, and critical race studies to investigate power relations, governance, citizenship, and inequalities (Morgen and Maskovsky 2003). My contribution aims to align itself with this analytical choice, which makes use of a theoretical framework that is fluid and heterogenous but which, for this very reason, seemed to be more flexible and versatile in communicating with the object of my research. It is important, finally, to contextualize the specific historical moment in which this research took place. I conducted fieldwork during a complex political moment for the United States: from one side the Obama administration had sparked hopes of a progressive agenda, but at the same time Occupy Wall Street and the movement against police brutality and racial profiling contested the widespread inequalities that still marked US society. In this book, some of these tensions are made visible, as well as some of the consequences of neoliberal

Introduction

23

governance. Since then, the situation has escalated intensely. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 covered the country with far-right populism, which, as Mullings noted, took off the gloves of the neoliberal racial project and embraced an explicitly racist and hyper-conservative agenda (Mullings, 2020). In this regard, it is interesting to point out the historical links and parallels Laura Briggs identified between child-taking policies. There is a reiteration through difference between Trump’s child separation policies for asylum seekers, foster care for the children of “welfare mothers”, Indian boarding schools, and the taking of children during slavery (Briggs, 2021) On the other side, the BLMM/M4BL exploded as a new driving political force in an increasingly polarized social spectrum enhanced by the COVID-19 crisis. In this landscape, with BLMM/M4BL demonstrations, and the simultaneous renewed political visibility and legitimacy of White supremacy, some of the issues in this volume will resonate. The movement for reproductive rights and the use of an intersectionality framework in antiracism, which gained momentum recently (Briggs 2017; Zavella 2020; Collins and Bilge 2020) in the United States and further afield, also contributed to highlighting in the public sphere, as well as in academic literature, some of the topics and open questions I address in the volume. The call for defunding the police launched by BLM activists and the abolitionist agenda reverberated, though less noticeably, in the child welfare system as well (Dettlaff et al. 2020; Roberts 2021). In the final chapter and in the conclusion, I present a brief account on how the field of child welfare systems condense a series of issues marking what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called the anti-state state and its anti-Black racial capitalism (Gilmore 2007; 2022), while the struggle for advocacy of marginalized families, caught between cooptation and dissent, documents the challenges of radically reforming oppressive institutional systems in the neoliberal racial project. Therefore, this book could be useful not only in the renewed discussion on the contribution of an anthropology of policy but also participate in a form of engaged anthropology to the contemporary debates on abolitionism as a way to reimagine the scopes and functioning of certain institutional functions. I believe this direction requires an understanding of how inequalities intersect and that an attuned research endeavor should foster an “anthropological social critic whose engagement with the world begins by treating other subjects/informants as fully embodied and affective interlocutors” (Jackson 2013: 278). This means looking at the families and parent advocates I met as “knowledge producers in their own rights” (Restrepo and Escobar 2005: 118) concerning the policies to which they are subjected (Davis 2013).

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Structure of the Book I have organized the ethnographic material into five chapters, focusing on the different themes that emerged from my fieldwork and that share an anthropological context, units of analysis, and a broader field of research. Since this research derived from the desire to investigate the local and situated representations that different social actors build around the institutional apparatus that deals with child protection, the systematization of the ethnographic material and the theoretical discussion were carried out while trying to respect what emerged as the main lines of interpretation during fieldwork. Despite this intention, it is necessary to provide a more historical and anthropological introduction to the evolution of welfare systems in the United States and the concept of “dependency,” which is highly relevant to the American public and academic debate on public assistance and poverty. From the second chapter onward, however, the issues that I perceived to be the most urgent from the words and attitudes of the people with whom I worked during the research are addressed in this order: the issue of racial disproportionality; the mechanisms of marginalization and the silencing of biological families; the attempts to manipulate and negotiate with the system itself; and the bottom-up forms of participation and advocacy aimed at reforming the institutional system. In the first chapter, the discussion is organized chronologically following the representations and discourses that circulated about welfare recipients, and the moral economies of the deserving and undeserving poor. These representations and discourses about welfare administration stand in a symbiotic relationship, shaping each other and constructing specific images and ideals of families and their needs over the past two centuries (Abramovitz 2000; Gordon 1994; Skocpol 1992). Moving from feminist scholarship, which has questioned the history of public assistance for women, the chapter enters the current debate on the disappearance of specific forms of assistance, the strengthening of forms of control and surveillance, and the consequent limitations of personal freedom, especially of single, poor, and usually Black mothers (Davis 2004; Kingfisher 1996; Morgen and Maskovsky 2003; Mullings 1997; O’Connor 2001; Wacquant 2006). A section is dedicated to a brief history of the child welfare system, from its origins as religious and charitable organizations to its institutionalization at the federal and state level, describing its essential structure and its organs. The chapter argues that the debate on the underclass acts as a glue between public assistance and the child welfare system, and it focuses

Introduction

25

on how the images and representations it produces impact the administration of welfare. In the second chapter, I look at the issue of racial disproportionality (i.e., the overrepresentation of non-White families in the child welfare pool of recipients), interpreted by many civil rights organizations as a clear sign of structural racism. Using sector studies and statistics made available by the Administration for Children Services, I discuss the data on racial disproportionality, trying to reconstruct its genealogy in the child welfare debate and how this category became an object for policies, political claims, and activism. In doing so I present several accounts from my fieldwork in which the issue of race and racism was discussed, in both formal and informal settings, highlighting how it influenced the discourse in different ways. I use these examples to reflect on how racial disproportionality cannot be isolated by class, gender, and urban social geographies, and how much an intersectional lens can be crucial in disentangling the complex genesis of racial disproportionality and disparity. The third chapter looks at the functioning of child welfare, describing the most apparent contradictions of the system. Drawing on my ethnographic experience, I illustrate its rigidities and counterintuitive paths and describe the consequences they have for families. For example, I illustrate the effects of the limited period planned for rehabilitation, the issues caused by the systematic medicalization of children’s and adults’ psychological reactions to separation, and the effects of a preventive and emergency-driven approach to the chances of having a case with ACS. My analysis focuses on the kind of commitment the system demands from parents and how the period of separation is reflected in long-term family relationships, a period often marked by conflict with social workers and sometimes foster families, impoverishment, and difficulties in adapting work rhythms to rehabilitation mandates. The final part of the chapter is an analysis of the internal labor structure of the child welfare system itself, which is also affected by the same dynamics of racialization and neo-liberalization that impacts its recipients. This analysis is then contextualized within the broader framework of different citizenship in New York, highlighting specific urban geography in which both families and caseworkers are inserted. In the fourth chapter, I focus on the forms of resistance, negotiation, and manipulation families put into practice when confronted with the duties imposed on them by institutional agencies. In particular, I describe some of the counternarratives about the system’s goals that circulate among recipients as well as social workers and policymakers. The widespread dissent circulating among recipients of the child wel-

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fare system is particularly relevant to investigating how interactions between the population and state institutions become problematic, and what space such interactions create for signifying child welfare governance and the possibilities for changing it. In the fifth chapter, I dwell on the parainstitutional realities, the archipelago of grassroots associations, communities, and advocacy projects defending the rights of families. With my research starting through this channel, it is necessary to highlight which areas of politicization they carve out and open up, their forms of organized protest, and which roles they have played in a welfare system fragmented into private contractors and increasingly inclined to delegate their tasks to the local and district-based management. In exploring the moral economies (Fassin 2009) that regulate the participation of civil society in both the provision and design of services, my main questions concern what dynamics of legitimacy are created by this space of mediation, what political and social demands it responds to, and how the different actors interpret and control a family’s needs. Civil rights and social justice groups appeal for greater community participation in the needs of a family but, in doing so, they create discursive arenas and social practices that child welfare relentlessly attempts to incorporate and manage according to its priorities. This gives rise to a battle over the meaning of what community participation means, and which community figures should be eligible to act as mediators with institutions: in short, a moral and political space in which a fight takes place for primacy over the definitions of the terms that should guide public action. In the conclusion, I retrace the evolution of my arguments, focusing on the intersection between neoliberal urban governance, racialization, and welfare institutions, while looking at possible future directions in child welfare practices. NOTES 1. The writing of this book was supported by FAPESP, São Paulo Research Foundation, grant n.2018/22947-3 and by the University of Bologna. The research was funded by my scholarship at the University of Bergamo (2011–14). This book represents a translated and substantially revised version of the book I published in 2018 with the Italian publishing house Junior, titled Revolving door. I servizi per i minori e la riproduzione delle disuguaglianze a New York. 2. In this volume I use both the terms “child welfare system” and “child welfare” to indicate the institutional apparatus made up of the government agency administering child protective services in New York (Administration of Children Services), the programs for parenting rehabilitation, the foster care agen-

Introduction

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

27

cies, and all the other public and private services that fall under the umbrella of child protection. In this book I refer to the Black Lives Matter Movement and the Movement for Black Lives with the two combined acronyms BLMM/M4BL, following Barbara Ransby, “to refer to the movement as a whole encompassing both affiliated and unaffiliated forces that have emerged or gained traction post2012, through their protests and organizing efforts against anti-Black racism, especially as it manifests in various forms of police, state, and vigilante violence” (Ransby, 2018: 4). In 2015, the Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System (CCWIS) was launched as an AI tool, fed on multiple data servers, which should guarantee an even more disembodied, exact risk assessment. The instrument has already sparked some criticism and is seen as problematic scientifically and ethically (Corrigan 2019; Hurley 2018). Particularly relevant is the parallel with the Italian context investigated by Carlotta Saletti Salza (2014), which sees the Roma population in Italy (around 0.15 percent of the total population) representing 2.6 percent of children available for adoption. With the phrase “parent advocates,” I refer to the professional figures recently introduced into child welfare, responsible for supporting parents in the rehabilitation process and defending their needs and rights in their interactions with institutions. The parent advocates I have dealt with also include former child welfare clients who have built their professional expertise on this experience. For the definition of racism, I use that of Leith Mullings: “Racism is a relational concept. It is a set of practices, structures, beliefs, and representations that transform certain forms of perceived differences, generally regarded as indelible and unchangeable, into inequality. It works through modes of dispossession, which have included subordination, stigmatization, exploitation, exclusion, various forms of physical violence, and sometimes genocide. Racism is maintained and perpetuated by both coercion and consent and is rationalized through paradigms of both biology and culture. It is, to varying degrees at specific temporal and spatial points, interwoven with other forms of inequality, particularly class, gender, sexuality, and nationality” (Mullings 2005a: 684). After eight months of research, a story told to the support group by a father in the presence of his child, a victim of abuse by an adult who was not there, left me morally and emotionally shaken for days, causing my temporary refusal to continue fieldwork and throwing me into a condition of doubt and consternation. Not that the other stories I had heard were less serious, but the terrified look I saw in the eyes of that little girl that morning had given a face to what remained unsaid. For a while I devoted myself to other tasks, working on my field diary and analysing interviews. After two weeks I returned to fieldwork but decided not to carry out two interviews I had previously planned, one of which was with the father of the girl I had met at CWOP. Children’s Bureau, “Child Maltreatment 2017,” U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, 2019. Available

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from https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/research-data-technology/statistics-rese arch/child-maltreatment. 10. Adoption and Safe Family Act, 1997: an act that speeds up procedures for permanent placement of the child, reducing the time for parental rehabilitation to fifteen months. The consequences of this reform will be discussed in more detail in chapter 1.

chapter 

Guilty of Being Poor A Brief Itinerary in the Recent History of American Welfare

KKK A First Look at the History of Family Welfare: From ADC to TANF

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he history of welfare institutions in the United States is relatively recent, beginning as a policy to support families, the workforce, and the general welfare of society in 1935 (Abramovitz 1996).1 Welfare programs were intended to act as substitutes for work income. They were an attempt to correct market forces, providing economic security for those who no longer received a salary due to illness, retirement, unemployment, widowhood, or disability. The Social Security Act of 1935 was not the first intervention to assist the poor in the United States, but it was the first federal program to be set up, at Roosevelt’s behest, as part of the New Deal reforms (Piven and Cloward 1971; Davis 2012). The Social Security Act’s reform plan also included the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program, which—unlike others accessed through labor force participation such as retirement and invalidity pension programs—required proof of a candidate’s poverty to qualify. Furthermore, to benefit from the ADC, the subject had to be married but unable to support one’s children financially due to the death or absence of one of the spouses, usually the man. Children conceived out of wedlock and those from single and working women households did not belong to this category. In 1962, the ADC program was revised and renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), widening the pool of possible recipients to include children of workers whose wages were not sufficient to support them. These families could include those with two parents who were not economically self-

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sufficient and those of single or unmarried mothers. This change and the welfare struggles that flanked the fight for civil rights in the 1960s along with the second wave of the feminist movement in the 1970s allowed many African American women to benefit from the program. New York was the epicenter of the campaigns to widen the spectrum of welfare for women. In her book The Battle for Welfare Rights, Felicia Kornbluh meticulously reconstructs the evolution of the welfare recipients’ movement in New York, led by the City-Wide Coordinating Committee. She described it as the most extensive in the country—and it also enjoyed the most support among social workers, lawyers, and religious figures—pioneering political strategies later used throughout the United States (Kornbluh 2007). It was precisely the conjuncture of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, the civil rights movement, and the discourse on rights made popular by the New York City-Wide Coordinating Committee that gave rise to other similar movements for welfare rights in other cities and states. Nonetheless, the National Welfare Rights Organization, the main political entity in this struggle, lost its effectiveness in the second half of the 1970s when it fragmented into small, local action groups. The organization was discredited as a result of the fiscal crisis, which imposed different criteria for the eligibility of beneficiaries and triggered the resentment of the White middle and working classes. However, the questions posed by the movement—whether it is possible to call oneself a citizen if one does not have sufficient resources to feed or clothe one’s children; and who decides what the poor should receive from the government and how (Kornbluh 2007)—seem to be even more relevant today. Piven and Cloward (1993) analyzed the regulation of the labor market through welfare, underlining how this has served to maintain a division of labor functional to the flexibility of the productive market of capitalism. Welfare has alleviated the condition of the poor at strategic moments, thus avoiding the possibility of popular uprisings and revolts. The expansion of the pool of recipients sanctioned by the transition from ADC to AFDC and the War on Poverty initiatives have been used as devices for the inhibition and regulation of social discontent (Davis 2006; Piven and Cloward 1993; Weir, Orloff, and Skocpol 1988). However, the inclusion of social categories such as single women— who predominantly came from low-income and racialized communities—increased the number of African American women beneficiaries,2 which is what the neoconservatives seized upon in the 1980s. They attacked the welfare state and mobilized the rhetoric of the deserving and undeserving poor, which has always been present in the discursive repertoires of the political and public sphere. They then created the

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new image of the “welfare queens.” Welfare queens were portrayed as women giving birth to children to collect welfare benefits. Even if not explicitly racialized, they were represented as Black single mothers in popular culture and political debate. This association of welfare with Black mothers was made despite most welfare recipients being White, as welfare consisted not only of AFDC programs but also the other forms of benefits I introduced at the beginning of the chapter. Of the children and families receiving AFDC benefits alone, 62 percent were White (Briggs 2017). For Davis, the popular representation of Black women maintaining a lifestyle through welfare is rooted in a racialized sex-political ideology. This has been cemented by the negative association with Black women and welfare, outlining a publicly circulating stereotype (Davis 2006). This stereotyping follows an earlier one of the pathological nature of Black families in the works of Dollard (1937), Frazier (1939), and Moynihan (1965), who identified “the typical African American family” as dysfunctional because of its alleged “matriarchy.” In past decades, Black women bore the burden of responsibility for being the origin of various “social pathologies,” including some twentieth century racial conflicts. In order to regulate Black families, programs that never became operational, such as the Family Assistance Program (FAP), were encouraged by conservatives to approximate Black families to the White and bourgeois model. In the 1980s, the forms of social deviance that had previously been blamed on Black families’ structure were then attributed to welfare dependency. The discourse on the degeneration of the educational context of Black families served as a theoretical basis to advance the argument of the effects of “welfare culture,” which according to detractors had only worsened their condition of passivity and social marginality. This argument allowed conservatives to redirect popular resentment toward racialized groups and liberal social welfare policies, laying the foundations for the reform of the welfare state and its transition to a product of the neoliberal economy. While the process of economic restructuring and the demonization of the “welfare queen” began during Reagan, Bill Clinton went on to further attack the “culture of dependence.” Such a culture trapped welfare recipients as second-class citizens and led to greater social irresponsibility, for which they were the first to pay the consequences. The rhetoric of self-help and the individuals’ ability to rise through their strength and advocate for their success was further reinforced to make it socially acceptable to drastically reduce aid to the poorest groups. According to Dána-Ain Davis, the public perception of Black women and motherhood prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s led to the consensus on welfare reform in 1996, which was seen as a regulating

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device for their fertility. In this regard, Briggs highlighted how reproductive politics at large were always central in determining the political history of the United States, shaping consensus, and are intimately tied to economic and social transformation (Briggs 2017). Among the commentators—conservative or not—the common opinion was that, because of the structure and the eligibility mechanisms of the AFDC, many women avoided getting married to continue to access economic assistance. In Reagan’s famous description of the archetypal “welfare queen,” he pictures a woman “who has eight names, thirty addresses, twelve social security cards, and collects veterans’ benefits from four dead husbands that do not exist on his cards. She has Medicaid, receives food vouchers, and collects subsidies for each name, a tax-free income of $150,000.”3 In August 1996, President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which replaced the AFDC with TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). TANF consists of a reduced form of financial assistance with a five-year limit, granted on the condition that recipients must commit to vocational training and, after the first two years, to twenty-five to thirty hours of work per week. This reform has been criticized because instead of reintroducing poor communities to the labor market, it has made living conditions even more precarious and put family well-being and family balances at further risk. An example of this can be seen in how the reform has made it more difficult for women trapped in situations of domestic violence to free themselves from their partners, especially economically, and has also jeopardized single mothers’ possibilities of supervising their children because they must submit to the demands of workfare (Josephson 2002). In the next section, I discuss how the concept of dependency has changed and adapted from a Keynesian postwar state to a neoliberal postindustrial one, coming to embody a racialized, gendered, and classed image of the anticitizen.

The Historical Continuity of the Concept of Dependency Nancy Fraser and Lynda Gordon have retraced the concept of “dependency,” which has gone through various historical and political phases in the United States. In particular, the two historians have looked at how much this word has been used to attack protective measures for the most disadvantaged sectors of the population, maintaining its persuasive power to propose increasingly restrictive reforms on assistance

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programs. Poverty as a social fault is a recurring element in national narratives and imaginations deriving from the capitalist social organization and the Protestant roots of American culture. With the transformation from the typical structures of twentieth-century capitalism to those of neoliberalism and late capitalism, the concept of “dependency” has taken on an increasingly ideological connotation (Fraser and Gordon 1994). In preindustrial society, the word “dependency” did not yet have the negative connotation it would later assume: it indicated a social relationship of subordination that was predominantly economic but accepted as part of the social order. The independence of some men was seen as a risk factor because, in a society based on interdependence, those who exited it represented a social anomaly. Later, when the full development of industrial capitalism imposed new relations of production, the term “dependency” took on its negative connotation, going so far as to signify individuals who could not acquire the means for their subsistence and lived off the rest of the population. Consequently, the term acquired a moral nuance and began to indicate a type of behavior contrary to the new concept of citizenship based on independence. In this period, dependency started to be conceptualized through three social figures. The first one was that of the pauper, incapable of fitting into the dynamics of work and production and therefore a dead weight on society. The second one was that of the slave and the native subaltern, whose dependency was initially thought of as a political condition from their subjugation, but which was later seen as a moral/behavioral aspect that caused their very subjugation. Biological racism was a fundamental contributor to the evolution and growing cultural significance of dependency. Finally, the last figure of dependency described by Fraser and Gordon is that of the (White) housewife, dependent on her husband’s salaried work. While in the pre-industrial economy, women’s work was seen as necessary and complementary to that of men, in the industrial economy, productive work was limited to the male labor force. This caused women to lose authority as they were relegated to the sphere of reproductive work, which was not valued as such and so excluded from full citizenship. Since hierarchical relations, once rooted in the relationship between landowner and peasant, were now less visible in the industrial age by the ideology of independence won through wages, dependency became a highly ideological concept. Liberal morality, which established the fundamental equality of rights between (initially White) citizens, could not accept dispossession and labor extraction as core functions of a capitalist system (Melamed 2015). Consequently, social disadvantage had to be rooted in a moral or psychological condition of dependency.

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A first and striking example of this is represented by the reform of the New Deal, which established a double standard of welfare: that of Social Security and unemployment, where the level of legitimacy was based on labor force participation and the deduction of welfare contributions from wages; that of the ADC and later the AFDC, which came from general tax funds and was considered an unfair exchange by the State as it took from productive citizens and gave it to other citizens who did not return the benefit. (Gordon 1994)

Fraser and Gordon note that the word “dependency” applied only to AFDC beneficiary mothers. Neither the beneficiaries of social security nor those who receive mortgage assistance were considered equally dependent. For this reason, the second type of welfare became highly stigmatized and was granted only after numerous checks on family, legal, and health status. The most striking form of control was probably the now extinct “man in the house rule,” which meant the suspension of the AFDC for women who were in a relationship with a man. This led welfare officers to break into private homes to check if women were indeed alone. The creation of antifraud devices reveals yet another negative moral characterization of those who turn to public assistance, as they are always suspected of cheating. With the progressive deindustrialization of the US economy, “dependency” as status changed again and acquired an even stronger psychomoral characterization. The recession of 1981–82 deeply affected the antipoverty programs promoted in previous years through the OBRA (Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act). When the Reagan administration started a process of welfare dismantling, the social precariousness of the poorer classes and especially of young women living in racially segregated neighborhoods increased (O’Connor 2001). This shift mobilized anti-Blackness and stigmatized the poverty that traversed US history. This included the revival of the concept of “culture of poverty,” first introduced by Oscar Lewis in 1969, which was then refashioned through the trope of the “underclass” (Goode and Maskovsky 2001). In his famous volume entitled Losing Grounds, Charles Murray (1984) used data on the rate of welfare recipients among the population in low-income communities to support his hypothesis regarding the production of poverty. He located its origin in the deviant and pathological social behavior generated and encouraged by welfare programs. By arguing that programs such as AFDC or food stamps had caused the downfall of the previously self-sufficient working-class, Murray did not include the majority of welfare recipients, such as the elderly, in his

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overview. In reality, the funds available for mothers with dependent children had actually gradually reduced since the 1960s. Even if Murray’s position was criticized, his argument acquired more and more authority and prominence in the ten years following its publication in 1984. The deindustrialization of the US economy implied the material withdrawal of investment from previously industrial cities, whose administration—especially after the civil rights struggles—had also been handed over to communities of color. The scarce resources allocated to Black neighborhoods meant the structural problems they inherited began to multiply in the years to come (Katz and Sugrue 1998). This generated the environment of urban decay that led many New Yorkers to set fire to their own homes in the 1970s and 1980s due to overwhelming property devaluation and rising maintenance costs, making it more profitable to collect insurance than to sell or rent their properties. In this context, the division of livelihoods and lifestyles between the Black working class and the White bourgeoisie increased. Racialized and impoverished urban communities were represented through the trope of the underclass and the failure of public administrative policies. This trope has widely permeated the media and mainstream culture and is also prevalent through a cultural production that has—willingly or not—emphasized the violence and degradation it communicates (McCarthy and Dimitriadis 2000). The trope originated in the book The Truly Disadvantaged, written in 1987 by Black sociologist Julius Wilson. In it, he attributed the decadence of the “inner city” to the crisis of the industrial economy and the disintegration of the social fabric of Black neighborhoods and communities, where a certain variability of socioeconomic status was still present. As a result of civil rights struggles and the establishment of Affirmative Action, most of the new Black middle class chose to move away from their homes and relocate to White residential neighborhoods. This phenomenon weakened the social fabric and the forms of support in Black neighborhoods, leaving the most disadvantaged people in areas increasingly vulnerable to petty crime, commercial and institutional abandonment, and environmental degradation. Moreover, the lack of role models for young people had, in his view, contributed to their entry into the informal markets of the economy. These factors generated what he called the underclass, characterized by gangs, single mothers, and widespread violence. His analysis, although motivated by the desire to investigate the structural reasons for poverty, ended up strengthening the idea that the problems of impoverished

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communities were behavioral. Once again, the belief in the pathogenic nature of African American families was reinvigorated. Moreover, the structural analysis present in Wilson’s work was completely erased by the media and political debate’s concept of the underclass. Wilson aimed to focus on the disorganization and dysfunctional features of families instead of highlighting the strength, pride, and self-sufficiency that had marked the discursive orders of Black self-determination and the left-wing discourse on urban communities. In his view, these communities did not work as an emancipatory model because, due to economic changes and the legacy of historical racism, the social structure had disintegrated and given rise to widespread forms of deviance. Moreover, Wilson, as he had illustrated in The Declining Significance of Race in 1978, thought of the new processes of economic restructuring and new ways of governance as racially neutral and saw class as the new category of the building and redistribution of inequalities (Wilson 1978, 1987). The success of Wilson’s thesis, and especially its use outside academia, ignited a heated debate within American sociology and anthropology. Most urban anthropology researchers criticized Wilson, and the underclass became the new paradigm to fight through qualitative research (Morgen and Maskovsky 2003). Among the various arguments, those of Marxist anthropology and critical race theory were undoubtedly some of the most precise and thorough. Critical urban anthropologists emphasized the role of neoliberal restructuring processes of the labor market, which generated a degree of flexibility and precariousness that undermined the already fragile survival strategies of the poor urban population, criminalizing and further racializing it. Their analysis focused on processes such as gentrification, which exacerbated the polarization of economic differences, involving the inhabitants of the racialized and impoverished neighborhoods within global mechanisms of dispossession and extraction (Harvey 1989; Susser 1996; Mullings 1997). Like other authors, Leith Mullings saw a direct relationship between the neoliberal project, which established the value of an individual through their productivity, the reduced government redistributive function, and the new racial ideology, reinventing the trope of poverty culture in the “underclass” (Mullings 2005b). The overlap between these dimensions was also seen in policyrelated analysis. The policy think-tanks of the Reagan era identified welfare “dependency,” family structure, and premature pregnancies as symptoms of social disadvantage instead of looking at social mobility and average income, which had been the yardstick for evaluating population welfare in the 1970s (O’Connor 2001). The value of work

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and the employment levels as a measure of social well-being were replaced by individuals’ ability to live outside the redistributive mechanisms of the State, shifting the focus from the rhetoric of rights to that of autonomy. To prove “welfare dependency” was detrimental, population analysis focused on capturing other “dysfunctional” behaviors through the population receiving state subsidies. These were precisely identified in the family status (female-headed houses), early pregnancies, and the disruption of the parental ties exemplified in the White, middle-class nuclear family model. These researchers concluded that being raised by a single mother put people at greater risk of poverty, welfare dependency, and leaving school early (O’Connor 2001). Such behavioral and moral lenses used to build representations of those deemed as “welfare dependent” became central in public discourse and policy making to build the political legitimacy needed to move towards welfare reform and the restructuring of labor. In this regard, the recent analyses by Laura Briggs highlight how welfare reform “pushed mothers into low-wage work at a time when the value of the minimum wage was declining steeply” (Briggs, 49, 2017), contributing to the exponential growth of corporate giants such as Walmart and McDonalds. Instead of the priorities of industrial capitalism, which needed forms of protection for the labor force to function, neoliberalism advertised the self-regulating capacity of the free market to allow for the accumulation of an increasingly internationalized capital. This capital needed to be free from national fiscal interference and be based on a global unskilled and delocalized labor force. In fact, in the 1970s, the so-called Corporate America finally materialized, not only as a means of internal production (as in the case of Walmart and McDonald) but also as a model and profit machine involving the economies of other nation-states. In sum, the neoliberal colorblind rhetoric of equal opportunities and fair chances succeeded in obscuring the reproduction of structural inequalities on which capitalism feeds. In the post-civil rights period, in which political rights have been extended to minority groups with a formal access to citizenship, to remain in a condition of dependency could only be attributed—for conservatives and even for some liberals—to a lack of willingness or ability to thrive, a moral inadequacy, or incapacity of complying with full citizenship. As a result, the condition of dependence has entered the health domain and has come to be defined as a recognized pathology in DSM III (Fraser and Gordon 1994). Dependency can be seen as a form of infantilism, or inability to respond to life’s multiple challenges, and has been attributed to an

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emotional and intellectual immaturity that prevents full emancipation from the other. White feminism also contributed to the pathologization of dependency, attacking the condition of nonworking (White) women depending on their husbands. It attacked the maternalist ideology of the state, as expressed by AFDC, and questioned the division between the public working life of men in traditional nuclear families and the private mothering dimension to which women were relegated. But this image completely disregarded how Black motherhood has been configured by slavery, segregation, urban marginalization, criminalization, and more recently by mass incarceration (Alexander 2010; Briggs 2021; Lee 2016; Roberts 2008), and thus by the history of oppressive technologies and policies that Black women continue to experience in the United States. While White women were linked to an ideology of domesticity (Davis 2004) and their role as mothers, Black women were always conceptualized as belonging to the workforce and as carers of White children before being mothers of their own (hooks 2014; Collins 2002; Hartman 2016; Spillers 1987). White feminism’s critique of state maternalism thus obliterated the different historical conditions of women of color to which analysis of reproductive labor from slavery to global capitalism bears witness. In sum, in the late twentieth-century social landscape in which the political priority was to control the surplus population generated by deindustrialization and welfare retrenchment, the rhetoric of dependency became even more powerful. The neoliberal mechanism of blaming the victim was increased to the maximum. Black women became the focus of all the dysfunctional attributes previously shared among the three original figures of dependency (the native, the woman, and the poor), a condensation that demonstrates the striking relevance of intersectionality as an analytical tool to read social inequalities. As the antithesis of the model citizen, they were depicted as irresponsible mothers, sexually unregulated, not self-sufficient, and often victims of vices and addictions such as drugs and alcohol (Briggs 2021; Davis 2012). Because being a user—or rather a “consumer”—of public assistance was seen through the prism of dependency, welfare itself was represented in the neoconservative discourse as a drug that plunged its users into passivity. At the same time, the numerous advocacy associations that declared themselves as welfare users began to criticize the stigmatization of dependence that welfare devices put in place and the forms of surveillance they implied (Cruikshank 1999). They attempted to reintroduce the theme of dependency as a social relationship and not as a behav-

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ioral syndrome. Nevertheless, these arguments remained strongly circumscribed in the field of activism without penetrating mainstream discourse or political debate and media representations, which—without any analysis of the power relations that make it possible—are still oriented toward a view of welfare usage as antisocial behavior and the fault of the individual. Feminist anthropologists have identified welfare policies, in their punitive and controlling aspects, as a form of structural violence (Davis 2006) and a means of enforcing “stratified reproduction,” where some types of women are encouraged to reproduce more than others (Colen 1995; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995). The movement for reproductive justice embodied these perspectives, seeing reproduction and childrearing issues as the core of the political life, and in intersectionality a crucial tool to organize Black women who were systematically disregarded in their reproductive rights through White supremacy, neoliberal governance, and gender oppression, also perpetrated through institutional apparatuses like the child welfare system (Zavella 2017; Roberts 2015; Ross 2017).

The Evolution of Child Welfare Institutions The history of the child welfare system in the United States can be divided into three periods: before 1875, in which the organized protection of minors had not yet been organized; from 1875 to 1962, characterized by nongovernmental and charitable organizations for the protection of minors; and from 1962 to the present day, which saw the foundation of a system of protection organized and financed at the federal level (Myers 2006). According to Jimenez, there are three legal principles that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century that shaped the child welfare system from the nineteenth-century to the present: the colonial poor laws, the legal principle of “parens patriae,” and the concept of the legal contract (Jimenez 2006). The poor laws, inherited from the English colonies, were the basis of state action in families until the end of the nineteenth-century. They dictated that children of indigent parents be indentured as servants to others or be sent to the poor house. Parens patriae is an English common law principle that established the state as the ultimate parent for children without parental oversight. It was used only in certain cases until the 1960s; but with the consolidation of the concept and regulation regarding child abuse and neglect, it acquired more importance,

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legitimizing state intervention and child removal from family custody. Finally, there is the principle of the legal contract, namely the need for the state to establish through a legal agreement a formal responsibility for the child. Differently from family law though, which established the possibility of shared custody between the two divorced parents, child welfare policies maintain unitary custody for children. This means the state needs to identify one person responsible for the legal custody of a minor except in the case of a married couple. This principle has heavily affected the child welfare system and is the reason fathers who are not married (or are divorced) are rarely considered by family courts as potential caretakers when the mother is investigated by child protective services. Now, state intervention into family life to protect children from abuse and neglect is governed by a layered complex of federal statutory law (e.g., Title IV-B and Title IV-E of the Social Security Act), United States Supreme Court Precedent (e.g., Santosky v Kramer, 1982), state statutory law, and state appellate court decisions (Jimenez 2006). Additionally, practices and expectations in individual courts vary, sometimes markedly (Carnochan and Austin 2002; Dailey and Cook 1984). Before 1875, child beggars in England were sent to the United States on apprenticeship contracts to save them from poverty, but this led in fact to a reserve of free labor for the New World (Billingsley and Giovannoni 1972). According to Billingsley and Giovannoni, the philosophical roots of child protection in the United States do not originate from a desire for reform for the poor as much as of the poor. Since the New World was conceptualized as an inexhaustible source of abundance, anyone who was poor was judged incapable of prospering because of their depravity and indolence. This basic ethicalpolitical approach also influenced the protoforms of child welfare. The protection of minors in difficulty was not seen as a public and governmental responsibility but for the charitable activities of religious and private institutions. The emphasis placed on the need to separate children from their families stemmed from the same social contempt for poverty, from which children had to be saved from growing up in a destitute family because it meant going through a process of irreversible degeneration. Another factor that influenced the birth of institutions for minors was the desire for religious autonomy concerning the motherland, which led the various religious institutions to create organizations aimed at taking care of minors according to their religious faith. This characteristic has led to the exclusion of some ethnic groups such as many traditionally Protestant African Americans in a spectrum of almost exclusively Catholic and Jewish agencies (Bernstein 1999).

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The third element traceable in the theoretical foundations of child welfare is Anglo-European ethnocentrism, which has shaped the devices for taking charge of children’s services and has contributed to the stigmatization of non-English-speaking destitute families, judged unfit to carry out the pedagogical and educational work of parenthood because of an allegedly backward and immoral cultural heritage. The last factor is transatlantic slavery, which for a long time excluded African American children from child welfare organizations, as they were considered property rather than individuals. African Americans created flexible kinship networks to cope with the dehumanizing system created and sustained by White plantation owners. It was this kinship system that formed the basis for religious and other cultural practices of African American families later on (Jimenez 2006). Initially, the children taken into custody were placed in shelters that became real orphanages in the mid-nineteenth century. Later, the use of free foster homes was established, where children were transferred after an initial period in institutions and where—from the age of twelve—they were sent to work on farms outside the big cities. In the period following the American Civil War and the end of slavery, African American children initially had no access to orphanages and thus remained in shelters, where they also ended up with criminals or people with mental disorders. Despite the socioeconomic difficulties of the newly freed former slaves in the first decades of emancipation, a support network of extended families, churches, schools, and private philanthropy took care of unaccompanied minors. In 1853, Charles Loring Brace established the Children’s Aid Society in New York, which spread to thirty-four states by 1920; and in 1882, Martin Van Ansdale founded the State Children’s Home Society of Illinois. With the creation of these societies, there was a shift from free foster homes to state-paid foster homes for the care of orphaned children. In 1889, the Settlement House Movement, led by Jane Addams, adopted a different approach from that of charities by focusing on social problems and not on individual salvation and thinking of a more participatory solution such as day-care centers for children. The first organizations to protect children from abuse and mistreatment were established in the 1870s and 1880s. The Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Humane Association (SPCC), originally founded to prevent cruelty to animals, were the first to address the issue of child protection (Myers 2006; Billingsley and Giovannoni 1972; Hacking 1991). The concept of “child abuse” was thus introduced and took an ever more central role in the debate on human and civil rights, increasingly refining and broadening the

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definition of what constituted child abuse and maltreatment (Hacking 1991). The SPCC were the first organizations to be given the power by the state to remove children from households and were the precursor of modern-day state-led child welfare systems. The SPCC had a broad definition of cruelty, which included the effects of poverty, like letting children out at “unreasonable hours” or neglecting them food, clothing, and housing (Lee 2016; Pleck 1987). Women used SPCC as a last resort to escape abusive relationships with their husbands, aware that turning to them meant they would usually lose their children (Gordon 1990). The equation between poverty and neglect that characterized SPCC in its first years was partially reshaped by the Progressive Era reforms (1900–1933) and the establishment of the welfare state. Some foster homes were declared unsuitable, and children were instead placed with individual foster families. Other ideas emerged that framed neglect as a failure of mothering, holding poor families to a middle-class notion of morality, which is still seen in child welfare procedures (Lee 2016). In 1940, the state created the Bureau of Child Welfare to find placement for children removed from “unsuitable homes” and to determine their eligibility for ADC benefits. At this time, the child welfare population included more non-White children as a result of the migration of the African American population escaping Jim Crow laws in the South and facing unemployment, racial segregation, and discrimination. At the beginning of the twentieth century, one of the biggest problems in the child welfare system was the shortage of religious agencies willing to take care of African American children and the scarce availability of adoptive families for them, especially in New York City. Although these agencies directed by religious institutions were already publicly funded, there were no African American agencies in the 1930s. Black families were thus forced to turn to Protestant agencies, which often excluded families on the basis of race (Billingsley and Giovannoni 1972). In 1942, a law was passed prohibiting segregation in publicly funded child services. Toward the end of the 1950s, the political ferment of the African American community and the actions of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) promoted initiatives to combat the scarcity of families available to adopt African American children. In New York City, the “Adopt-a-Child Project” was promoted, which was a multiracial and multireligious project that aimed to collaborate with African American and Puerto Rican communities to develop a network of temporary and permanent adoptive families, distributing information and requests through the work of volunteers. The results were initially poor but then improved as the initiative was repeated, although it often met with resistance from the

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custody agencies to which the selected families had to refer. The initiative was judged as a failure by the official literature because there were few families selected compared to the effort put in (Billingsley and Giovannoni 1972). This failure helped reinforce the belief that Black communities and their families were the first to disregard Black children, while according to Giovannoni and Billingsley, it was the sectarian nature and racism inherent in the system itself that determined the lack of adoptive families in sufficient numbers to meet the demand. Despite the grim picture, many authors have documented how informal adoption and childcare was crucial in African American families, especially in the case of unwed mothers (Jimenez 2006). As documented by Carol Stack’s book All Our Kin, the extended management of needs and resources allowed single women to raise their children, addressing various material deficiencies (1975). Children were growing up within an extensive network of kin and in households that often included three different generations, where the presence of grandparents was fundamental. This form of shared caretaking, what Patricia Hill Collins defined as “othermothering” (2000), allowed economically marginalized families to protect and supervise minors. The kinship network was complemented by the presence of the broader community, in which churches held a particular importance. In the 1960s, child welfare became very focused on the abuse and neglect of children instead of supporting the family coping with everyday problems. There were many reasons for why this happened, including the implementation of X-ray technologies in the medical field and the coining of the term “battered child syndrome,” but also the increasing moralization of poverty and the scrutiny exercised on “welfare mothers” by the new welfare program of AFDC. Public concerns about child abuse pushed the state to create what is now called the central register, a hotline where people can report abuse and neglect of children and made certain professions in the medical and educational field legally mandated to report abuse and neglect (Lee 2016). The first federal law regarding child maltreatment was passed in 1973, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), to cope with the increasing reports of abuse and neglect and the scarcity of resources to address them. The law established that states were required to meet federal guidelines for reporting, investigating, and providing treatment for child abuse and neglect in order to qualify for federal funding. During this time, the policy focus shifted to urban Black populations and more and more children were removed from communities of color.

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Simultaneously, the activism of Black communities in the child welfare system became more visible in the 1970s and challenged the entire institutional structure of the time, pushing for a culturally sensitive and racially specific childcare system. Although Billingsley and Giovannoni identified the main problem of providing more adoption options for the many children who were not served by child welfare, biological families remained on the margins of the institutional field, which was slanted toward the interests of adoptive families. The focus of children finding a stable home shifted policy focus to permanence and for the first time established preventive services in New York State through the Child Welfare Reform Act of 1979. Robert, one of my research interlocutors and later the director of CWOP, was working as a caseworker in preventive services at the time, and he told me about the stressful and hectic workdays, a clear signal that the need for preventive services exceeded the actual capacity of state agencies, at least in New York: You are meeting with families at the point of crisis, when something really bad happened to cause that referral and trigger them to coming to you and ask help, and this was constant. There were months where you were just flooded with referrals. We established an intake policy that we wouldn’t never say, “Sorry, we can’t help you with this problem,” but, “We cannot help you directly, cause we’re out of capacity, but we can refer you to other similar agencies.” (personal interview at CWOP, December 2011)

Several scholars remarked that even if more federal budget had been allocated to preventive services, the additional funding remained inadequate for the many critical situations of families living in poor neighborhoods and foster care funds were still much more consistent than those for preventive measures (Lee 2016; Roberts 2002; Pelton 1989). However, after ten years of a steady decline in foster care cases, thanks also to the implementation of preventive services and a policy emphasis on making “reasonable efforts” to keep children with their original families, by the mid-1980s the pendulum between child protection and family preservation swung back to child removal. This was in part due to the spread of crack cocaine, but as Tina Lee noted, the reasons were more complex than that (Lee 2016). Violence escalated in urban communities due to the drug trade, and the lives of children worsened (Mullings 2003; Bourgois 2003). CWOP’s director described it as a “very troubled time in our city; very high level of despair and hopelessness and on a daily basis.” (CWOP, 7 February 2012) With crack came the hypercriminalization not only of those dealing it but also those using it. The mothers who were using crack had their

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children immediately removed after birth and placed in foster care, and they risked imprisonment. It has recently emerged that many of the doctors’ beliefs about the permanent damage of exposure to crack in newborns were actually wrong, as the children of the crack-using mothers grew up regularly without health complications. This caused a rethink among academics and policy makers not only with the health aspects but also on the moral and legal ways in which the problem was tackled in the 1980s (Okie 2009). At the time, however, the increasing number of children caused a crisis in the foster care system because there were no places or beds available for them all. This led to a restructuring of the foster care system, which, still dominated by the sectarian logic of religious affiliations, had to “secularize” its availability at the request of the State (Tobis 2013). In the words of some interlocutors, the extraordinary emergency of that period emerged. I was told how families were piled up in hotels in infamous areas such as Times Square, then a center of prostitution and drug dealing, to relocate them away from both family members who used crack and buildings that had become crack houses. The peak was in the late 1980s, although the situation continued into the early 1990s. The criminalization of crack use that inhabitants of the poor city districts underwent was not equal to the criminalization of cocaine users, demonstrating a specific strategy in punishing poor drug users in comparison to wealthy ones. As Laura Briggs argued, the discussion of the “endangerment of the fetus” that provided the judicial backdrop for incriminating mothers using crack was the result of the convergence between the War on Drugs and antiabortion politics in the 1980s and 1990s (Briggs 2020). In my research, I met mothers whose children were removed after birth during those years, and whose lives were still haunted by the presence of child protective services despite not having used crack for decades. Having such a record with the child welfare system was something that continued to shape their lives against the possibility of caring for their grandchildren, benefiting from welfare services, and taking job opportunities (see chapter 3). But things were much more complicated than simple crack use, and in racialized and impoverished neighborhoods, the kind of problems families and mothers faced at the time came from the living conditions in which they were forced to survive. Though trivial, they could be seen as neglectful from social services: Housing issues were a big problem; like if I can’t get heat or hot water, my kids can’t bathe and I can’t wash clothes, then I am not gonna be able

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to send them to school. If we wake up in the morning and there are drug addicts fighting in the hallway, we’re not gonna open the door; if they stole the lightbulb down the stairs, we’re not gonna go down the stairs in the dark. (personal interview with Robert at CWOP, March 2012)

As the first signs of normalization seemed to have brought the emergency to a partial resolution, circumstances changed once again in 1995 with the death of Eliza Izquierdo, a little girl killed by her mother and her mother’s partner. The NY Bureau of Children Services came under scrutiny as a result of the media frenzy that marked the event, especially given the previous contacts child protective services had had with the Izquierdo family. This event led to yet another change in the agency’s structure from the Bureau of Children Services to the Administration of Children Services in 1996, with a general reorientation toward a strong emphasis on child protection over that of preserving the original family. In the same statute of the rebranded agency, social workers were encouraged to “resolve any ambiguity in favor of child protection”: this meant preferring the removal of children to reduce any potential harm to them, even if signs of abuse or neglect were still mild and not fully substantiated. Then, in 1997, the Federal Government approved the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), a reform designed to shorten the length of time spent in the foster care system and to reduce to fifteen months the time available for parents to obtain reunification. The act stated that if the parent failed to meet the conditions required by the civil court to regain the right of custody, the government agency would be entitled to request the termination of the biological parent’s rights over the child in question. These two events, along with the increase in early pregnancies, the use of crack in racialized and poor neighborhoods , the effects of welfare reform that had excluded many families from the lists of recipients of economic aid for households with dependent children, the crisis in social housing, and the spread of HIV, all generated an increase to the numbers in foster care, causing a reaction from movements and associations defending the rights of families. The average number of children in foster care in New York City in the 1990s reached fifty thousand; in 2020, the number was around nine thousand. There has thus been a drastic decline, reflected also at a national level, probably due to the end of the crack “epidemic,” the use of family networks and kinship care as an alternative solution to foster care, and the development of a movement for the defense of parents’ rights. However, there has not been an improvement in relations between communities and child welfare institutions, and many

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civil rights organizations denounce the excessive number of removals the ACS still practices today. Nevertheless, there is widespread consensus on the substantial changes in the agency. It has had to open up, willingly or not, to new political subjects, such as parents and community representatives who have sought a path of political recognition within the hierarchies and institutional structures of the child welfare system. Nevertheless, parent advocacy has seemed to have lost some of its power in recent years, and a new rise in the number of foster care children seems to point toward a more punitive child welfare system (Tobis 2019). New York City is the only city in the United States to have a completely privatized foster care system (Tobis 2013), although it is regulated and partly financed by the Administration of Children Services, which also manages the child protection process and the investigation of families. The New York City Civil Court, which has a seat for each neighborhood, decides whether children should be removed from their families. These three factors—ACS, foster care agencies, and the Family Court—make up the whole child welfare system and define its action. The other chapters of this volume will be devoted to exploring the forms of contestation and reorganization of daily practices produced by the interaction between institutions, the legislative apparatus, families, and communities that are articulated in the many different aspects of the child welfare system.

How TANF and Child Welfare Intersect: Administrative and Representational Overlaps She belonged to these places, not to possess but to be possessed; she needed, and that need constrained her and was exploited by others. (Meyers 2022: 10)

The history of the child welfare system, although ostensibly autonomous from the discussions and transformations of welfare policies, intertwines deeply with the latter. In my research, the overwhelming majority of families I met who had a child welfare case supported themselves through TANF subsidies, and in some cases the check on eligibility criteria for TANF users was bringing families into contact with child protection services. In policy research this link is not investigated much, but when it is, the results indicate a substantial overlap between “cash welfare” and the child welfare system (Courtney

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and Heuring 2005), finding that half of the children in foster care came from welfare-eligible homes (Geen 2002). The social workers in charge of investigating the living conditions of the many women who turn to them are in close contact with the child welfare system and the ACS agencies and are themselves mandated reporters, therefore bound by law to report any suspected abuse or neglect of minors perpetrated by the adults they meet. For example, the need to undergo a drug test to use the TANF program automatically constitutes the opening of a case with the child protection services if the test is positive. TANF and the child welfare system are also deeply interrelated because of the negative imagery and representations of welfare users that circulate in the public sphere and influence the attitude of welfare workers toward their clients. This aspect has been highlighted as well in the case of women dependent on the public healthcare system for prenatal care and childbirth (Bridges 2011). The detrimental interaction between different forms of public assistance is demonstrated well by the following excerpt from an interview with a mother, grandmother, and parent advocate, Gabriela. As the interview shows, even if being on public assistance subjects people to multiple forms of surveillance, it makes service compliance requested by the child welfare system even more complicated: They wanted me to do an anger management class, but I couldn’t find any class because I had Medicaid and the clinic I was going to was not taking that, while my daughter had First Medicaid, and we had to take anger management class together. I went to so many places; I went to a Community Center on 104th street, in the projects, and they would have taken me, but they knew I was going through ACS. This is what they told me: “I’m sorry but we can’t take you in,” because, remember, they didn’t take my plan [Medicaid] but they could have taken it through ACS. But they knew ACS, they don’t pay—they took too long to pay—so they didn’t accept me. I went to other places in the West Side, but [the process] was hard; I couldn’t get in. (personal interview at CWOP, October 2012)

There is a strong connection between the socioeconomic conditions of families and the need to attain public assistance, with its scrutiny, and finally the possibility of failing to comply with child welfare mandated rehabilitative services. These connections create a feedback loop between poverty, stigmatization of welfare users, racist tropes around Black motherhood, and the possibility of having a child welfare case. An African American professor of social work, who also worked as a policy maker in a past New York administration, describes in the excerpt below, using herself as a case, how motherhood is perceived

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through a series of filters and statuses, and how it is judged differently in different spaces with an emphasis on the private/public dimension (Mount Sinai is a prestigious private Hospital while Harlem Hospital is public) and on the urban location: So there are issues of reporting bias . . . yea, it’s complex. I would say if I would be living in the Upper East Side, go home and have some glasses of wine and get annoyed with my child and slap him, and go to Mount Sinai and I would have my health card from NYU, and I’m teaching at NYU and I am all nicely dressed, I have insurance, I speak okay, nobody is gonna think I abuse my child, you know? If I go to Harlem Hospital with my blue jeans and not . . . you know? It’s a complex issue. (personal interview with Alexandra at NYU, May 2012)

Demographers Christopher Swann and Michelle Sheran Sylvester (2006) gathered evidence showing the reason foster care caseloads more than doubled from 1985 to 2000 was due to more women being incarcerated and reductions in cash welfare benefits, materialized by the transition from AFDC to TANF. According to Wacquant, social services and the penal system have built a partnership aimed at controlling and subjugating the impoverished minorities in the metropolis (Wacquant 2006). As Dorothy Roberts noted, within the political framework that married conservatism with neoliberalism, “both the welfare and foster care systems, then, responded to a growing Black female clientele by reducing services to families while intensifying their punitive functions. The main mission of child welfare departments became protecting children not from social disadvantages stemming from poverty and racial discrimination but from maltreatment inflicted by their mothers” (Roberts 2011: 64). The desire for emancipation—or “empowerment” in the jargon— of the “dysfunctional population” has thus been defined as the only possible social mechanism generating virtuous, self-responsible, and productive civic behavior. But while workfare was presented as a tool to rehabilitate oneself to a dignified citizenship, increasing economic and social precarity and vulnerability followed the retrenchment of welfare rights. Several studies have shown that TANF’s forced insertion into a labor market that is often deskilled and deunionized has worsened the condition of poor families (Acker et al. 2002; O’Connor 2001). This has been particularly true for Black women, who are more likely to be poverty-stricken and have therefore been the most affected by welfare measures and discretionary options for each state such as the “family cap,” which limits welfare provision to the first child. This further restriction, also in use in the State of New York, has penalized

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African American and Latina mothers with more than one dependent child, and toward whom the coercive and punitive mechanisms of “workfare” seemed to be more effective (Davis 2006; Gordon 2001). On the one hand, the hoped-for welfare reform, in fact, traced the causes of poverty back to individual choices, as if it were not related to structural inequalities based on class, gender, and race (O’Connor 2001: 268). On the other hand, it erased the gendered, classed, and racialized ways in which population groups have been impacted by welfare reform and neoliberal governance at large, promoting a colorblind and antidependency rhetoric that strengthened these differences even more. The lack of specific attention to how the population was conditioned by social policies concerning their social status, drawn by class and race hierarchies, had as its counterpart the strong implicit racialization, which is manifested through the racially coded discourse on dependency and the underclass. This example sheds light on how centuries of history of explicit and legally constituted discrimination and racialization in the United States did not disappear once civil and political rights were granted to minorities. Instead, they display a certain capacity to endure, persist, and resist through time, reshaping inequalities and reinventing racialized political repertoires and tropes. As Susan B. Hyatt argues, the kind of racialization of poverty that has gone hand in hand with the affirmation of the new welfare model has not been carried out openly but has slipped into the representations of what Ida Susser calls “media-visible periphery,” of impoverished communities of color (Hyatt 1995; Susser 1998). The same process of racialization occurred with the category of “female-headed household” precisely because it had the ideological function of obscuring the political and structural dimensions of poverty, pointing back to the disorder and fragmentation of the family nucleus as its cause. This happened despite the fact that families of single mothers were often surrounded by a network of solidarity, as I stated in the section on the history of the child welfare system. The ideological, political, and economic formation of both welfare and child welfare systems never recognized the strength and resilience of communities who had been racialized and dispossessed in the course of history, ignoring their alternative models of family management and judging them as unfit for parenthood and guilty of being poor.

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NOTES 1. Parts of this chapter were previously published in the article “The Elephant in the Room: Silencing Racialization in Welfare Regimes,” La Ricerca Folklorica 76 (2021): 67–90. 2. On the social and historical roots of the prevalence of female-headed families in African American communities, please refer to Mullings 1995; Dickerson 1995. 3. “‘Welfare Queen’ Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign,” The New York Times, 15 February 1976, accessed 23 August 2022 at https://www.nytimes.com/ 1976/02/15/archives/welfare-queen-becomes-issue-in-reagan-campaignhitting-a-nerve-now.html.

chapter 

What Does “Racial Disproportionality” Mean and How Is It Tackled? Genesis, Interpretations, and Practices

KKK The Debate on Racial Disproportionality in the Child Welfare System

A

fter her son was removed from her care, Sarah started to navigate the ACS website, finding the statistical data published on the number of removals by city district. She found that most removals came from low-income districts where most residents were Black or Latinx. She requested a meeting with the child welfare commissioner but met his deputy instead, who said, “Most parents come here to discuss their case, not data.” Sarah responded, “I don’t want to discuss my case—this is not about me; this is about how your agency operates” (personal interview, October 2020). This chapter discusses what the statistical data from the ACS website indicates, how the data is categorized and rationalized in the professional and public sphere surrounding the child welfare system, and how they constitute a central element for social and racial justice initiatives in the child welfare system. Key to this discussion is the policyrelated term “racial disproportionality.” This is the statistical category that identifies the over-representation of families of color among recipients of the child welfare system. It compares the proportion of one racial group within the child welfare system to the same racial group in the general population; racial disparity describes the unequal outcomes experienced by one racial group compared to another (Dettlaff et al. 2020).

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In 1999, although African Americans constituted 14 percent of the population of the United States, 45 percent of the children in the child welfare system were African American. This percentage, which varied depending on the national, state, or regional contexts (Derozetes, Testa, and Poertner 2005), has decreased in the last two decades, reaching 23 percent in 2020, thanks in part to the series of initiatives to respond to the issue (Detlaff et al. 2020). Nevertheless, Black children are still overrepresented in foster care at more than 1.6 times their proportion of the general population. In a lesser degree, disproportionality has also been observed for Native American children and Latinx children. In New York City in 2009, the population was 44 percent White, 27 percent Latinx, 25 percent Black, and 11 percent Asian; however, around 47 percent of children in foster care were African American and 29 percent were Hispanic, while only 3 percent were White.1 Even though the number of children in care dropped dramatically from fourteen thousand in 2011 to seven thousand and five hundred in 2021, the New York City child foster care population continues to be disproportionate toward Black and Latinx children, who still make up 89 percent.2 The statistics published at the time of my research on the official website of the Administration for Children Services demonstrate the differences between the number of cases investigated and substantiated by social services across the different administrative districts and urban areas of the city. For example, in Brownsville (located in East Brooklyn, a traditionally Black neighborhood), 302 foster children were placed with third-party families or institutions in 2011. Considering that a residential neighborhood like Park Slope, which tends to be White and middle-class, had only 41 children in foster placements points to a historically constituted relationship between institutions and specific areas of the city, which are accompanied by a “negative symbolic capital” (Wacquant 2006: 209).3 The first three National Incidence Studies (NIS) conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services (Sedlak and Broadhurst 1996) concluded that there were no significant or were marginal differences in the incidence of child maltreatment in terms of race. This means, since the incidence is measured in percentages per thousand, all groups should be represented proportionally to the total population. If this does not happen, a structural bias can be assumed to exist (Yegidis and Morton 1999). Going beyond the epistemological implication of similar statistics, which I have discussed more extensively elsewhere (Castellano 2017), this discrepancy between the data relating to the presence of children of color in the system and the incidence of

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child maltreatment concerning race reveals a missing variable, namely child welfare procedures. Racial disproportionality and disparity have become a topic of debate in recent decades, starting with the 1972 publication of Children of the Storm by Billingsley and Giovannoni. For the first time, this book brought to light the massive gap between the Black and White populations in the child welfare system, retracing the history of child welfare and its constitution from its origins as a philanthropic and religious initiative to the institutionalization and differentiation of services. As stated by Billingsley and Giovannoni, the system’s first beneficiaries were Italian, Irish, and German children. Italian and Irish children were removed at the highest rate in the first decades of the twentiethcentury due to their economic disadvantage and associated social stigma. African Americans were altogether excluded from the system, and only after the battle for civil rights in the 1960s were they granted full access to welfare and child welfare services. The concern of Billingsley and Giovannoni was the scarce presence of the Black population in the catchment area of the child welfare system. Although their economic conditions were much worse than those of other ethnic groups, African American children were underrepresented compared to others. When the book was written, the system began to serve more and more African American children, but this was still insufficient compared to the number of families in need. According to Billingsley and Giovannoni, the history of child welfare (see chapter 1) is a striking example of “open and covert” racism (1972: 8). “Open” because, for the first two hundred years of their history, the dominant child welfare institutions in the country systematically and openly excluded African American children from their services. The early explicit racist discrimination has been replaced by a hidden but no less effective racism, namely the insufficient and unequal distribution of services to Black children (1972: 213). The two authors recognized three aspects that contributed to making child welfare a racist institution: • • •

The negative conception the state had of African American families Their exclusion from participation in and control of the system Their exclusion from support and services

The combination of these three factors was part of a broader context in which the incidence of infant mortality, unemployment, poor housing, and related diseases among Black communities created a widespread

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social malaise. This led to the idea that the task of child welfare was not to protect the family but to remove children from them directly. According to the authors, this kind of White paternalism, which destroyed African American communities, needed to be counteracted by locating child welfare’s administrative power in the Black community, including finding African American adoptive families and providing the services for the biological families. In other words, Giovannoni and Billingsley’s book expressed the desire to professionalize the members of the Black community on which the system intervened and to have more Black people in critical institutional positions since the agency’s boards of directors were traditionally composed of rich White citizens4 (Billingsley and Giovannoni 1972: 183). Today, the policy focus has shifted to the possibility of more bottomup advocacy and community-led services than those which were present in 1972. This shift is represented by the two sectors of the Administration of Children Services dedicated to advocacy and community partnership. This can be seen in the promotion of semi-institutional figures such as parent advocates and the relocation of some services to the most affected areas. While most of the prominent figures in child welfare continue to be White representatives of the upper and middle classes (judges, directors of foster care agencies, commissioners and administrators of public agencies, policymakers, etc.), many of the social and case workers I met were Black women. Since Billingsley and Giovannoni’s publication, the path leading to the termination of parental rights for biological parents has sped up thanks to the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) measure, created to reduce children’s time in foster care. Additionally, BIPOC children are less likely to receive in-home services compared to White children, even when the problem detected by social services is the same and the solution is to be reunified or adopted (Roberts 2002). Even if Black and Latinx families make up the most child welfare recipients, the fact that they are over-represented doesn’t mean they are overserved, or that the services they use work toward family reunification. Despite the dominating presence of child welfare institutions in the districts of the so-called inner city, services—other than those responsible for monitoring families—continue to be absent or inadequately provided. Dorothy Roberts (Roberts 2002) demonstrates that communities lack a series of programs to make the foster care period as short as possible. Mandatory parenting classes are often operating beyond capacity. The rare and poorly funded rehabilitative services for addiction and psychiatric assistance are often not covered by Medicare or Medicaid, the most common insurance for those who use the child welfare system.

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I also witnessed several times how the difficulty in complying with court-requested measures to correct parenthood impacted families’ capacity to cope and compromised the possibility of reunification, as I will discuss in chapter 3. In conclusion, the system’s tendency to “fix Black families” by moving children away does not seem to have changed much from Billingsley and Giovannoni’s publication. The continuity in how the child welfare system acts toward Black and Latinx children, and BIPOC people more generally, reveals how institutional and structural racism are still very much ingrained in social dynamics and urban governance in particular.

Rationalizing, Detecting, and Tackling an “Impossible Object” In the many publications on social policy and its effects on the population published by research institutes such as Chapin Hill, the Casey Foundation, and the specific scientific journals on child welfare, the issue of racial disproportionality receives reasonable attention. The surveys focus on the statistical breakdown of the demography of each institutional segment of the system, including variables such as economic status, educational status, and the type of maltreatment that has been substantiated in court. The question of racial disproportionality, however much debated, remains a difficult aspect to confront. This is because it is so elusive and multifaceted at the level of its social production that the initiatives trying to correct it are faced with what I define as an “impossible object,” co-constructed by a series of complex dynamics deeply rooted in a hierarchical racialized social order. Much of the statistical analysis has focused on identifying where and when the decision-making process becomes discriminatory, with obvious analytical difficulties. This analysis focuses on the incidence of child abuse or neglect concerning cultural, racial, or economic variables or on decision-making models that may or may not increase the unequal treatment of minorities. One part of research presented in the book Race Matters in Child Welfare by Rolock and Testa (2005) questioned whether the investigation process is racially biased. Using logarithms combining a series of variables, however, the authors were unable to find proof of a discriminating attitude in the decision-making process. They could not find data to explain why mistreatment accusations toward African American children were made more often than those against White children (Rolock and Testa 2005). This type of quantitative analysis therefore

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struggles to find an objective explanation for the problem of racial disproportionality, which with its slippery and complex nature continues to evade attempts to rationalize it through “hard data,” creating more uneasiness in policy research. As a result, it is not difficult to find case studies that conclude that race is not a significant variable in screening cases or of children removals—and even the exact opposite can be found in other studies (Derozetes, Testa, and Poertner 2005). Despite these uncertainties, racial disproportionality has been widely discussed for decades and has become the object of numerous initiatives to reduce it. Even if the detractors of the initiatives defined them as the expression of a “movement” (Bartholet 2009), in my research experience I observed how instead of being generated from grass-roots activism, the issue emerged primarily in the institutional and professional world of the child welfare system. Compared with movements addressing racial disproportionality and disparity in the criminal justice system and policing (more recently subsumed under BLMM/ M4BL), initiatives about the child welfare system were placed in the center of the institutional world and were characterized by a corrective/reformist approach. In other words, the push to act upon racial disproportionality and disparity came from within the policy world of child welfare, so it “produced” the same outcome. The different strategies have been shaped by the cultural and pedagogical context of social work, in which antiracism and culturally sensitive approaches are now used in the training of future professionals. Accordingly, such strategies advocate for a greater presence of preventive services for families, more cultural competency classes or antiracist workshops, and finally, greater self-management and responsibility entrusted to the community (Roberts 2008; Dettlaff and Ryclaft 2008; CWLA 2008). These characteristics separate activism against racial disproportionality in child welfare from other more bottom-up approaches, such as that against the practice of Stop and Frisk.5 The latter had a strong politicized focus with media coverage, which gained support beyond the members of the communities immediately affected. The initiatives on racial disproportionality in child welfare instead remain more confined to social services, losing in part their advocacy power and, above all, failing to create a wide-ranging mobilization that could then effectively be linked to other movements. The difficulty of achieving such an outcome is, I argue, connected among other things to the very high level of circumspection and “moral panic” (Hall et al. 2017) that child abuse generates in public opinion. One of the initiatives I encountered proposed the adoption of a series of measures to increase awareness of social workers to structural

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racism through attendance at antiracist workshops. The same initiative also called for the establishment of a committee, whose members reflect the race/ethnicity of child welfare recipients in New York more proportionally. They would be given the role of overseeing the work of governmental and nonprofit agencies implementing policies to reduce racial disproportionality. This project was carried out with determination by some, while others considered it too indefinite and limited to change the structure of child welfare because of the system’s complex intersection with other institutions in the city that reinforced one another’s oppression. This continuity and interdependence between different governmental institutions is also partially shown in the statistical literature. This datadisplays how African American children and adolescents are not only overrepresented in the child welfare system but also in the juvenile justice system and mental health services, even taking into account their socioeconomic status (Derezotes, Testa, and Poertner 2005). Other professional initiatives that sought to reduce racial disproportionality included Courts Catalyzing Change (CCC), promoted by the Alliance for Racial Equity and coordinated and funded by the Casey Foundation, a private nonprofit organization, to promote and finance initiatives that improve social policies for children, families, and communities. The Casey Foundation is a powerful player in the field of child welfare, with enough resources and a strong voice to guide the trends and policies of public and private institutions. Courts Catalyzing Change is an initiative that took place mainly in the legal field and involved figures working in Family Court. The initiative promoted the use of a Bench Card for judges and referees presiding over Family Court cases and the establishment of racial disproportionality committees composed almost exclusively of legal figures. The Bench Card consisted of a series of questions the judges must ask themselves before deciding on a case so as to identify their potential biases about “cultural affiliation, gender, and family context” (Mille and Maze 2011: 4). In addition, it established an informal hearing in which all the figures involved in the individual case could discuss what needed to be done, what services the family needed, and what the context was when maltreatment occurred. This preliminary hearing was to place the case in a context, seeking to alleviate the depersonalizing effect of the highly formalized procedures taking place in Family Court. The Courts Catalyzing Change initiative also included a Disproportionate Minority Representation Committee, which was a group of child welfare legal professionals responsible for working on the im-

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plementation of the CCC initiative. I interviewed one of its members, Michael, an African American man, at the time in his forties, who then worked as an educational advocate for children in the child welfare system and who was strongly committed to antiracism. Talking to me about the initiatives in which he participates, he told me about the issues they faced as an activist group in clearly defining their object: When I was a legal guardian, I became a member of the Committee on Racial Disproportionality, and at the time we didn’t know what to do. There was the Courts Catalyzing Change initiative, but we were still looking for a way to define the disproportion accurately, and only once defined, we focused on how to find a solution and for years nothing came out of it . . . . I think they just feel uncomfortable about changing anything, and fortunately we have a judge who is willing to make changes. It is about the fact that the process is very long since there are so many people who have to change in this process: there is the child welfare public agency, there are service providers, the agencies that supervise the visits, and there are also professional guardians at home. There are so many people who deal with things differently, and their role in the process, and think about what they do and do a new activity to better serve children and families. So, I’m optimistic that the CCC will have a good impact. At the moment we do not have the will to make this change. (personal interview, Newark, February 2012)

The most difficult issue to deal with seemed to be how to interpret racial disproportionality and the weight attributed to institutional racism, even in meetings created specifically to discuss this aspect. During a meeting at the Bronx Court of the Disproportionate Minority Representation Committee, chaired by an African American judge who had strongly advocated for the Committee and who pragmatically coordinated the group’s activities, I witnessed the same kind of “unspeakability” when it came to the topic of race. During one of their usual conversations about potential strategies, such as greater community involvement or the streamlining and personalization of the parental rehabilitation program, the judge intervened with the following words: We’re talking about how to improve the system, but we’re not dealing with the race issue. Bench Card research shows that there are fewer children in foster care, but no less disproportionality. The part about race is uncomfortable because we have to examine our personal prejudices. (Disproportionate Minority Representation Committee [DMR] meeting, Brooklyn Family Court, 31 May 2012)

This statement, unexpected and proffered without any introductory sentence (common when cautiously approaching these topics in sim-

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ilar settings), generated evident embarrassment in the group. The conversation was interrupted for a few seconds until the judge spoke again, expressing the wish that, after participating in the antiracism workshop scheduled for the following month, the conversation would become “easier.” Michael also believed that the workshop could resolve the tensions and taboos that dealing with racial issues generated among the professional, political, and friendly circles he frequented: Me: So, you see the Undoing Racism workshop as a way to tackle these obstacles by creating a common background among the people participating? Michael: A safe environment where we will be able to discuss without judging. To reinforce what I believe to be true, that we are all victims . . . . I think mentally we have to go to the same place and identify the fact that [believing] that we are all victims is the way to get there. As I was saying, these people have unfair advantages, artificially high opinions of their achievements, just as there is an institutional disadvantage to others and who have unreasonably low expectations of their own success. So, our country has not been able to get as much as we could, because they have left access to conquests only to certain people. (personal interview, February 2012)

The function of the workshop is therefore to create this sort of third space in which one is not only authorized but strongly encouraged to discuss racial issues. It can be a safe space where the normal dynamics structuring the unspoken issues around racial relations are interrogated and discussed. Regarding the effectiveness of such policy tools, opinions were divided: Katy, a White woman who represented parents in Family Court for a nonprofit organization thought the initiatives were palliative and had more of a “politically correct” function rather than being effective in practice. Monica, a Black woman in her late twenties, who was a colleague of Katy, saw them even as a form of hypocrisy (“96 percent of Black people in the system is not disproportionality; it’s much, much more,” she told me). Others, like Gloria, a parent advocate in a foster care agency, appreciated the will those initiatives signaled for starting dialogue on the issue and trusted the capacity of antiracism workshops in making people more aware in institutional settings. Overall, the general consensus was that the best way to reduce the overrepresentation of people of color was to limit as much as possible the cases of removal from families, focusing on community development as well as in-home and preventive services.

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In my ethnographic excavation of how race and racism were expressed and debated in the New York child welfare system, I also analyzed how antiracism initiatives participated crucially in identifying what race, racial disproportionality, and racism signified in the child welfare system. As I illustrate in the next section, even if their analysis was used in institutional settings as the main operational and conceptional tool to avoid racial inequalities, they were not free from the ambiguities and silences surrounding them. But what these networks attempted to do was to remove “the elephant in the room” when discussing racism.

Silences, Intromissions, and Short Circuits In February 2012 I participated in the meeting between antiracist activists and the Administration for Children Services organized for Black History Month. The discussion was held in one of the ACS meeting rooms. Everyone had their microphone station and a video conference to other ACS venues scattered throughout the five municipalities of New York City. Speakers included a parent advocate, an antiracism workshop trainer, a child welfare professional with expertise in social policy, a young activist who belonged to a White antiracist group, and a moderator from the institutional child welfare field. They discussed possible responses to racial disproportionality and shared the conceptual and practical contributions of their work or activism. The conversation was rather moderate, with an exchange that fostered a reflection on community cultural enrichment and resources, the need to involve those directly affected by removal cases in the dialogue and decision-making process on child welfare reform, and the importance of a bottom-up leadership style able to counter the flaws and fragmentations of the service apparatus. Particular emphasis was placed on the need for a paradigm shift in the approach to families and communities, which should not be based on the idea of the user-client (judged as disempowering) but on a model of active involvement and selfmanagement, promoting a system composed of the same people who use it. There were between twenty and thirty people in the room, some of whom left during the discussion most likely due to other work commitments. Most of them were caseworkers and some were sporadic supervisors. Most of the participants were African American or Latina women; there were two or three White women and one White man. Of the five offices connected via Skype with the conference room, two were empty and the other three had two or three people each.

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At one point, an African American caseworker intervened and frantically expressed her point of view. She asked the speakers how it could be possible to focus on secondary issues, such as not using the term “empowerment” but instead “enrichment” or launching numerous community partnership projects involving local community centers, when the mentality of those working in the ACS continued to be wrong. With this observation, the caseworker referred to the attitude that influences the work of many Black social workers in their relationships with clients and their White supervisors: We can talk about enrichment and all that, but I need to take a break and ask myself who I am and how screwed up I am. And I need to do it now because there can be no change if I think there is no reason to change; and if I think I am okay, I will not try to change things! You know, when people find out that we are trying to include [an operational] model based on White privilege, they refuse! “Oh, I’m not gonna talk about that!” Whenever we have events like that, as you call them, I look around and see 99 of us and a couple of the dominant culture here! So, you know, I’m very frustrated. I’m not as hopeful as you are. . . . We have to look inside ourselves to find out why we’re against Black people, because I’m going to tell my supervisor that my colleague tried to help a Black family, because as an agency we investigate White families in a different way than we do Black families. Because when we try to talk to most Black people, they won’t come, thinking, I don’t want anyone to hear me say that. (meeting on racial disproportionality, ACS headquarters, February 2012)

I heard similar remarks on other occasions, especially during meetings with antiracism groups. These outbursts usually generated a block in communication that was difficult to remove because of the censor mechanisms that intervene when racism is directly and relationally addressed. If, however, they were made in a “safe” place, like during antiracism meetings, these remarks were added to the “healing” dimension of the group, whereas they caused much consternation in more formalized places and spaces. In my interviews with a former director of CWOP, Robert, I asked him how he felt as a White man to be the director of a community-based organization deeply rooted in East Harlem, in which users and advocates were mainly women of color. He reiterated that his presence at CWOP was only temporary, dictated by the need to financially stabilize the association. He felt strongly that the contradiction of his racial, gender, and class identity with his role at CWOP led him to occupy a less visible space in the organization, leaving interactions with families to parent advocates. In the following excerpt, Robert narrates a mo-

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ment in which he silenced himself when another social worker made biased and stigmatizing comments regarding child welfare clients: I mean, it’s complicated. Just because I’m comfortable, I can’t take for granted that people feel comfortable with me and everything is okay; and every once in a while something will happen that will make me very aware that I am the only White person in the room, and I was not thinking about that until this happens. Like for example, we were in a meeting with ACS last week where the only two White people in the room were me and A., and all the ACS staff were people of color, and one of them was speaking in a way that was very hateful and racist, was speaking a kind of “welfare queen” stereotype about the family she serves, and she was talking about them in a very negative way. You know, the kind of stuff that Gingrich says, that they are parasites, they are like leeches on society, that they just take, take, take, and they don’t even take care for their kids and . . . that was one of those moments when I felt very consciously being the only White people in the room because, what do you say? What do you say when the person saying this is Black? How do you confront without sounding like, “I understand your people better than you do,” you know? How do you address that in a way she can really hear, not just dismiss what you say, you know? (personal interview at CWOP, March 2012)

He decided not to challenge the caseworker’s opinion because of their different racial identities, as he feared she wouldn’t have listened to what a White man had to say about her mainly Black and Brown clients. Racial categories and belonging, as seen in Robert’s story, become material obstacles in, ironically, questioning the same racialized trope of the “welfare queen” and “unfit parent” that the caseworker seemed to evoke. I presented these last two vignettes to illustrate how processes of racialization and institutional racism are silenced in the child welfare system and how their unfolding or interruption manifests in different settings and in different ways. Michael Taussig theorized an intimate connection between the mechanism of silencing and the emergence of a “public secret” in a determined cultural and social context. As something simultaneously present and absent, a public secret refers to “what is generally known, but cannot be articulated, a collective practice of knowing what to not know” (Taussig 1999: 5). Taussig connected the existence of public secrets to power structures: wherever there is power, there is secrecy, or public secrecy, something “fated to maintain the verge where the secret is not destroyed through exposure, but subject to a revelation that does justice to it” (Taussig 1999: 8).

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Like Taussig, I think about racialization and racism in this ethnographic study as revealing the “secretly familiar” aspect that traverses the whole social fabric in the United States. As something that is “made transparent, invisible, monumentally significant, and immaterial” (Cox and Davis 2012: 103), depending on the context, race(ism) continues to have a central place in social and political life in the United States. The attention to the data on racial disproportionality, rather than gender or class, could even be seen as an example of the “narrative structure” that “establish[es] racial disparity discourse as lingua franca of inequality studies in the United States” (Reed and Chowkwanyun 2012: 153). As a result, policy discussions seem to ignore how other differences interlock, reciprocally reinforcing their impact and the dynamics of discrimination. Despite, or perhaps because of, its relevance and predominance compared to other dimensions, the “racial” issue in the child welfare system remains “unspeakable,” especially in policy and professional circles. In other words, race and, more importantly, racialization/racism are elements “hidden in plain sight” in child welfare institutions, practices, and discourses. As the judge and Michael recommended, antiracism workshops could be used as a tool to talk and learn about race and institutional racism. However, what emerged from these workshops showed that there was discomfort and embarrassment in “talking about race.” This embarrassment has both an ethical (the risk of accidentally reinforcing racial categories) and relational motivation (the fear of saying the wrong thing and alienating personal and professional relationships), but it is precisely “our inability in naming the racial issue which implies an obligation to think about it” (Fassin and Fassin 2006: 20, my translation). While racial issues are identified and ever-present in US public debate, they are nevertheless hard to grasp and tackle in the policy sphere. Race configures itself as an “unmanageable object”— or as a former director of CWOP said, as “political dynamite”—when discussed in institutional and professional settings, and especially in those of the child welfare system. Similarly, when I met with a professor of anthropology at Columbia University to show him my ongoing research in 2012, he compared the themes I was investigating to a “hot stove,” something that as a researcher, he preferred, understandably, not to touch. What made the discussion even more complicated was the plurality of aspects that converge in the child welfare system and its perception, which can involve children’s rights and the definition of what is considered abuse and neglect, public management of family intimacy, the

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social and cultural normalization of family structure, the historical role of the welfare state, gender configurations, and the material conditions of existence in specific urban arrangements. These elements have always been racialized, even when this racialization took place through voluntary silencing (Davis 2007; Federico 2004). While discussions around race and racism in institutional settings may have created embarrassment among the Black and Latinx parents and caseworkers I met, they were still everyday topics of conversation. During my fieldwork, I heard several parents denouncing the highly discriminatory attitude of institutions and the almost exclusive presence of Black families in the system. In places such as the parent support group, discussion of racialization and racism did not provoke embarrassment and denial, as in other contexts, but were treated as an obvious constant background. The issue of racism was raised by the participants of the support group and was addressed assertively, without doubt or hesitation, because they knew it would resonate with the people in the room. Expressions such as “If I were White, my children would have been home for years by now” were followed by a series of nodding heads. There have been numerous occasions when parent advocates themselves saw delayed reunification as deriving from racism, especially when the parent had completed the rehabilitation program. Some of the parent advocates were connected to an antiracist network in the institutional world, and they shared their reading of structural and institutional racism with the parents. These interpretative resources were employed as self-narration guidelines and as problemsolving methods for “antiracist” strategies. When, for example, one of the mothers in the support group told a parent advocate about her difficult relationship with the therapist she had been assigned by social services (the therapist did not speak Spanish and did not know anything about the cultural context of the woman in question, Puerto Rican), the parent advocate advised her to implement an “antiracist strategy.” She suggested the mother look for a therapist who spoke Spanish—a Latina or even better a Puerto Rican—who would be able to understand the woman’s problems without pathologizing her. Parent advocates were able to suggest to the parents how to orient themselves and which organizations to count on concerning their cultural affiliations. Asked about racial disproportionality, Natalie, a former African American ACS caseworker, saw this definition as almost laughable considering how obvious it was. This term and related initiatives seemed to Natalie to be a form of hypocrisy, a patina of superficial concern for something people working in the field considered self-evident and the

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natural product of a social structure based on White supremacy. Natalie was convinced that revealing the scale of racial disproportionality would not lead to a solution anyway. According to her, the issue was not the overrepresentation of Blacks in the child protection system but the almost total absence of Whites. The White population—which in New York, it should be reiterated, means the wealthiest—escaped institutional control thanks to a series of devices based on material and ideological privilege. According to Natalie, the history of child welfare coincided with the history of White domination in the United States. She identified the contemporary form of child welfare as a direct descendant of slavery. As long as the administrative figures of child welfare agencies continued to be White, racial disproportionality would remain the obvious outcome of all policing institutional systems. Natalie was one of my interlocutors who most openly expressed a type of discourse that is quite common in the Black community but which remains a topic that is difficult to discuss with people belonging to the White majority. In the support groups, as well as my interviews, parents used racism as an interpretative resource to rationalize the actions of a system perceived as controlling and punitive instead of helpful. Only seeing one’s own “race” in all the stages of child welfare (the court, the support group, the parenting classes, the foster care agencies) made the presence of racial disproportionality a ubiquitous element of the anthropological landscape. This was made explicit by an episode I witnessed. During one support group session, a new mother, a White woman in her fifties, entered. She was one of the few White people I had seen in a year of the weekly group and the only one on at that particular meeting. When Gabriela, one of the parent advocates, came into the room to start the group, she looked at her curiously and somewhat inquisitively and asked her if she was a new social worker; but the woman replied that social services had removed her son from her custody because of alleged sexual abuse. The woman was agitated and outraged at what the ACS was doing to her family and considered their accusations absurd and unfounded. The woman became even angrier when other people advised her to follow the court’s instructions and refrain from suing ACS until her son was returned to her. The woman reacted badly to this, arguing that she could not take all the classes the court had ordered her to because she worked for a major law firm in Midtown. The argument escalated into an altercation and the woman, visibly shaken, left, slamming the

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door violently. The women who remained in the group looked at each other in a knowing way and, after asking me what she had said (she had only spoken to me one-on-one without any solicitation from my side), they concluded she could not accept bending to the same rules as the other women because, as Gabriela said, “she saw that we all look alike,” meaning that all the other mothers were Black. As Faye Harrison has highlighted, the concept of “race” has shifted from being “one of political oppression” to one of “political participation and emancipation” following the civil rights movement (Harrison 1995: 61). This transformation and its incorporation into the language of the state responded, at least rhetorically, to the need of public policies to combat inequalities. But even if this attempt to move toward a postracial society had been incorporated into institutions and wider governance (especially in the Obama years of my research), the striking racial disparities present in every aspect of social life, from household income to prison population to health care (Davis 2019), tell a different story. They clearly show the historical continuity of the US racial formation (Omi and Winant 1994) as being rooted in White supremacy and the hierarchy of access to citizenship that marks current forms of US racial capitalism.

The Intersectional Nature of Inequalities in the Child Welfare System Isolating racial disproportionality data could run the risk of enacting “welfare racism” unintentionally, creating the idea that welfare policy only affects BIPOC populations, similar to what happened to AFDC and TANF (see chapter 1). Here, this perverse effect is even more dangerous because the stereotype is not just of the “welfare queen” but also of the monstrous “abusive parent.” The data of racial disproportionality, if not adequately contextualized in the broader framework of intersecting inequalities in the social and urban fabric, could offer an opportunity to reinstate the discourse on pathological and unfit Black parenthood. Explicit or silenced, the issue of racial disproportionality still represents an open wound in the US debate on the child welfare system, which makes researching it all the more troublesome. In conclusion, if it is true that the concept of race holds a “polyvalent mobility” (Stoler 1995), which is played out and signified differently depending on the context, racism is a social relation articulating

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power, which “transforms certain forms of perceived differences, generally regarded as indelible and unchangeable, into inequality” and “works through modes of dispossession” (Mullings 2005a: 684). In this regard, Leith Mullings also reminds that racism works through coercion but also consent and that it is always “interwoven with other forms of inequality, particularly class, gender, sexuality, and nationality” (Mullings 2005a: 684). Racial inequalities in the United States have always had a fundamentally socioeconomic dimension, so focusing solely on the racial factor becomes an unhelpful, if not misleading, analysis. The overrepresentation of the Black population is information that, if extrapolated from the social context from which it is generated, can become extremely problematic and easy to manipulate. To “de-reify” racial disproportionality, it is therefore important to recognize how it is not inscribed a priori in the social order but has been helped by a series of structural and intersecting factors affecting Black and Latinx urban communities. Some of these factors include income inequalities, scarcity of resources, access to the labor market, urban segregation, the concentration of informal economies in impoverished neighborhoods, the mass incarceration of African American men, gendered stereotypes about Black women, the disintegration of family cohesion due to economic and employment precariousness, and racialized representations of urban marginality. As we have seen, racial disproportionality in other public institutions created to assist and simultaneously to control the population reproduces itself with the same morphology. To read the data that shows the massive overrepresentation of children of color in foster care, it is necessary to acknowledge the legacy of White supremacy and anti-Black racism as a systemic force that still affects society. These forces can and do lead to state-sanctioned violence, not just in blatant ways like policing but also in social services, which act within the framework of what Savannah Shange has called “carceral progressivism” (Shange 2019). As I will describe subsequently, people living in low-income and racialized neighborhoods are surveilled and policed by institutions in a very different way from wealthier and White families. Their status within the social and racial geography of the city and their necessity to rely on public services such as hospitals, schools, and welfare offices expose them to a much higher probability of being investigated by ACS. The hypersurveillance they endure is paired with racialized and stigmatizing representations of poor mothers that often inform state agents’ conduct, as they are seen as the sole individuals responsible for child-rearing, and consequently abuse and neglect when they occur (Kennedy 2011; Lee 2016). The double-edged sword of being institutionally surveilled and

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socially neglected contributes to the reproduction of racialization and racist stereotypes regarding child welfare recipients. We can imagine racial disproportionality as a piece of fabric: its strength depends on the density of its texture, or how multiple threads intersect with each other. If we individually take each of the elements I just described, it is easier to understand how the fabric of “racial disproportionality” comes to exist as a phenomenon in the social arena. Likewise, it is also clear how difficult it would be to undo the fabric by pulling just one thread. This one thread could be focusing on the pure data of racial disproportionality per se or intervening exclusively in the realm of the child welfare system. All these dilemmas are made even more problematic by the urgency of decision-making for which any case of suspected child maltreatment calls, along with the policies implemented to allow safe and responsible interventions in situations of danger. The way these threads are tied can be seen in people’s experiences and ways of thinking about inequalities. Gabriela, a Puerto Rican Black mother and grandmother in her fifties, had a life of great suffering: she came from a poor family, as a teenager she briefly crossed the juvenile justice system, she lost her first teenage son in a shooting, and she had numerous problems with her second child, which involved ACS several times. Gabriela had a pragmatic and proud attitude: she was very reserved but extremely astute in understanding the parents for whom she advocated, often anticipating the features of their ACS cases and suggesting the most suitable paths for solving their issues. In an interview, she answered my question about racial disproportionality simply and eloquently, highlighting its connections with the conceptions and conditions in which people who deal with child welfare live daily: Me: Why do you think just 3 percent of the children in the New York system are White? Gabriela: Cause the system was made just for poor people, and this is how they get money. Rich get rich from the poor, you know? (personal interview at CWOP, October 2012)

For Gabriela, Whites are rich, and Blacks are poor. It was evident to her that the two conditions matched and did not require further explanation. Gabriela’s understanding of “racial relations” is rooted in her experiences of living in East Harlem. In rationalizing racial disproportionality, Gabriela limits herself to acknowledging the gap she has always experienced first-hand, which is based on the correspondence between class- and race-based inequalities.

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So, the “elephant in the room” of race(ism) was always accompanied by other faithful “companions” in structuring inequalities: gender and class. The majority of people I met during fieldwork and especially at the support group were mothers, as mothers and/or grandmothers were often the only parental figure(s) for their children, and they were interacting with state institutions by virtue of such a social identity.6 Scholars of stratified reproduction and the reproductive justice movement have highlighted how mass incarceration, widespread unemployment, premature death, disinvestment in public services, and environmental justice are all also reproductive issues that can heavily impact the lives of women and their possibility of maintaining stable family relationships with men (Ross and Solinger 2017). A matter of reproductive justice can also be seen in the maternalistic focus of the child welfare system, where child welfare agencies are not required or encouraged to inquire about fathers or involve fathers in the child’s case (Campbell et al. 2015). In this chapter, we have seen how initiatives and research on racial disproportionality, within the institutional and policy world, struggle to acknowledge the complex, layered, and intersectional dimensions of it. Institutional actors and their initiatives get stuck in the conundrums of race relations, forgetting that “by reducing racism to a question of discriminatory employers, lenders, and landlords, what is forsaken is an analysis of how the global city might function as a mechanism through which capital produces race as a socio-political category of distinction and discrimination in the first place” (Danewid 2020: 291), which is something I will explore later in a more detailed way. The fourth and most recent National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect, released in 2010 (Sedlak, McPherson, and Das 2010), found, for the first time, a significant difference in child abuse and maltreatment rates between the White and Black populations, showing that Black children suffer maltreatment more than 1.7 times as often as White children. The researchers explained this finding, which represented a new element compared to previous NIS studies, as a consequence of the growing gap between White and Black populations in terms of economic well-being, with African American families facing further economic decline compared to White families. The data collected reflects the growing economic and social inequality between racial groups and the more significant difficulties Black families face in their daily lives. Once again, race, class, and gender show their profound intersection in dictating the conditions for social reproduction.

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NOTES 1. Statistics are taken from the “OCFS Initiative to Address Racial Disproportionality in Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice,” NYS Office for Children and Family Services, New York, 2009. PDF accessible at: https://ocfs.ny.gov/ main/recc/presentations/OCFS-Racial-Disproportionality-in-Child-Wel fare-Juvenile-Justice.ppt. 2. Data was taken from the ACS Report on Youth in Foster Care, 2021, available at https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/acs/pdf/data-analysis/2021/ReportOn YouthInFC2021.pdf. 3. If this data is compared with that of the incidences of abuse and neglect reported to social services and validated by an investigation, the same findings emerge. If we look at an area like East New York, there were 2,450 cases investigated compared to 385 in the Park Slope area. In the following chapters, particularly in chapter 4, I discuss the dynamics that cause this discrepancy, particularly the greater institutional visibility that neighborhoods like Brownsville and East New York have compared to residential areas like Park Slope. 4. In this regard, is important to highlight again the origin of child welfare, borne not out of the will of the state but out of philanthropy initiatives of secular and religious organizations, traditionally the prerogative of the wealthier classes. 5. Note how, at the time of my research, the movement against racial profiling and the practice of Stop and Frisk were taking shape, also tying in with Occupy Wall Street. Since then, as a result of the deaths of several African American citizens at the hands of police officers, and the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, they have taken on a national and international dimension, merging into the Black Lives Matter movement. 6. In this regard, it is important to remind the reader that according to New York State Law, unmarried fathers who cannot pay child support are not permitted to take custody of a child if the mother has been accused of neglect or abuse. On the social and historical roots of the prevalence of female-headed families in African American communities, please refer to Mullings 1995; Dickerson 1995.

chapter 

Revolving Door The Work of Child Welfare in Making Parents Chronically Unfit

KKK Stratified Stigmas: Parents as Anti-Citizens

B

y the time Hanna decided to join the support group, she had been living in extreme hardship for some time and her last hopes of improving her situation were fading. Her three children had been in foster care for years, and Hanna had failed to prove to the judge and social workers that she had completed her rehabilitation. Her efforts had been deemed too intermittent, and her willingness to regain custody of her children too weak. The first time Hanna joined the support group, she barely looked at any of the other participants, wearing a blank and indifferent expression. When it was her turn to share her reasons for joining the group during the introductions, Hanna broke out into an excited monologue that ended in her crying uncontrollably. She also responded aggressively to the questions parent advocates and other parents asked her, raising her voice and moving incessantly and abruptly in her chair. Everything in her behavior, from her gestures to her inability to control her exasperation, indicated the state of frustration and panic that possessed her, so that even her ability to tell her story coherently became challenging. Hanna had been struggling with the child welfare system for years. Her life story was a collection of all the multiple stigmatizing aspects that can add up for users of the child welfare system. Hanna was a young African American woman from one of the poorest areas of Brooklyn. She was an unemployed single mother who suffered from drug addiction. Furthermore, she had been struggling for years with

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both bipolar disorder and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), had suffered domestic violence, and had been in foster care as a child. To make matters worse, all three of her children had been diagnosed with ADHD and thus required extra attention and resources, which Hanna was unable to provide. Hanna’s biographical trajectory was a sort of “mosaic of deviance” in which the different pieces become the epitome of the “anti-citizen” (Singh 2000). On the one hand, Hanna represented the negation and antithesis of the universalized model of motherhood, understood as protection, attention, unconditional love, and sacrifice (Twine 2000). On the other hand, she is identified as the sum of the structural violence facets faced in an urban context. The child welfare system takes charge of the parents’ problems exclusively, thought of as separate from their self/personhood/subjectivity. They are seen and treated by institutional devices through the “categories of deviance” they represent. This ends up engulfing the individuality of the person in question and underestimates the weight of the social and political conditions in which people like Hanna negotiate their “unfit citizenship.” As an interlocutor with a long-term involvement with the child welfare system repeatedly told me, the system does not view the children of people like Hanna as truly belonging to their families “by right.” States think about parenthood through the cultural, ideological, and social lenses that construct the idea of citizenship in each national context. BIPOC families in settler colonial societies and in Europe have always been placed at the margins of citizenship and represented as an opposition. The condition of structural inequality in which they live, as a result of dominating historical processes, often paints them as being unable to take care of themselves—in the sense of what Foucault (1988) understood as “technologies of the self”—and therefore of their children.1 When technologies of the self fail or are not properly incorporated by subjects, disciplining policies become the only possibility for interaction between institutions and people like Hanna. While Hanna seems the prototypical target of the child welfare system, she is also a woman, a mother, and a person who has articulated how oppressive her experience has been. Hanna constantly questioned herself in the face of the political dimension of her personal history. The experience of foster care in childhood meant she had interacted with institutions since the early years of her life. Her existence had always been conditioned by the state’s management of her. As Sennett points out, “inequality is such a fundamental element of human experience that individuals are constantly engaged in making sense of it” (Sennett

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2003: 104), and Hanna was forced to do this and work out how she was handled by institutions from an early age. It was precisely this awareness of how institutions viewed her that caused her to exclaim, “I don’t want to be yet another African American woman with mental health and addiction issues who is unable to take care of her own children!” This denotes both a form of reflexivity and a willingness to resist the mechanisms of epistemic violence exerted by the institutions with which she interacts and the stigmas they instill (Spivak 2004). Her words, pronounced with a sense of desperate vindication during the support group, symbolically marked the beginning of her path of regaining her own agency. Hanna was therefore not a passive subject suffering from the pathologizing effects of the “inner city”, such as drugs, violence, and the inability to handle motherhood. Rather, Hanna was a person caught in a constant struggle for her existence in a context in which she was thought of as antisocial, irresponsible, and dangerous. She has been overlooked, in the sense described by Homi Bhabha in this passage on the philosophical and political legacy of Frantz Fanon: “to be amongst those whose very presence is ‘overlooked’ in the double sense of social surveillance and psychic disavowal—and, at the same time, overdetermined—physically projected made stereotypical and symptomatic” (Bhabha 1991: 193). At the same time, Hanna began to understand how institutions operate. While her behavior was initially out of control and her anger unmanageable, over the months her attitude changed profoundly, as did her self-awareness and confidence. When Hanna first came to the group, the judge had recently begun the process of terminating her custody rights. This meant that, within a few months, Hanna would irreversibly lose her rights as a mother and the children would have been permanently adopted. In the various sessions, Hanna was alternately consoled, motivated, rebuked, understood, and counseled. Each week, I saw her become less bitter and more communicative, increasingly open and smiling. Within a few months, thanks to the advice of parent advocates, she was able to file a request for a reversion of custody rights—a fairly uncommon procedure to be undertaken in the child welfare system with the outcomes rarely successful—and she seemed optimistic about the possibility that the judge would grant it. Hanna was no longer the rebellious person I had seen before. She now moved with confidence, counseled other parents, and had a surprising sharpness and lucidity in anticipating the outcomes of other parents’ stories. Hanna was quick to learn what she would have to do to get

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her children back. She was the one who intervened in discussions after yet another parent became frustrated by the difficult-to-comprehend bureaucratic procedures of the system and the evaluations made by social workers and judges. She advised these parents to avoid hostility in the courtroom, to sit composedly, not to give the others present any skeptical or defiant looks, but to lower their gaze and raise it only when asked, with a smile. In her opinion, it was also essential to dress elegantly and soberly, not to give the slightest sign of restlessness or impatience, and to be enthusiastic about the educational opportunities provided by parenting-skills courses and the benefits of psychological therapy. Hanna was eager to help others once her training process was completed, suggesting to them how to perform compliance with child welfare professionals through displaying a disciplined behavior. In her first meetings, she saw social services as antagonists within her own personal narrative of lost family intimacy (as another mother put it, “When my kids were put in foster care, I taught them that ACS was the enemy; they had to ally with me, not ACS”). As time passed, she became more nuanced, adapting to the system’s requests and learning how to deal with them. At other times, however, Hanna seemed to have profoundly shifted her perspectives on the usefulness and importance of the services parents need. At the end of spring, after months in which Hanna’s presence at the support group had become constant and central because of the strength of her example, she triumphantly entered the group room singing, dancing, and excited so that everyone became interested in what she was so happy about. She said the judge had reviewed her case and decided to return to Hanna her parental rights and her children. There was a wave of emotion in the group; people hugged her, some crying, in a sort of collective catharsis and celebration of hope. Thereafter, Hanna appeared sporadically a few more times at the group. In the last meetings she participated in, she spoke of her preparation for her children’s return—how she had arranged their rooms, what plans she had made for their newfound time together, and what habits she planned to change. Even in her absence, she continued to be present in the words of the parent advocates and in those of the parents she had met, becoming a positive precedent for the possibilities of negotiation with the system and of reunification even in cases that seemed hopeless. In this context, the element that was most emphasized was Hanna’s change from an obstinate and bitter victim of the system to an irreproachable collaborator with it—a change that was considered the only viable response to the actions of the institutions. In this, the

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advice and support of parent advocates was crucial, as they were capable of changing her powerless anger to a sense of confidence and a capacity to deal with the system. The parents themselves were able to incorporate these changes, especially among those who, like Hanna, had been stuck in the system for a long time and who understood that a negative attitude would lead them to repeat their struggles with the institutions. The system would then evaluate their behavior as pathological, deviant, unproductive, and immoral, and it would continue to wield the power to impose its evaluation. When parents in the group realized this, they would often criticize those who seemed unable to understand and act within its rules. Their suspicion of parents who were more confident in their innocence was often reinforced by parent advocates, whose questions became more insistent if the parents’ answers to why child protective services had intervened in their case became vaguer. Often, a veteran mother or father in the group, who had already begun the process of understanding their own positioning within the system, would continue to shake their head during this type of dialogue between a new parent and the parent advocates. They would then intervene with vigor, emphasizing how the attitude of the parent in question was the wrong one, how he/she could not think he/she was right and simply blame a system that, while fallacious and cruel, was functioning according to certain rules and which started from the identification of a problem. The parent’s refusal to recognize this problem, even if within the intimacy of other parents, represented the first and most insurmountable obstacle in the struggle for reunification between parents and children.2 On several occasions, I have witnessed discussions, even quite heated ones, between parents and parent advocates where the advocates sought for the parents to recognize the problem. Beyond the moral evaluation of one’s own “wrong” parental acts or behavior, this admission served to identify the problem and to begin to orchestrate strategies that would potentially resolve the case with institutional actors. Once they had admitted the problem, the path to empowerment and advocacy could start, and parent advocates and parents could begin to help the parent toward reunification. The expression by which many parents referred to this journey—“jumping through the hoops”—is not simply a hyperbolic way of referring to the troubled relationship with the state’s rehabilitative bureaucracy. In this case, it takes on a particular meaning, along with another common term: “juggling.” This latter expression is also often used by parents (yet another circus metaphor, parents are the “jugglers” for the extraordinariness of the social performance they enact) to emphasize

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the difficulty in reconciling the multiple fronts with which they must engage in order to regain custody of their children: maintaining financial stability, rehabilitating themselves as parents, attending to their new legal and bureaucratic life, and maintaining a good psychological and emotional balance during the process. The profound suffering caused by the removal of one’s own children triggers the onset of anxiety and panic among parents, making these the dominant mental states that drive the urgency of the rehabilitation performance and can frequently compromise its outcome. As I explained in the first chapter, ASFA only allowed fifteen months for parents to demonstrate their rehabilitation, which for those facing chronic physical and social suffering (such as from drug addiction, perpetrated homelessness, or a situation of domestic violence strongly rooted in family dynamics) is often not enough. To solve the many problematic aspects that mark the lives of these parents, social services thus ask parents to make an extraordinary effort, solving at the same time economic, relational, psychological, emotional, and physical problems. The performance required of parents is further complicated by the low level of trust institutions have in the racialized, low-income communities to which the families belong. This distrust is seen in the language, assumptions, and practices that characterize the institutional world and separates them from more marginal urban communities, and it is experienced by parents simultaneously as a source of discomfort, which often truncates the possibility of cooperation from the beginning. The general attitude toward child protective services is partly comparable to the police, whose function in the community is seen as both necessary and harmful. What I noticed conducting fieldwork is how the child welfare system is similarly conceptualized by recipients as a device for community control and punishment while recognizing the necessity of its existence and its actions to protect minors from abuse and neglect. As Mary, a mother in the system, told me, “I understand nobody wants to be soft on child abuse, and I understand that it is a horrible thing, but you have to be solution-oriented, and the system is not solution-oriented. Snatching kids doesn’t solve the problem; snatching and sticking them in foster care isn’t a solution—it’s a quick fix.” What is contested, therefore, is not its function but how its intervention is structured. With the child welfare system’s invasive and harsh measures toward parents and the widespread opinion that foster families are not subjected to the same level of scrutiny biological parents endure, the antagonistic feeling that inhabits interactions between these kinds of communities and institutions is reinforced, rather than

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mitigated, during each interaction with the system. But what exactly are the “hoops of fire” through which these parents must jump? In fact, it is not simply a matter of courses and classes to attend or programs to follow, but it modifies life rhythms and priorities, which can damage fragile economic and work balances, in addition to the shame, guilt, and blame parents go through. Once a case of abuse or neglect has been substantiated by social services, the parent is faced with multiple tasks. First, he or she must understand what is required of him/her by social services and whether the case of neglect or abuse is serious enough for CPS to be authorized by the judge to remove the child/children. If removal is avoided, the parent will still be referred to programs—usually parenting classes or anger management—that are mandatory to maintain custody of the children. In some cases, Family Court supervision will still be required and the parent(s) in question will be asked to appear at scheduled hearings to verify their compliance with the services identified by ACS. In the case of removal, on the other hand, the parent must complete several tasks relative to the severity of the charge. First, parents must ensure they will be present in Family Court during hearings and comply with the steps to be taken to move toward reunification. Second, they must attend, and testify through certifications of participation, parenting rehabilitation courses, anger management classes, domestic violence counseling, and so on. This means committing to at least two courses per week and ensuring an average of between four and six hours per week for the various courses. Regularly, however, these courses are flanked by other activities, such as rehabilitation programs in the case of drug addiction, often accompanied with individual and/ or family therapy, which can also be pharmacological. In the meantime, parents must commit to seeing their children regularly. This can be left to the freedom of the parent, as in the case of Mary, who had entrusted her daughter to some friends and visited her daily, trying to spend as much time as possible with her. In other cases, a court order can prohibit parents from seeing their children beyond the hours set by the judge. These meetings almost always take place in small rooms overcrowded with other families in foster care agencies—a traumatizing and humiliating environment for parents and children. Furthermore, they are always supervised by the agency’s social worker, who assesses the quality of interactions between parents and children. Sometimes the agency pairs the social worker with a professional figure called a visiting coach, who is charged with guiding parents and children toward satisfactory and complete communication. For biological parents, there is also the option of bringing a visiting host such as a

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friend or family member to participate in the meeting. This strategy is often used by parents and encouraged by parent advocates if there has been a hostile relationship with the social worker or with foster parents in which the biological parent feels that he or she is being penalized and portrayed negatively by the other two participants, making the meeting with the children unpleasant and frustrating for both parties. In addition to visiting the agency or more informal locations, the parent is often mandated to attend family therapy that requires them to work with a therapist or family coach and usually involves the foster care family. In summary, the possible commitments a parent must maintain with child welfare are scheduled or free visits, individual therapy, family therapy, parenting rehabilitation courses, any substance abuse rehabilitative programs, any anger management/domestic violence prevention courses, and court appointments. Maintaining these many commitments creates several challenges for families. First, work schedules don’t always accommodate all these appointments. Many parents enter the child welfare system with employment (albeit mostly underpaid and precarious) and lose it in the process because the commitment required by the child welfare system ends up taking precedence over employment (see also Lee 2016). This obviously worsens the economic situation of families, often already struggling with a life that is around the poverty line. Moreover, most mothers in child welfare benefit from public assistance, or rather from TANF. Once children are placed in foster care, mothers lose these benefits and find themselves without any form of secure income. Meeting the demands of social services and the courts while simultaneously seeking employment can be a daunting task, so some mothers are unable to escape the child welfare system and end up losing custody of their children (Roberts 2002). Another problematic aspect is that of dealing with drug addiction. While it is true that an entrenched form of addiction can indeed jeopardize the well-being of children, it is particularly difficult, especially for mothers, to break free from it following removal. When they are left alone with the desolation of an empty home, having to deal with their own sense of failure and inadequacy coupled with the stress of untangling the complicated and demanding bureaucracy of child welfare, their addiction can be exacerbated. Brianna, one of my interlocutors, now in her midfifties and rehabilitated several years ago from a crack addiction that began during the peak years of the so-called crack epidemic (Watkins and Fullilove 2000), told me about the arduous task of breaking free from her addiction just as her children were being taken away by social services. She asked me how she could be expected to be

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able to get clean at the most desperate time of her life. Rehabilitation programs that do not remove children from their parents but instead provide in-home care for parents and families are hypothetically as viable a solution as foster care. Despite this, caseworkers rarely opt for this solution, instead preferring preventative removal of the children, even if the parents are functional addicts who have learned to manage their addiction in such a way that they can attend to their daily tasks. It is important to remember that one can risk removal even for using soft drugs such as marijuana or hashish alone. The fifteen-month period usually proves too short for a complete rehabilitation and usually involves at least one relapse. Brianna lost custody of some of her seven children because of this, and the same has happened to many other mothers I have met who have forever compromised the possibility of reunification with their children because of a single relapse. Domestic violence cases are another example of how the wheels of the child welfare system end up being punitive toward parents. Recently, New York State law has also included the exposure of children to domestic violence as a form of child maltreatment, so that even the victimized partner is liable to prosecution from the moment he or she has failed to protect the children from being exposed to such violence. Aihwa Ong, within her discussion of Cambodian family regulation regimes in the United States through welfare technologies, has highlighted how the feminist approach, which some social services have incorporated in recent times, pushes for women to break their “acquired dependency” by resisting male oppression, even by dividing the family if necessary (Ong 2003: 163). However, this process of female empowerment is not free from cultural conditioning; associating them with characteristics of passivity and weakness, it tends to undermine the status of these women, most of whom are immigrants and/ or of color. I have observed cases where the minimum requirement for reunification was the end of the relationship with the partner because it was deemed dangerous for the well-being of the children and identified as an indicator of the psychological instability of the victim who was lingering in a self-destructive relationship. Women who denounce their partners are temporarily relocated, with their children, to shelters while waiting for their economic situation to be rebalanced. The permanence in the shelter system could sometimes be more harmful than beneficial. In fact, within these structures, women are subject to a regime of visibility and surveillance far greater than that of the intimacy of their private homes. For this reason, some of the women I met who dared to denounce their partner came into contact with the ACS

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once they entered the shelter system, where they were then referred to preventive services. They face intense scrutiny when the domestic violence services put them in a position where, in addition to facing the enormous difficulties of overcoming the trauma of abuse and the reconstruction of the family fabric, they must monitor their behavior without making mistakes. Leaving minors alone in the shelter, for example, can represent the beginning of a neglect case and reintroduce the family to the tribulations of the child welfare system. This situation occurred with one of the mothers who attended the support group. Relocated to a shelter following several incidents of domestic violence that she reported to social services, she found herself facing a case with ACS shortly after entering the shelter after a caseworker had noted her children had been left unattended there. Although it was only for a short time, the woman’s protests did not stop Child Protective Services from opening a file on her. Understandably, some women are reluctant to seek social services because they are fearful of the unintended consequences that such an action might entail (Davis 2012). In conclusion, in an attempt to reconfigure these unfit mothers into “mythical mothers” who do not feel anger toward their children, who never lose control, and who do not use drugs (Twine 2000), the devices employed by the state are diverse but always individualizing. They make a complex entanglement of socially related risk factors into an individual problem, while lacking the necessary attention toward individuality, understood as the uniqueness of the social, intersubjective, and political experience of the subjects with whom they deal. Motherhood, on the other hand, as pointed out by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “is far from universal and innate and instead represents an ideological and symbolic representation rooted in the basic material conditions that define women’s reproductive lives” (Scheper-Hughes 1992: 401).

Blame or Medicalize: Comparing Two Alternative Approaches Paul Farmer’s research has sought to answer “through what mechanisms social forces ranging from poverty to racism come to be incorporated as individual experiences” (Farmer 2006: 24). A clear example of how this dynamic not only takes place but is rewritten into practices of the normalization of social suffering through the pathologization of individual suffering is well illustrated by the mental health policies of the child welfare system. These show, in fact, the “iatrogenic effects” the interaction with certain institutions generates in individuals. Susan B. Hyatt reminds us that under medicalization regimes aimed partic-

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ularly at mothers because of their key role in forming the first political unit in society (Foucault 2006), women are reduced from their totality as persons to a compendium of signs and symbols for which appropriate therapies can be dispensed and administered (Hyatt 1999). Through the lens of medical anthropology, the child welfare system shows how the identification of dysfunctional behaviors occurs within institutions regulating and constructing citizenship and how this intersects with economic, social, and cultural processes (Ong 2003). Within the procedures of “risk assessment” made by social workers investigating abuse or neglect (Scherz 2011), there is also a “mental evaluation” for both children and parents. For some, mental disorders cause them to abuse or mistreat their children, and the child welfare devices actually allow them to utilize therapeutic paths to which they previously would not have had access. However, the diagnosis of a syndrome can sometimes be followed by the removal of the children, even if it is a syndrome that arose from the intervention of child services by removing their children. The system thus proposes treatment for pathologies that came from its presence in the life of their “client.” The numerous depressive and traumatic syndromes that can occur after separation from one’s own children can become an obstacle to reunification, as the parent ends up entering an iatrogenic spiral in which the worsening of their condition corresponds to a lesser chance of reunification. A striking example of this can be seen in the case of a woman I met at CWOP. Following a case with the ACS due to excessive corporal punishment, her children had been placed in foster care and she had been referred to an “anger management” course, which was followed by a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Although the woman was committed to attending classes and using therapy, she saw the goal of reunification receding further and further as, at the end of each course, the judge ordered her to attend another one, not judging her to be psychologically ready for reunification. As a result, the woman’s condition worsened with each anger management course that followed, and she became increasingly frustrated and bitter. The paradox here is not an uncommon phenomenon in child welfare system cases. In my many conversations with John, a psychotherapist who supervises the cases that social workers submit to him and who, in rare cases, works directly with the families involved, has repeatedly been perplexed about the excessive medicalization enacted by the child welfare system. In his words, the problem is not only the excessive pathologization of the psychological state induced by living in a condition of constant deprivation and lack of resources, but also the total lack of prevention and attention to how psychotic syndromes

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can develop before the encounter with social services. The context in which this—often unique—encounter with mental health services takes place amplifies the coercive aspect and symbolic violence that all psychiatric devices imply. Instead of being about care and prevention or a voluntary request for support, the diagnosis and medicalization are imposed on parents who are trying to regain their custody rights. This means the therapeutic process—even when it is necessary—is strongly opposed by parents, who are unable—and unwilling—to see the opportunity, seeing it only as an imposition. When a diagnosis prolongs reunification, the psychological condition of the parents worsens considerably. They experience, on the one hand, the frustration from being unable to free themselves from the system and, on the other, the anxiety and guilt related to the deterioration of their mental health. They fear the rehabilitation deadline and the consequent revocation of their custodial rights. The feeling of failure from seeing themselves as the cause of the children’s removal is often further exacerbated by the failure of their own psychoemotional resources to cope with the situation. This triggers a spiral of depression that, in addition to the family sphere, ends up affecting their general existence, making them lose confidence in their emotional, work, and productive capacities. In describing this dynamic, it is difficult to understand how a coercive psychotherapeutic intervention in this situation can be designed to be as sustainable as possible. In this regard, Mary, who struggled for years with a war-induced PTSD syndrome after serving in Iraq as a soldier, expressed her resentment toward how the child welfare system couldn’t deal with her mental condition and kept “waving a finger” and accusing her of being a bad mother. In the excerpt below, she explains why, in her opinion, parents resist ACS services so strongly: When you are ordered to do something, you’re so angry at these people for invading your life anyway, you’re gonna be resistant and defiant and resilient to do the opposite of what these people say, even if it’s good for you. Because by mandating, it’s just packaged in a way that is distasteful, you’re so angry at the world at that point, whether you are an abusive parent or not, you are angry at the world because they are accusing you of being abusive. Even abusive parents don’t believe they are abusive. (personal interview, Central Park, 12 October 2012)

However, a psychotherapeutic journey does not always prove more harmful than beneficial. In some cases, individual therapy becomes a fundamental resource for parents to reinvent their roles as mothers and fathers and to acquire a “new awareness” of themselves. Both Mary and Jennifer, for example, told me how they benefited enormously

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from the relationship with their therapist, being able to reflect not only on aspects of their behavior and character but also explicitly facing for the first time the several traumas that had marked their lives. Mary was able to face some past experiences of abuse and partially overcome the traumatic experience of the war in Iraq, thanks to the help of her therapist and her commitment to her studies. Jennifer was able to cope with an obsessive-compulsive behavior she had developed during a period of intense stress but was nonetheless still struggling to get her children back at the time of my research. The greatest difficulty, according to the mothers I spoke to, was facing such difficult challenges, like overcoming extremely painful previous experiences, in a moment of such crisis and insecurity. In fact, it is not difficult to find women with cases with ACS who have unresolved trauma from their past, usually attributable to abuse of various kinds suffered at the hands of family members or partners. Some of the mothers I observed at the support group and in court had themselves been children in foster care, like in the case of Hanna, just as some of the early single mothers I met were daughters of early single mothers. Family histories were investigated by social services to find previous cases of mental illness in the person’s life or family, especially if the parent had been diagnosed with a pathology. In fact, the most astute parents avoided revealing too many details about their past (“good parents keep their mouth shut,” as Mary told me), knowing that anything told to social workers could be used against them. Many parents, on the other hand, naively told the social worker about previous episodes of psychotic events and manifestations, family traumas, and past addictions, only to suddenly see their situation deteriorate and suspicion toward them increase. At that point, social services require technical proof of their suspicion, either through a psychiatric evaluation or drug testing. Coline Cardi (2007), in her ethnography of problematic mothers in French social services, notes how social workers and educators operate a sort of essentialization of deviance, starting from certain signs of psychological distress that are extended to the overall behavior of mothers and through which their defective motherhood is reframed. This grid of potential pathology, which the social services apply to their subjects, is a common tool in public apparatuses to control the population. In this case, it is in mothering behaviors that these pathogenic signs are to be traced: the family past is reinterpreted in the light of this aspect, transforming every element of it into a risk factor. One of these signs in the parents’ history was, ironically, if they had been in foster care as children. In fact, ACS is more likely to judge parents who have grown up in foster care as emotionally and morally unstable, and so the scru-

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tiny and surveillance of their parenting behavior increases. This aspect is one of the many paradoxical elements of the child welfare system. Caseworkers are aware of what growing up in a temporary family entails in terms of emotional, psychological, and existential balance, adding the experience of foster care as an additional risk factor for parents in an investigated case. The uncertainty and insecurity of the bonds children develop in foster care families, which often change several times, make them more fragile subjects. What appears to be an almost textbook example of structural violence is the reproduction of similarly precarious family conditions once these former children become parents, along with the further penalization that such a past entails for those parents should they, in turn, be investigated by social services. Fernandez and Lézé (2011) describe the psychiatric care of inmates in French prisons as a process of the conversion of the patient into a moral person, given that their status as prisoners implicitly places them outside the boundaries of the moral economy that regulates the political context; namely that of vulnerability and protection of bodily integrity. It is not in the prerogatives of psychiatric devices and mental health services to constitute a true moral education, although, according to the two authors, they end up acting as such. Medical and psychiatric care reinserts them into the moral economy of vulnerability as it humanizes them (Fernandez and Lézé 2011). This moral economy of vulnerability is thus first and foremost inscribed in a political order that constructs a specific form of humanity and makes it desirable. Just like Fernandez and Lézé’s prisoners, parents in the child welfare system must move through this educational process toward correct morality. This goal is achieved not only by the therapeutic accompaniment but also by the numerous courses in parenting rehabilitation, anger management, and education in the emotional relationship with their children. In the web of what Polsky (1993) has called the “therapeutic state,” those who are seen as deviants become legitimate subjects of the state once again by passing through its technologies of citizenship. However, while going through this process—which, as we have said, is not explicitly designed as a moral education—people are reduced to the signs of their vulnerability. This is never expressed in an exclusively medical and objectifying way but instead charged with an ethical-moral value related to the status of an unfit mother or parent. People within the child welfare system, therefore, suffer from two types of disapproval: that of their biological and social role as parents, which can be legally questioned and lead to the removal of children from their custody, and that of their

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psychological functionality, which needs to be cared for and managed by the mental health services. To try to cope with these complex dynamics, the clinical paradigm that more and more child welfare services are adopting is one centered on the category of trauma. The shift from psychiatric diagnosis to trauma recognition tries to avoid blame and the stigma associated with mental illness by focusing on the causes that may have given rise to pathological behavior and unfit parenting. This approach can be extremely useful in identifying an event of abuse and violence that can be the origin of a disorder and craft an informed and targeted therapeutic intervention in cases such as those of domestic violence, which are not always detectable. However, this attention toward trauma, also strongly encouraged by empowerment and advocacy associations, doesn’t necessarily go beyond the individualizing and depoliticizing dimension of medicalization in the treatment of individuals whose suffering originates in the social and political context (Fassin 2007; Young 1997), and doesn’t move toward a recognition of the need for system change rather than just personal change.

Spatial Proximity and Issues of Trust between Parents and Caseworkers Not working with children obviously impeded a thorough assessment of their journey within the child welfare system, and this clearly limits the analytical outcome of this research. However, as this is not a technical evaluation of child protective services but rather an insight into how certain forms of inequalities are reproduced and understood through the prism of institutional action, my lack of interviews with children did not affect my research aims. I did not just focus on the parents’ conditions but also analyzed the child welfare apparatus, recognizing the pervasive epistemologies and repertoires shaping its methods. Those who emerge as the most powerful actors are the figures higher up on the institutional ladder: judges, administrators, directors of large private and public social agencies, and researchers. These are the figures who are called upon and authorized to speak about the seriousness of child abuse and neglect, the social and preventive policies designed by the welfare state, and even to denounce the marginalization suffered by families and children dealing with child protection services. Those who often remain outside the discursive area and the “game of true and false” (Foucault 2004) are the caseworkers—or rather those who put child welfare into practice—who go into people’s homes at

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all hours of the day and night to verify a report of abuse/neglect and possibly proceed with emergency removal. Briggs and Mantini-Briggs have noted how “scholars have focused on how courts impose and discipline social categories, thereby shaping what happens in court as well as identities, practices, and social relations in a wide range of institutions and beyond them” (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2000: 309). They analyzed the case of Herminia Gomez, a Warao woman employed as a maid for a family in Venezuela, who was accused of infanticide. The case was marred by violence and institutional racism, social suffering, and culturalist prejudice, which led to a guilty verdict. The court’s power to reinforce and reproduce social and cultural categories becomes even more relevant when standards of motherhood are at the center of the discussion. The Family Courts I visited over the course of my research were indeed very signified spaces and revealed the kind of racialized, gendered, and classed power dynamics of the child welfare system. When I first went to court, I noticed that caseworkers were not, at least superficially, very different from their clients. They were mostly African American and Latina women, modestly dressed, who sat quietly in courtrooms, and whose spokespeople were lawyers, mostly White, assigned to represent the ACS before the judge. By meeting some of these women during the research, I began to understand the hierarchy—in turn, built on economic, cultural, educational, and, not least, racial axes—that configured the space of power within child welfare. The people brought to court were mostly young women of color and, likewise, their accusers were also young women of color who worked for the ACS. On either side sat the attorneys. The minors’ law guardians were almost always from the Legal Aid Society, a nonprofit organization that advocates for children’s rights. They were mostly men and fairly young women. The parent attorneys came from the three largest nonprofit agencies providing free legal representation to parents (young, multiracial women who were usually at the beginning of their careers) or were court-appointed attorneys (almost all White men in their forties and fifties). Judges and referees were almost always White men and women, usually over fifty years of age. The court thus represented an interesting dichotomy of power relations articulated through the institutional complex and built on differences of gender, class, age, and race. The job of caseworker has been described to me as an exhausting, time-consuming, and—in the long term—dehumanizing profession, which leads to an “exhaustion of compassion” typical of those in social work (Sennett 2003). As John, a psychiatric supervisor in an ACS

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agency told me, caseworkers “cannot feel too much,” especially if there are structural similarities between themselves and their clients. He also told me how, according to the caseworkers he supervised, it was not their work with families and children that “will dry you up and make you traumatized” but “the inhumanity of the system you’re working with; it’s the punitive, anxiety-driven procedures and just the daily routines that wear people down” (personal interview in Brooklyn, April 2012). Cheryl, an African American woman in her early forties who had worked her way up the ACS to a key position as a policymaker, described to me the feelings of frustration and the ethical dilemma she experienced when she was supervising caseworkers who were operating removals. In particular, she told me about an episode that was so shocking she resigned from ACS and worked for a few years at a foster care agency. One of her caseworkers had had to proceed with an emergency removal because she had found a crack pipe in the mother’s home for which a report had been made. The removed child was only a few months old and had been brought by her caseworker to the agency, pending a temporary placement. Despite the efforts of the social worker, the child, once taken from her mother’s arms, had cried continuously for hours, so much so that at one point Cheryl had to replace the caseworker, whose shift had ended. As she sat in the agency trying to comfort the baby, Cheryl could not stop thinking about her son, also only a few months old at the time, as she waited anxiously for her workday to end. The next day, following a sleepless night, which she spent crying with her baby in her arms, Cheryl resigned from ACS. Monica also talked to me about how her working as a caseworker had compromised her relationship with her young son, with the hours and intensity of her work convincing her to quit. I met Monica five years after she stopped working for ACS, so she could speak about her experience within the agency. In her words, the workload structure was so fragmented and heavy that caseworkers had neither the time nor the adequate knowledge to refer parents to services or to understand the family’s situation. According to Monica, the fear and discomfort of having to go to the homes of strangers and be treated as a threatening and hostile presence caused over time defensive feelings of detachment and hostility toward the people they served. The emotional distress caused by breaking up children from their parents was the origin of the reactive attitude developed by caseworkers, in her opinion. At the same time, the margin of freedom they had in deciding whether a family was suitable to care for their children led to feelings of disquiet rather than confidence among caseworkers, since it

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left them with the crucial responsibility of deciding on removal, which could lead to tragedy if decided against, which is why they often preferred to proceed with it instead. In the words of Monica, who interpreted the system as a form of exploitation and marginalization of minorities of color (see chapter 2), the harsh and emotional work of the caseworker was naturally left to women similar to those who ended up in the crosshairs of social services: Black women of the working class, themselves often single mothers like her. The young, White, single women who finished their master’s in social work aspired to managerial and administrative roles, finding themselves in positions of power early on and avoiding “field” experience. Monica did not think these dynamics were consciously put in place but were inscribed in the social order, redistributing the different professionals within the child welfare labor force. Processes of racialization are therefore mobile and translate into different dimensions of social space: among the users of the child welfare system, in its professional stratification, and in the spatial organization that underlies the intensity of institutional surveillance of citizens. During the research, I have met more than one parent who was investigated by ACS and, at the same time, had previously worked in a context in which she also responds to an institutional role as mandated reporter or was directly working in the child welfare system. The proximity between caseworkers and families with an ACS case was not only socioeconomic but also spatial, as caseworkers and parents were often neighbors. The proximity remained inscribed in the social make-up of the city but did not necessarily mean any form of empathy or solidarity on part of the caseworkers. But as Tina Lee noted in her ethnography (2016), sharing a neighborhood did not mean necessarily that caseworkers were free from perceiving their clients through the racially coded discourse of the culture of poverty. The lack of empathy toward people they lived nearby or even knew was expressed by Dorothy, a mother, activist, and parent advocate: “It’s sad for me to see someone who looks like me and who lives in the same community and shops at the same supermarket that made the decision to remove my children.” Akin to the policemen racially profiling, mentioned by Lipsky, this practice “arises not from official policy or direct racial orientations but out of the ways police officers draw on social stereotypes in exercising the discretion sanctioned by their departments” (Lipsky 2010: xiii). In the course of the research, I heard regularly the leitmotif that caseworkers had a morally superior attitude toward parents and wanted to distance themselves from the families with whom they worked.

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Lisa, a Puerto Rican woman in her forties who arrived in New York from Puerto Rico with her family when she was six years old, was shocked when she had a case with ACS because she did not think she fit into the image she had of parents involved in the child welfare system. Growing up in the Bronx in the eighties, she had faced the harsh reality of living in a complex of projects; but she was raised in a family who had a strong working-class identity and despised many of their neighbors, who often interacted with the child welfare agencies. To become a “parent with a case” caused her enormous shame initially but allowed her to rethink her own prejudices.

The Child Welfare System and the Reproduction of the Dual City As the internal differentiation of the labor force in the child welfare system, the dynamics between caseworkers and child welfare recipients and the data on the highest concentration of cases in a few districts show how the city reproduces social and racial inequalities, which are central to the phenomenology of the child welfare system. Global cities do not just reproduce core neoliberal dynamics but also racist, sociospatial relations that are constitutive of the city. It is not accidental that disproportionality is higher in big US cities that reproduce spatial segregation, such as New York and Chicago. This dynamic has profound historical roots that demonstrate how capital produced racial spaces in global cities (Danewid 2017). The postslavery migration of the Black population to the industrialized metropolises of the Northeast in the first decades of the twentieth-century generated conditions of racial segregation and exploitation, with the Black population relegated to specific areas of the city. This allowed real, symbolic, and “caste” borders to be erected, shaping the historical form of the ghetto (Wacquant 1997). This period, between the 1930s and 1960s, was characterized by the heavy reliance on Black labor in the Fordist industry of the time, placing the Black population on the margins of education and consequentially the labor market. During the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, when the South—still openly segregationist—as well as the North were strongly affected, areas like Harlem became focal points of activism that coordinated the movement throughout the United States. The civil rights movement changed the urban political order and questioned the traditional forms of labor division and the economic and cultural hegemonies that had spatially shaped the metropolis and regulated the production of wealth. As a response both to the renewed vitality and civic participation of the African American

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and Latinx community and to the disintegration of the US industrial economy and the shift toward services and financial capitalism, the ghetto was transformed into what Wacquant (2004) has called a “hyperghetto,” characterized by the remains of the ghetto in symbiosis with the prison’s institutional model.3 East Harlem was, in the past, one of the areas most affected by the phenomenon of urban decay and marginalization, as many of my informants had seen—also shown in Philippe Bourgois’ dense ethnography on crack dealers (2003). However, the increasing gentrification of the city is forcing those boundaries. Since the 1990s, more luxury condos have appeared, as well as expensive businesses, museums, and supermarkets that are inaccessible to most of the local population, despite the commercialization of ethnic identity that intimately connects the project of the neoliberal city with the multicultural city (Dávila 2004). Wine bars and restaurants are opening alongside the bodegas, and a part of the CUNY University has been moved to 116th Street along with housing for its students. This new situation creates contrasts even within the same block. This is especially true for those who have lived in East Harlem for decades and who share a strong sense of community that has been built over the decades through different inhabitants, from being a primarily Italian American neighborhood until the postwar period and then increasingly Puerto Rican and Latino. Central Harlem, meanwhile, is the best-known part. It is historically the political and cultural center for the Black community both nationally and internationally, and it gave birth to historical movements, from the Harlem Renaissance to the mobilization and participation in the struggle for civil rights (Mullings 2001). Many previous Harlem residents have moved to the south Bronx because of rising rents and the renovation of buildings designed for the upper-middle class who have arrived from the expansion of the Upper East Side neighborhood Yorkville. Those who have managed to maintain their residence in East Harlem, also known as El Barrio, are mainly residents of public housing. The projects are the tall brickcolored apartment buildings typical of New York that are almost entirely social housing, heirs of the earlier Tenement Houses, and an architectural symbol of the urbanization of the Black—and later Latinx—populations. Despite the spatial coexistence, the process of gentrification activates a staggering divergence in living in the community, marked by a divorce between gentrifying agents (usually middle-class families) and the gentrified (usually working-class communities of color), who share the same space but not the same perception of the social dynam-

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ics of building an urban community. The cohesiveness suggested by the word “community” is dismantled by this process of internal differentiation, weakening the social solidarity that marks its very possibility. Bourdieu, regarding the possibility of habitat and habitus shaping each other, noted that bringing agents who are far apart in social space into the same physical space cannot, in and of itself, lead them to be closer socially: socially divergent groups find nothing more intolerable than physical proximity (Bourdieu et al. 1999: 128). Here, the intolerable proximity violently reminds the gentrified that access to the social space occupied by newcomers is denied to them. The increasing presence of the police in neighborhoods like El Barrio goes hand in hand, therefore, with the process of gentrification. However, long-term residents perceive how the police are there not to protect them but to enhance surveillance for the benefit of the new inhabitants. While I was walking one day with Mary and her daughter, I noticed a sort of elevated New York Police Department station that stood like a control tower at the intersection of 110th Street and Madison Avenue, with projects on both sides of the streets. Mary glanced at it with a look of annoyance and resignation. When we arrived at the diner where we were supposed to have lunch on Lexington and 112th, a couple of cops came in and went to sit at a table. The little nine-yearold girl immediately alerted her mother, as if of danger. Mary, who did not want to give any weight to Rose’s comment, ordered her to go and sit down. However, since the only other table available was next to one of the cops, she told her mother softly that she did not want to sit there and waited impatiently with us in front of the counter until we took our orders and sat with her. Clearly, the mother and daughter did not have a trusting, positive perception of the police, something that is understandable in neighborhoods like El Barrio where it has been embedded in people’s lives since childhood. The visibility of the surveillance regimes to which residents of impoverished and racialized areas must submit is reflected in parts of the child welfare system (e.g., in the way mandated reporters are redistributed to the various places in which people experience their citizenship). These places are hospitals, public schools, welfare offices, and shelters for homeless parents or victims of domestic violence. The scrutiny to which the inhabitants are subjected means the visibility of their social behavior is very different from those who use private facilities. These are mainly used by people living in more affluent and secure neighborhoods, and who are more likely to have a relationship with public professionals not solely based on suspicion. Not only, then, is control amplified by the multiplicity of occasions in

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which mandated reporters and family members may encounter each other, but also by the type of gaze directed at them. Leith Mullings, in this regard, establishes a connection between gender and social class that deepens how these governmental technologies help each other, consequently reinforcing the representational categories they coconstruct. The type of scrutiny to which families of single mothers are subjected reflects a “fear of women without men,” becoming the “other” of the patriarchal family, just as the underclass represents the other of the middle class (Mullings 2001). In the reproduction of the dual city, institutions become overseers, charged with the surveillance and supervision of the population seen as problematic. The combination of surveillance apparatuses—whether visible as police patrols or invisible as mandated reporters in public schools—renews and reactualizes inequalities in the local population. Indeed, the work of neoliberalism through privatization and welfare withdrawal is counteracted by the rollout of enforcing apparatuses and social control (Hall 1973; Wacquant 2001). However, there is a reversal to the social and localized hypervisibility; indeed, the most disadvantaged populations simultaneously undergo a “regime of disappearance” from public discourse and national policy priorities (Goode and Maskovsky 2001) that trace the causes of urban distress and poverty back to individual responsibility. The first chapter showed how US welfare has been socially stratified, a characteristic that produced a “dual social citizenship”: divided into high and low, linked to the concepts of “right” and “need,” and into beneficiaries or dependents (Gordon 1994). The political invisibility of what constitutes the major expenditure of welfare (social security for ex-workers and the disabled, study subsidies, aid for businesses) is, on the other hand, matched by the widespread awareness of what most people understand as welfare: namely, the subsidy for single mothers in difficulty. The difference between the two forms of expenditure is also articulated on the axes of gender and race. It also traces another axis long present in the governmental rhetoric of the United States, that between the deserving and undeserving poor. Child welfare, though hypothetically separate from other forms of welfare because of its universal mission of protecting children, ends up falling into the “low” welfare category, since its actions focus on this very demographic. Elements such as the sociocultural continuity between people who provide services and people who consume services creates contiguity between the worlds of clients and professionals. On the other hand, it contributes even more to the phenomenon of the “eviction” of ev-

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eryday child welfare interactions from the realm of the visible and of the public sphere, as those interactions are engaged on both sides by social actors with little representative power. The further marginalization of the system in an urban context like New York City is in its apparatus created for and served by a specific demographic section. Its implicit racialization, obvious to most social actors inside and outside the system, is an expression of how structural racism reproduces different modalities of citizenship that are materially and conceptually “crafted” in the city, to which it seems to run in parallel and rarely meets. Like the boundaries between Yorkville and El Barrio, the possibility of their contiguity is based on that of the preservation of boundaries that must be made invisible and unspeakable, but which, precisely because of this quality, remain impassable. The people who are lucky enough to live beyond 96th Street, in the case of El Barrio, not only occupy a different urban space, but also a different imaginary, degree of social legitimacy, capacity to access resources, and cultural capital—in conclusion, a different signifying universe. This two-tiered social citizenship can be seen in the testimonies of some of the informants with whom I spoke. Legal representatives of both children and parents, as well as employees of the ACS, described the difference in procedure for those families not part of the “undeserving poor” category, but rather to the upper-middle class. The director of CWOP at the time summed up this duality with the expression, “We don’t get calls beyond 96th Street.” CWOP is indeed located in East Harlem, on 110th Street; the people who frequent it also live in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, but not ten blocks south of the agency itself, where Yorkville and the Upper East Side begin. How is this difference pragmatically translated and reproduced in the day-to-day interactions between the child welfare apparatus and citizens? Gathering some testimonies, I have illustrated some of the dynamics involved in shaping this diverse modulation of citizenship. In the case where, for example, a teacher has a suspicion of abuse/neglect toward a child who lives and goes to school across 96th Street, the procedures will be radically different from that of a school on 120th Street. Parents will be summoned (something that rarely occurs in public schools; it is preferred to call social services directly since parents are immediately seen as guilty and dangerous), the school director will be consulted, and experts (psychologists, pedagogues) will be mobilized. The matter will therefore be partly investigated through intimate, private, and discreet channels. Even if social services do intervene, how the family is dealt with will deviate from the usual. What middle- and upperclass families, usually White in New York, do, as an ACS employee ex-

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plained to me, is “lawyer up”; that is, hire lawyers through which the ACS then needs to mediate. From this moment on, the behavior of the agency for the protection of minors changes and remains on a register that is as noninvasive as possible. This is also for fear of being sued, which in the United States is a widespread practice in the interaction between organizations—public and private—and individual citizens. Numerous social researchers have underlined how the same technologies of welfare imply a removal of the boundary between public and private (Ong 2003; Rapp 1987; Roberts 2002), and how this removal is operated selectively in a recursiveness between paternalistic policies for groups that are thought incapable of responsibly and civically managing the sphere of what is preserved as private for others. In the practice of “lawyering up,” it is not simply the possibility of greater economic availability that plays a decisive role: what intervenes is a sense of legitimacy, of authorization for intimacy, and respect for the boundaries between public and private to which poor families cannot appeal. Overall, ideas of correct parenthood and motherhood are seen through racial and classed lenses. These ideas circulate in the public sphere and shape implicit assumptions about Whiteness, as showed in the excerpt below from an interview I had with a white social worker who was working with a foster care agency: Even when I was going to the meeting at the agency I was working with, they are talking about behavioral mandating parenting, and I said I should sit in that class for my son, you know? And they were all laughing hysterically, that it would be so funny, like just because I am a White woman and a professional, I must know how to raise my son and all goes smoothly. (personal interview with Molly, May 2012)

This account is useful in understanding how much motherhood, parenting, and the ability to practice them correctly is already a given by one’s position in socioprofessional and racial hierarchies. Molly’s doubt seemed to the social workers at the agency to be simply absurd, so much so that imagining her at one of these classes was so paradoxical as to generate hilarity. The dual city (Mollenkopf and Castells: 1991) is continuously restored by the set of regulatory regimes (Ong 2003) that manage its heterogeneous issues, overlapping in lives that seem to relentlessly reinforce the divorce between the two cities. Such divorce, as we have seen, continues to persist despite the process of “requalification” and gentrification initiated from the Giuliani era onward. An ethnographic case of how this difference is expressed in interactions between completely different families can be found in this anec-

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dote told to me by Mary. Because of her status as a single mother and veteran with a disability, Mary has been able to provide her daughter Rosa, who has ADHD, with a range of services that she would not have been able to access due to her economic background. Rosa attended a private school for children with special needs located on the border between the two neighborhoods. In this anomalous educational setting, Mary met the families across 96th Street for the first time. However, this meeting generated quite a few misunderstandings and difficulties in translating each other’s worlds. Something as seemingly trivial as organizing playdates and social occasions for children can reveal radical differences between different “common senses” rooted in the implicit assumptions associated with different social milieux.4 Mary was amazed that it was the children who arranged these meetings among themselves and that parents accepted their requests for hospitality without interfering in the children’s decision-making autonomy. Moreover, the ease with which the children went to each other’s homes, without taking into account the degree of familiarity between the parents, was almost unacceptable to Mary. Not being privy to the details of where and with whom a birthday party would be held meant Rose could be in cars driven by strangers or under the responsibility of parents whom she had never met. Mary found this absurd compared to the other world to which she belonged. The degree of circumspection, caution, and prudence that belonged to their reality could not simply be lost as Rose moved through far more affluent circles. The security and confidence present at Rose’s school seemed naive and unreasonable to Mary. When we talked about this, I told her about my experience babysitting for a wealthy Lower East Side family and the environment that this opportunity had allowed me to observe. It was true that the relationships between children, families, and babysitters were extremely informal and not very supervised; but at the same time, they were implicitly asserted by a series of social behaviors that reaffirmed the values and status in common among the children’s families. This, coupled with the rarity of negative experiences that occurred, laid the foundations on which these highly informal and poorly scrutinized relationships took place. What these parents took for granted was that everything would work out for the best and that in the social networks they occupied, this security was already a given, already part of the order of things with no need for scrutiny. For Mary, who has always lived in poor neighborhoods, the possibility of relying on the security of one’s own status was, in itself, unimaginable.

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By reviewing these different aspects, I have attempted to reconstruct the social context and the common sense that constitute the framework of meaning and the power relationships in which the actions of child welfare are inserted. What emerges, in my opinion, is a radical heterogeneity of urban life, which cannot be circumscribed within a dual perspective that separates the well-off from the less well-off, but which on this axis diversifies the experiential limits of individuals and entire communities. The definition of what is understood and institutionally sanctioned as deviance in the sphere of domesticity and the mechanisms of medicalization mobilized to treat such deviance depends on the historical-cultural construction of family normativity as well as on social and economic stratification. These forces are structured through the organization and transformation of urban space, inscribed in the child welfare professional hierarchy, and reiterated through institutional action and the reproduction of boundaries (always mobile and dispersed, as evidenced by the phenomenon of gentrification). Their entanglement is vital in determining the kind of citizenship to which New Yorkers have access. In the following chapter, I will focus on how people reframe these conditions and attempt to respond to them using their resources and the margin of negotiation that institutional interactions sometimes allow them.

Notes 1. Foucault, with the phrase “technologies of the self,” meant the technologies “that allow individuals to perform, by their own means or with the help of others, a number of operations on their bodies and souls—from thoughts, to behavior, to the way of being—and thus achieve a transformation of themselves in order to reach a state characterized by happiness, purity, perfection or immortality” (Foucault 1988: 13). If Foucault reconstructs a genealogy of the techniques of the self that is rooted in the classical era and the advent of Christianity, in the case of my ethnography, the technologies of the self refer to all the discourses and practices through which a certain kind of motherhood is incorporated and represented for the self and others in the contemporary sociocultural context in which my research is situated. 2. For example, the use of corporal punishment: a practice that, especially in the case of marks, is considered abusive in the United States but is part of the experiential baggage and transgenerational educational practices in many African American and Latinx families. 3. The importance of a movement like that of the Young Lords, born and raised in Spanish Harlem between the 1960s and 1970s and fundamental in the rec-

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ognition of the civil and political claims of the Puerto Rican and the Hispanic community generally throughout the United States, is recalled. 4. I use here Herzfeld’s description of the concept of “common sense” as worthy of critical dissection even if entrenched in people’s ordinary assumptions, a dissection operated at best by anthropological reflexive and critical understanding and its capacity to illuminate the relationship between common sense and power (Herzfeld 1997).

chapter 

Contesting Child Welfare Perceptions, Negotiations, and Counternarratives

KKK The city was imagined as a place for competition, elite sociability, cosmopolitanism, and luxury, populated by ambitious, creative, hard-working, and intelligent innovators. As the Bloomberg administration began to reshape the city’s urban landscape and economy, it did so in accord with the qualities ascribed to this imagined New York and imagined New Yorkers— and in conflict with those inherent in other imaginaries. —Julian Brash, Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City.

“Designed to See Us Fail”: The Political Economy of Child Welfare According to Its Users

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ulian Brash’s (2011) ethnography of Bloomberg’s New York highlighted the importance of the dominant social imaginary and archetypal citizenry in guiding the many projects of the spatial, economic, and social restructuring of post-9/11 New York. The contrast between the imagined New Yorker in the epigraph and the people who populate my ethnography is jarring. The visibility of this selective restructuring of urban spaces and services is evident, especially for the people who are completely excluded from it. New York thus unveils the violence of its “savage inequalities” (Kozol 1991), unequivocally revealing who the unwanted citizens are through the actions of the labor market and institutional apparatuses. Loïc Wacquant is one of the scholars who has emphasized the role social services and public institutions play in the new urban landscape of disadvantaged areas. He argues that they are

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deliberately used as a weapon of oppression against less privileged minority groups. He affirmed that “far from attenuating the inequalities that weigh upon them, public institutions thus tend to accentuate the isolation and stigmatization of their users . . . . Instead of serving as a weapon in the fight against poverty, public authority turns into a war machine against the poor” (Wacquant 1999: 136). It could seem excessive to believe a field like child protection is intentionally co-opted into this war on the poor, even though in its history, the criminalization of poverty is very much traceable. Mostly, as many of my interlocutors pointed out, it is difficult for parents to have sufficient physical, emotional, and material resources, along with enough legal and bureaucratic knowledge, to respond to the system’s solicitations “efficiently”. The laws and procedures regulating child protective services and the layered, public/private hybrid system managing a child welfare case can be difficult to handle and navigate and could generate contradictions. In Brianna’s case, for example, her lack of knowledge of the regulatory mechanisms of child welfare and her prior experience with social services generated yet another removal following an episode in which she had been the victim of domestic violence. When I asked her if the case had been substantiated after the investigation, Brianna responded with skepticism, as if legal procedures did not matter in the dynamics of her case: You see, “unfounded,” “substantiated”—nobody explained these things to me. They put my kids in care and . . . did I have other kids in care at the time? . . . I did. I had two other kids in care at the time, due to substance abuse; but in this case, I don’t know if it was the failure to protect them or the endangerment of their welfare. I don’t know what it was at the time, but I was known to them, so it really didn’t matter because I never completed the original program they told me to do: a drug program. I hadn’t done that. They just pull that on the top of the list and that was that. But it was just a lack of information, a lack of knowledge. (personal interview, May 2012)

Brianna did not even remember the precise definition of her removal case because she was poorly informed and also probably overwhelmed by her crack addiction. As a result, the cause of the removal, in a certain sense, faded into the background. Therefore, what was decisive was that because the social services knew who she was, knew her from her past cases, and considered her an at-risk subject, they proceeded with removal the instant a problem emerged. Although being a foster kid or “catching a case” with ACS (Lee 2016) is an ordinary occurrence in the districts, families are not always

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aware of the behaviors that can expose their children to the risk of removal. As Gabriela pointed out, this is the “red flag” after they accidentally expose their parenting practices in the context of institutional interactions. In the authoritative and rigid context of child protective services, this aspect turns into a systematic disqualification of the pedagogical capacity and authority of educational models coming from a different cultural world. This is particularly evident with recent immigrant families, who have different educational customs and can easily attract the attention of institutions. The inability to speak English, in itself, can be a significant obstacle when this encounter takes place. An interpreter is not always available, and even though parents are, by law, entitled to a translation of all the documents they have to sign along with an accompanying explanation, I have heard stories of mothers who were denied this right. In these cases, social workers and foster families made decisions about the children, leaving the biological parent partially in the dark. Parents perceive the attitude of caseworkers and foster care agencies as uncooperative and not particularly interested in building a positive dialogue with the family. Parents also perceive foster families to be poorly supervised, especially in comparison to the regime of hypersurveillance families of origin must undergo. During our interview, Cheryl, the ACS veteran who has also worked for years in foster care services, raised the issue of the poor checks of temporary families: “We need foster families so badly that we don’t really check their credentials,” she told me— something the literature has also confirmed (Chamberlain, Moreland, and Reid 1992; Kammerman and Kahn 1995). It is not uncommon for abuse and neglect to occur in temporary families, sometimes worse than in the families of origin (Roberts 2002). Dorothy, the daughter of a parent advocate I met, had, for example, experienced abuse in foster care. One of the sons of the couple who had taken Dorothy into custody had sexually abused her. Her mother learned of it months later. These types of incidents are not, as I said, uncommon in foster care families. However, what I heard from parents, advocates, and professionals can be identified as a form of emotional neglect of the foster child. The child would require greater care because they would have entered foster care carrying the scars of multiple traumas, including that of separation (Barber and Delfabbro 2001). Foster families often supervise adolescents less than the original parents, as the parent can pick up on signals the foster parent cannot, just as he or she is aware of the habits and environments in which the children move. A paradoxical situation can occur if removal is caused by the rebellious behavior

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of the adolescent (such as many days of truancy or absenteeism from school) for which the parent is blamed. The educational path of the adolescent often does not recover, and their behavior becomes more difficult to control, so much so that the foster parents refuse to continue care. This is also the case in other instances, such as children with “special needs,” a macrocategory that includes children with mild or severe mental retardation, children with behavioral problems, or children with mild physical disabilities. It is common for children who remain in the foster care system for some time to change homes and foster families regularly, as 60 percent of foster families withdraw within the first twelve months (Barber and Del Fabbro 2001). I would often hear parents complain that their children had changed families yet again and, given that removals are often complete (i.e., all children are removed) and siblings are placed in different families, the situation was often logistically chaotic to manage. During the course of my fieldwork, I came across cases with children who had been moved four or five times within a year, resulting in a change of schools according to the areas where the different foster families resided. In the cases I saw of children being placed in kinship care, especially if the parent had a mental health problem or substance abuse issue, I observed how this option could bring some mutual relief. It gave the parent the possibility of accessing services to address their issues, and children could spend some time in a more peaceful and stable environment. It is important to note that kinship families are financially supported by child welfare to a much lesser degree than foster families (Jimenez 2006). Another issue was that of preventive services. During my research, most of the mothers I met who had had their children removed had issues that should have been addressed before the specific incident that caused removal had occurred. Nevertheless, preventive services could act as a forerunner for a case with child preventive services, as the story of Gloria demonstrates. Always involved in community organizing through women’s associations and the church, Gloria never thought she would become involved with Child Protective Services. But she turned to ACS preventive services when her oldest child, then twelve years old, began to develop aggressive behaviors following the family’s move from Atlanta to New York and Gloria’s divorce from her ex-husband. After an altercation in which she left a small scratch on his neck from grabbing him by the T-shirt, Gloria decided to seek help through preventive services to ensure psychotherapeutic counseling for him. But when she arrived at the agency, she had a surprise:

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I said: “Now we need to go to therapy, this is not good, so I’m gonna go to ACS,” right? Because to me that’s the place to go, for children and families in crisis. I can’t get what I need on my own; if I go in, they’ll help get the services I need. So I go to ACS, and I can tell you what I knew from the street, baby snatcher, but I was still naive because I thought how could it be? Do you need help? You just go and ask for help. So I did that, and when I came in, the CPS worker that was there asked me why I was there, and I said everything I told you, and she said, “I need to talk to your kids in private.” And I say, “Okay.” So when my boys come out she’s looking at us, searching their bodies, right? And I said “Really?” So anyway, I go and she says she wants to speak to me, and I say, “Okay,” and she tells me that he has this scratch on his neck and that she has to open a case, and that’s how it began. (personal interview, March 2012)

Even though the investigation was dismissed shortly afterward, her son was still waiting to start therapy when another incident happened, a heavier altercation, that resulted in her calling the police and removing her son from the household. Two years passed before Gloria was reunited with him, but the relationship was then beyond repair, especially because ACS allowed very limited contact between him, Gloria, and his brother. The inability for the two to discuss the incident exacerbated the situation and contributed to further estrangement. Brianna also became a user of preventive services following the removals of two of her children in previous years. When her partner became violent and threatened her, Brianna turned to preventive services, who ordered her to come to their facility immediately to secure her child. Brianna would not leave the apartment, and her case came directly under the jurisdiction of Child Protective Services, who decided on an emergency removal. Her bewildered and angry reaction was met with violence by the police (who often partner with ACS in emergency removal cases) and Brianna was arrested: I was on preventive one time. I remember once I called them and said that my baby’s father was going to do something to me. They told me to go to their office and bring the baby, but I said, “No, I’m not going to leave the apartment. It’s my apartment. He should leave!” The day after I had a fucking knock on my door, and these people came with the police to take my kid. I can’t understand why. If I’m asking you for help and you are literally below my fucking apartment: You can’t come to my house and talk to me? I wasn’t a danger to my kids! That removal was terrible. It will stay in the back of my mind forever because the cops assaulted me. I still have the cut over my eye. They assaulted me in my house, and they dragged me out of my house in handcuffs with no shoes on and took me to the hospital, and they left me in the hospital with no shoes on!! (personal interview, May 2012)

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The scarce use that families make of preventive services is dictated by the fear that, once contacted, the degree of scrutiny and suspicion toward them will increase. Instead of a deterrent to the action of removal, preventive services would accelerate it, eventually involving the child protection office in the lives of families. This only confirms to parents that the services from which they should really benefit are actually close collaborators with those that penalize and punish them. Indeed, as parent advocates often warn, “They are the same people.” They are not perceived as benevolent, supportive, or sympathetic, but as suspicious and judgmental. The same is true of their potential clients, who are circumspect toward child welfare institutions. In summary, what characterizes these relationships is the lack of trust in one another. According to Gupta and Sharma, it is in the mundane activities of everyday bureaucracy in which the primacy of the state is reproduced and its superiority over other social components reaffirmed, and it is through this daily routine that social inequalities, such as those of class and gender, are recreated and maintained (Sharma and Gupta 2006). Exchanges between citizens and street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 1971; Bernstein and Mertz 2011) are the site (Bourdieu 1992) through which the state’s experience and its influence on people’s social lives are thus constructed. The institutional weight of the child welfare system affects the existence of the people it serves in profound ways. The parents I met came to see the child welfare system as a Hydra-like entity, oppressing people’s family lives through its multiple agencies, institutions, and bureaucracies. It is a labyrinth from which it is almost impossible to escape once entered. Behind this kind of structure is what is commonly referred to as “the city”—that is, the central authority that decides social policies and redistributes resources, of which the various administrative apparatuses are the limbs that allow it to feed. As Gabriela told me, “Rich get rich from the poor”; or as Jennifer said, “The more children are in the system, the more money is generated for the city.” “The city” and those working for its administration are perceived as one; they are portrayed as exploiters of the less privileged citizens and the obstacle to their social mobility. The feeling of being neglected and exploited by the state, or whoever is acting in its place (such as the city), is counterbalanced by the awareness of the extreme surveillance to which users of public services in schools, hospitals, and welfare offices are subjected. According to many parents, the child welfare system exploits and dominates minorities and low-income communities. The state is fundamentally represented and visualized as a hostile presence, driven by

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a desire to control and discipline a specific portion of the population. The people who work within the system are seen as being driven by a feeling of deep contempt and irritation toward their clients. It is interesting to note in this regard how the analysis of parents does not stop with the more immediately “Foucauldian” aspect of surveillance and oppression. They actually see the goal of the system as being the exploitation of the subordinate classes. In the representations of its inhabitants, the most disadvantaged communities thus become “cash cows” (another recurring expression) for the city and the hundreds of agencies that subcontract its administrative, bureaucratic, and welfare activities. A recurrent narrative, especially in the most politically active circles, is that through the prison and child welfare systems, community members are materially taken from the community and moved to facilities that turn them into a source of profit. This impoverishes communities, weakening their potential for self-management that would lead not only to higher per capita income but also to higher levels of schooling, social cohesion, and security. The continuity between the different systems is captured by expressions such as “the school to jail” pipeline, coined to indicate how the disastrous state of public schools in the most impoverished neighborhoods leads to a life surrounded by institutions responsible for their containment. Alternatively, it may indicate how the lack of supervision and the low quality of education do not provide students with the necessary tools to be competitive in the labor market, relegating them to a life of unskilled and precarious work (Ferguson 2001; Kozol 1991). Gabriela said: You know it’s sad to see that African American and Hispanic kids are removed all the time. It’s a money thing; they make money out of poor people. If there wasn’t any child in care, there would be no job. Instead of helping families and keep them together . . . like, if I have a mental illness, I should count on the fact that everything is in place. But why doesn’t it happen? It’s a money thing. (personal interview at CWOP, October 2012)

Child welfare is but an aggravating factor in this already rather oppressive picture. The Vera Institute of Justice collaborated with the ACS in 1997 to identify correlations between the child welfare system and the juvenile justice system, finding that although the population of former foster children in New York amounted to 2 percent of the total population, they accounted for 15 percent of juveniles incarcerated in the juvenile justice system (Armstrong 1998). Furthermore, research conducted in Connecticut highlighted that 75 percent of youth in the state criminal justice system had prior experience with foster care (Roberts 2002).

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The pipeline therefore consists of the child welfare system, the juvenile justice system, and the criminal justice system. Individuals who follow this downward trajectory are permanently expelled from the possibilities of the self-realization promised by “advanced liberalism” (Rose 2006). In the child welfare system, the prison system is relevant for several reasons. Beginning with the high rate of foster kids behind bars, prison interacts with the child welfare system regularly: for example, when a single parent or both parents are arrested, the children are placed in foster or kinship care. Visits with parents are almost nonexistent, and the parents rarely make decisions concerning the course of their children’s lives, instead being handled by social workers and temporary families. Another recurring occasion in which child welfare and the criminal justice system interact is that of parents’ arrests for child abuse. Parents can be arrested for sexual and physical abuse and, even if only for a short time, in borderline cases of corporal punishment. Dorothy Roberts pointed out that in New York City, in particular, arrests for infractions that endangered the welfare of the child tripled during the 1990s, or rather in the aftermath of the creation of the ACS. The arrests do not necessarily involve physical or sexual abuse: I have met mothers who have been arrested for simply leaving their children unsupervised for a couple of hours. Parents can find themselves under arrest for the oddest reasons, like what happened to a young mother who went to the support group. She was arrested upon arriving at the hospital following her son’s fall from his stroller because social services had concluded she had intentionally injured the child. As discussed in Chapter 1, many authors (Wacquant 2006; Davis 2006; Morgen and Maskovsky 2003; Hyatt 1999; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011) have described the phenomena and dynamics that led to a stigmatization of welfare that was fostered in the years of Reaganism and brought to the executive level during the Clinton era. When Clinton “ended welfare as we know it” with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), the goal was not only to scale back government spending but also to regulate those who benefit from it.The demonization of poverty—especially urban poverty—during the 1980s and 1990s went hand in hand with its racialization. As a consequence, in the shift from welfare to “workfare,” the process of “racial formation” (Omi and Winant 1994) that accompanies social phenomena in the United States has taken a new form, combining the actions of the criminal justice system and the welfare system in reproducing racialized citizenship. The concept of welfare, in the new neoliberal paternalism embodied by the

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PRWORA reform, merges disciplining technologies (the obligation to work) with technologies of the self (the “empowering” discourse on emancipating oneself from dependency). The price for social welfare access subjects them to verifications of their economic, work, family, and relational status. Because these procedures expose people’s most intimate and private spheres, numerous authors have insisted on the increasingly biopolitical nature of contemporary governance (Rose 1999; Ong 2003). In the previous chapter, we saw how there is a certain continuity between the actions of ACS employees and those of the police; the figure of the social worker knocking on the door of families and that of the policeman stopping adolescents on the street represent two different moments of social control according to the parents I met. During the period in which I carried out my field research, more groups and associations were organizing to oppose the policies of racial profiling in light of the murders of young African Americans by police. In New York, the struggle against racist police brutality focused on the so-called stop-and-frisk law enforcement practices. This policy was widely used by the New York Police Department in specific neighborhoods and allows policemen (uniformed and plainclothes) to stop and search people who “look suspicious” for weapons and drugs. Most of the people stopped were young males of color between the ages of thirteen and forty on sidewalks.1 In February 2012, two officers killed an eighteen-year-old boy in his bathroom in the Bronx. After being ordered to stop on the street, the boy ran and entered the apartment building where he lived with his mother, grandmother, and sixyear-old brother. The police officers entered through the back door and broke into the apartment while the boy took refuge in the bathroom. After ordering him to show them his hands, one of the two officers thought he was armed and shot him in the chest. His grandmother and younger brother witnessed the entire scene. The cops found a small amount of marijuana and no weapons on him. He had the marijuana when he was stopped, and so, having had a history of marijuana possession, he panicked and ran. In the same month, a twenty-twoyear-old man and a seventeen-year-old boy were also shot by off-duty police officers in different situations.2 In the wake of these murders, the campaign that was waged against stop-and-frisk engaged successfully with people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, from family, friends, and neighbors of the victims to broader communities and civil rights and antiracist activists. The world of social justice has generally sided with the protesters and groups involved who have received media attention, especially

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when they filed a lawsuit against the NYPD and the city of New York regarding the practice of stop-and-frisk. Some of the parents I met during my research had personal experiences of the practice of stop-and-frisk. The children of some of the mothers I spoke with during the months of research had suffered numerous arrests and searches, even at very young ages. In public and political discussions on the production of the “underclass,” the latter often seems self-generated as a product of the legacy of the United States’ racist past and the pathological deviance of disadvantaged communities, a sociological argument that risks reproducing the notion of a “culture of poverty.” Rather, it is important to place, among the “iatrogenic conditioning” of living in a racialized and impoverished neighborhood, those triggered by institutional discriminative practices as stop-and-frisk, I have witnessed conversations in which mothers and activists shared their doubts about how to have the “talk” with their preadolescent children. Rather than a conversation about sex, this talk would warn their sons about the risks they could face from the police. There were many painful aspects mothers had to communicate to their children: first, that their mere existence was perceived as a threat to others; next, that the way the police and institutions, in general, would relate to them would permanently mark and enforce this perception; and that, above all, they had to exercise extra care to protect themselves from those tasked with watching over their safety. In the volume Bad Boys, Ann Arnette Ferguson discussed her field research in an American public school, describing the process and institutional sites in which identities are stereotyped by individuals in charge. This process of labeling reproduces the negative expectations American society has for working-class African Americans. In fact, how punishments are administered and managed at school highlights, according to Ferguson’s analysis, a discriminating attitude of the teachers and supervisors, even if they are African American. This rests on a representation of very young Black children as criminals in the making who need vigorous punishment and continuous surveillance. The process by which these children were assigned labels such as “troublemakers,” “at risk,” “unsalvageable,” and “prison-ready” illustrated to them a specific and predictable way of life, that of the future “gangbanger” or marginalized youth living in a society that deplores their existence. African American youth behavior was informed by a series of assumptions that denied their potential to learn and adhere to the social norms of what Ferguson calls “schoolboys.” In this analysis, Ferguson recalls how racial inequalities in the United States are reproduced through institutional practices and cultural representations of

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racial differences (Ferguson 2001). Even in the recent ethnography of Savannah Shange, in a San Francisco public school devoted to social justice, she outlines how the school fails its students and the community because it operates within a space predicated on anti-Blackness (Shange 2019). It is not difficult to imagine what results from the interaction between families and social services within the broader context characterizing the interactions between state institutions in general and poor, racialized communities. The “system” is often described as a revolving door or by statements such as “the system doesn’t see us as families. Indeed, it is difficult for parents to foresee how long they will remain entangled in its web because once they have entered, it becomes increasingly difficult to leave due to the greater surveillance enacted upon them, meaning the “deviances” are easier for the system to see. Many problems can delay, if not eliminate, the possibility of reunification: a case of negligent supervision can turn into one concerning the parent’s mental health, as we have seen in the previous chapter, or one concerning domestic violence into a case of lack of adequate accommodation for the family unit. Foucault defines the role of the family in the modern dimension of governmentality as a privileged instrument for the government of the population (Foucault 2006) instead of over the territory with its inhabitants. But to administer the population, the population had to become an entity and be known, and then divided into other units (family, community, and so on). It is not only the state’s sovereign power that is at work in governmentality but also institutions such as schools, hospitals, and prisons as instruments of the (self-)regulation of the population. This mode of disciplining citizens is referred to as “policing,” or the operational model through which the conduct of conduct is administered (Foucault 2006).3 Nikolas Rose has taken Foucault’s paradigm and expanded it to neoliberal governance, which he renames “advanced liberalism.” Advanced liberalism necessitates that the individual and the family must be simultaneously assigned their social duties and their rights and informed that experts must instruct them one how to responsibly assume their freedom (Rose 2006). Governing through freedom (Ong 2003) thus becomes the modus operandi of the modern state in which social security is provided in exchange for individuals taking on responsibilities and duties that reconfigure the liberal nature of concepts such as “freedom” and “privacy” (Rose 2006). The paradox of neoliberalism exists when it criticizes the government as a form of interference in individual freedoms but assumes, for its very functioning, that

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people’s problems require government intervention in the form of a diagnosis, prescription, and cure (Rose and Miller 1992). I believe that the child welfare system, despite its aims, fails to follow the diagnosis-prescription-cure succession indicated by Rose and Miller, so the project of instigating the management of one’s own freedom doesn’t live up to its promise. The violence of removing a person’s children and/or the mandatory nature of rehabilitative services, even in cases in which children remain within the family, convey what Lipsky called “coercive compliance.” Even the normative effort Lipsky saw as pertaining to apparatuses working through coercive compliance, such as the police or the school, is invalidated by the fact that families perceive the decision-making process in their case as arbitrary, biased, and contradictory. Court decisions, and especially rehabilitative services, convey to parents a feeling of being institutionally neglected and antagonized by the system, rather than empowered toward a path of “correct citizenship.” During Gloria’s case hearings she had to focus on the knowledge that no matter what was said, they could not “diminish me as a person, as a mother, and all that I have done to love and nurture my kids and making sure to be a good citizen of society. And I had to hold on to that because clearly what they said in that court was: ‘You’re a liar; you’re a monster.’” The experience of being antagonized and depicted as moral monsters in court and in child welfare offices hijacks the goal of corrective subjectification envisioned by Foucault and Foucauldian scholars such as Rose and Miller. These parents experience a government through “the social”—typical of welfare strategies (Hyatt 1995)—but exclusively in its punitive aspects. Governmentality is not exercised in subtle and even ways on the population but is always classed, gendered, and racialized. For example, the child welfare system, an apparatus designed to correct harmful parenting attitudes, is run by its professionals as a means to contain a law-and-order racialized problem. Recipients then become disenchanted with the system’s “official” goals and the disconnect between communities and institutions. In Reproducing Race (2011), Khiara Bridges’ volume on women following the Medicaid plan for prenatal care, and Anne Marie Smith’s study on the TANF welfare reform (Smith 2007), the Foucauldian notion of the expanded carceral archipelago is reclaimed to question how Foucault’s confessing society cannot be applied to their case studies. What users of public assistance are requested to do by programs as Medicaid or TANF, is not to be truthful about oneself and transform subjectivity, as in Foucault’s analysis; instead, “the soul craft that Foucault teaches us to search for in disciplinary technologies is largely ab-

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sent; we are left instead with crude, superficial, and impersonal modes of correction” (Smith quoted in Bridges 2011: 200). The “transforming” or “empowering” of the subject is not therefore embedded in these kinds of institutions and epistemologies. Instead, it is the purely punitive part of the carceral archipelago that their subjects experienced. No transformation is envisioned for them because they represent the “residual” that cannot be independent or empowered and requires control and restraint (Clarke 2008). Parental classes are attended by social workers who are tired trainers and educators lacking attention to the details of families’ individual backgrounds and histories. I have heard many parents say, “Do they think I don’t know how to feed and put my children to bed? I’ve already raised three of them. How do they think I did it?” In my opinion, the show of instrumental compliance that parents display when they attend these courses is also a reaction triggered by the impression that there is something fictitious in the educational objectives of the rehabilitation program. It is as if they did not really want to provide parents with good parenting advice. This tired execution of a rehabilitative bureaucracy is rather more like a ritual that works not through its pedagogical strength but in its purely coercive status, which requires a form of adaptation to its disciplining mandate. In other words, parents were well aware of the fact that “clients are not a primary reference group of street-level bureaucrats. They do not count among the groups that primarily define street-level bureaucrats’ roles. . . . the poorer people are, the greater the influence street-level bureaucrats tend to have over them” (Lipsky 2010: 65). However, I think it is precisely because this dynamic is revealed so clearly that leads to such contestation among the social actors involved. An interlocutor once told me that she had conducted a parenting class when she was twenty-three years old and had just graduated with a degree in social work. As a young, middle-class White woman, she had felt alienated from the parents to whom she was giving parenting classes. She had no experience as a parent and had never had any first-hand experience of what it means to be poor. During the class, she thought she had nothing to give these parents and felt the whole situation was meaningless. A larger moral order rooted in structural inequalities is reflected in the image of a twenty-three-year-old, middleclass White woman teaching parenting skills to poor parents of color who were mandated to attend the course. Nevertheless, it also expresses, through Jules’ embarrassment and the skeptical look in the parents’ eyes that she noticed, how much this moral order shows its paradoxes and is not passively incorporated by its subjects.

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Parents perceive themselves to be “less than actual citizens” (Williams 1992) precisely because they understand the different ways in which citizenship can be modulated and more or less imposed. If being poor in a rich society means being dispossessed of the ability to mediate one’s own representations in society (Wacquant 2006), the epistemic and symbolic violence (Spivak 2004; Bourdieu 1992) these parents experience—because the social position they occupy influences society—is not passively experienced by them. Parents’ conceptions about the dysfunctional and exploitative nature of the system shows how the discriminatory nature of contemporary governance in Western countries constructs an antagonistic imaginary of the state. It is essential to notice how these are backed up by the very functioning of the child welfare political economy and by what has been defined as the “poverty industry” (Hatcher2016). Federal funding (Title IVE) is provided to states on a per-child basis and goes to help fund foster care services and administrative costs rather than to parents directly. Only children removed from low-income families can bring these funds, which are then also redistributed to private foster care agencies receiving a certain sum for any child they place (Hatchet 2016; Woodward 2021). As I will illustrate later, these issues push parents to antagonize social services and attempt to counter their action. These can take the form of individual strategies and tactics (De Certeau 1984), everyday forms of counter hegemonic resistance (Scott 1985) or form the basis of collective political claims. But a critical view of the system’s functioning, also shared by many of its professionals, does not necessarily translate into a form of agency or resistance but can instead become an obstacle for families who understand the system as a sort of “black box” whose sole objective is to punish them. This belief can lead to resignation (“I’ll never get my kids back”) or increase parents’ anger and frustration about their own condition, possibly making them blind to the real parenting problems they may have. It can increase the marginalization of families, left in a condition of further disadvantage until the next event or accident occurs that will involve social services. This view of the system as exploitative toward its “clients” was expressed in the support group. In the case I report here, a father used it as a cover for his and the mother’s own parenting mistakes. Gabriela, a CWOP parent advocate, questioned the father’s version of how his children were removed. He had claimed that the mother had lost custody because of addiction and that he was the one taking care of the children until the mother said he violated an order of protection to-

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ward her. There were some inconsistencies in his story and Gabriela challenged him, asking specific questions: Gabriela: But why did you have an order of protection? Father: Because in order to get out and get high, she called the cops on me and told them I was beating her. Gabriela: And she called the cops just like that, without any bruises, any evidence? Lisa: Let me tell you something, in cases of DV [domestic violence], ACS can decide to remove the children from both of the parents because the victim also fails to protect them. Father: But she’s a blanquita [a White lady]. She’s Italian. Teresa: But there has to be something more than that. Father: They don’t hear. The city makes its money from the federal government, and you can’t sue them. (CWOP Support Group, 24 June 2012)

While the father depicts the domestic violence accusation as false and used as an excuse by the woman to find drugs, Gabriela shows her skepticism, remarking how the allegation of domestic violence needs to be substantiated by physical evidence. She reiterated her doubts even when the father suggested that her being a White Italian woman facilitated his ex-partner’s credibility, even without any evidence. This is a case in which gender and race are both at the very core of the discussed issue. The father interprets his situation as institutional racism and economic exploitation of child welfare recipients, alluding to the idea that the New York City child welfare system places children in foster care because “the city makes its money from the federal government.” Gabriela on her side insists on the domestic violence accusation, thinking there is more to the story than the father is telling. I saw parent advocates working in similar ways on other occasions to avoid these interpretations becoming “common sense” that erased parents’ responsibilities and flaws.

Resistance, Resilience, and Manipulation: What It Means to “Navigate the System” Sharma and Gupta argue that targets of state programs who are thus located outside of bureaucracies will copy the techniques of lowerlevel state agents in order to sabotage official orders. They do so to gain institutional access, to subvert official scrutiny, and to establish

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their authority among peers. Like Hanna, other parents learn how to relate to the bureaucracy, produce documentation, preserve it, and adopt manners befitting it (Sharma and Gupta 2006: 17). Language has to be transformed; they must behave the way that institutions require them to. One father, during a support group meeting, responded to another who was dealing with the child welfare system by saying, “I understand you and I come from the same experience as you and I know it’s hard, but you can’t do the same things you would do on the street.” He was referring to the change in attitude he felt the other man had to put into practice, from the code of honor of street defiance to the submissive attitude that one must show to institutions. One of the most common refrains among parents was the exhortation to keep all documentation received from the ACS and the various other professionals. Whether it was a request filed in court or a diagnostic evaluation, the secret lay in archiving the evidence of the intense, bureaucratic life the parents suddenly found themselves living. The conditions that the institutions set were either at odds with each other or contradictory over time. Parents were then trying to remedy this inconsistency and demonstrate its contradictions. The turnover of caseworkers who managed families, both biological and temporary, meant that each brought with them partial information and their own way of mediating with their clients, as one young social worker confirmed to me: There is also frequent worker turnover, you know. It’s common for parents that have a two-year case to have changed five different caseworkers. So every time, that person doesn’t know what’s going on and so there is a lot of confusion. (personal interview with Olivia, January 2012)

The chaos of the child welfare system is primarily the result of its fragmentation into a myriad of different contractors scattered throughout New York’s five boroughs. As a result, parents, if initially discombobulated by their confusing path through the system, eventually became (though not all of them, of course) perfect bureaucrats. They appeared at the support group with folders full of documentation and inquired about the clauses that specific laws provided in order to use them to their advantage in anticipating the next decision ACS and/or the judge would make. In a system of confusing procedures, they were the ones who tried to make sense of the events and statements that came from their interactions with the state apparatus. An interesting case, for what it then implies on an existential and epistemological level, was what I renamed the “struggle of the diagnoses.” As we saw in the previous chapter, the excessive medicalization of family members is a

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highly stigmatizing practice. Unlike among middle and upper classes, having to seek psychotherapy is still a source of social shame for most poor people. Parents have a common understanding that once they are diagnosed with any syndrome, ACS “can hold that against you.” John, an ACS psychiatric supervisor, confirmed widespread medicalization of complex situations and issues, highlighting how his commitment to antiracism also involved an attempt to de-medicalize them whenever possible. However, the ease with which other ACS-funded psychotherapists diagnosed just about any parent who happened to be at a Child Safety Conference caused parents to find alternative solutions. The first and most obvious was to seek a second opinion. The weight of psychiatric diagnosis in a child welfare case is considerable, seemingly reinforcing what Lipsky noticed: “court psychiatrists are chronically misused because the social function of psychiatric referral by judges outweighs protection of the psychiatric milieu” (Lipsky 2010: 63). By turning to other psychiatrists (there are also free consultation services, especially at private university hospitals such as NYU and Columbia), parents can find a counter-diagnosis for the social workers and the court. Although the psychiatrists ACS consults have more institutional authority, the parents try to accumulate as many referrals from different therapists as possible to at least quantitatively “defeat” the official psychiatrist’s diagnosis. The therapists, in some cases, become involved in the custody affairs of the parents, testifying in Family Court to certify the improvement of the parents’ condition, as I have been able to observe several times. When parents realize they have minimal power over their fate and that they are subjected to the evaluation of “experts” charged with identifying, diagnosing, and curing their problem, they learn how to use the authority of the recognized experts (i.e., psychiatrists) to assert their rights themselves. However, not all parents are able to enact these strategies of “indirect advocacy,” as many are overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of procedures, confused by the heterogeneity of the system’s demands, or alienated by this new feature in their lives. The support group was a space that allowed parents to devise strategies that no other setting could have made available. Parents advised each other on escaping the various forms of control the system placed in their path. This could be advice on how to deal with specific agencies and professionals, either because they were known to parent advocates or they had already interacted with other parents. The support group allowed the expertise of more veteran parents to be made available to newcomers and addressed by parent advocates. Thus, parents and advocates shared phone numbers of psychotherapists, lawyers,

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and professionals providing specific parenting classes according to each individual’s needs (children with special needs, teenagers, etc.). The history of each specific case was reconstructed, and solutions were sought collectively while allowing their own stories to be reconstructed as well as their trials with the system and its emotional burden. What was produced was a general sense of relief, as sharing implied a mutual and deep understanding. Through this shared space, parents felt less powerless and invisible and were able to give a social and political dimension to their experience and to overcome the psychological isolation generated by the institution’s shaming and blaming. The expertise of parent advocates and veteran parents disentangled the layered, often contradictory, and generally opaque journey parents needed to follow, and on which they were usually poorly informed by state agents. As Jennifer told me: CWOP really helped me a lot because there were times that I really didn’t know what to do. I wanted just to scream and yell but didn’t talk with anyone. I couldn’t vocalize it. I couldn’t do it with my therapist. He couldn’t understand. Nobody understands what it is like. (personal interview in Central Park, May 2013)

Services made available by child welfare to parents were occasionally perceived as resources parents could reclaim and exploit to their advantage. These reappropriations could range from small things such as the need for a new stroller to larger things like targeted therapy for a particular disorder or a temporary housing solution while waiting for a redefinition of the family situation. Parents shared these resources spontaneously without the intervention of parent advocates. Sometimes “clients” drag agency staff into family power struggles, forcing them to take the side of one family member over another (Polsky 1993). In my experience, I have seen how sometimes the child welfare system is used as a weapon to target members of one’s own family and as a legal tool to punish a partner, a parent, or a neighbor. In these cases, however, people usually underestimate how difficult predicting the results of turning to social services will be. Often, the family member who used the child welfare system to target another finds himself or herself put on trial and included in the pathological picture child welfare makes of the family situation. Calls to the central register—the line where reports are filed—can remain anonymous, and people can use it as a form of retaliation in cases such as feuds between spouses’ families or neighbors. With this potential, some parents claimed their involvement in the child welfare system was due to a false report from someone known to them. A call to the central

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register authorizes child protective services to show up at the house of the reported parent in case they find anything that could back up the allegation. Even if the report is false, allowing child protective services to enter one’s household still represents a risk for poor parents, as CPS can detect other issues in the family, mostly related to neglect (such as leaving children unattended or in the care of an older sibling who is still a minor, an infrastructural problem in the apartment that can be seen as dangerous, inadequate housing, and so on). In other words, when the parenting conditions of low-income families are exposed to ACS, there is a high chance that the agency will find a reason to start an investigation. I saw how this could cause further harm. Parents could blame an acquaintance or family member for their situation, portraying themselves as victims of a form of abuse and injustice. This belief could delay the reunification since the parent in question may refuse to follow the rehabilitating path, assuming he or she has always acted correctly. Adolescents are a particularly problematic category because of their ability to manipulate the mechanisms of child protective services to their own advantage. Some of the court cases I have followed regarded conflicts between parents and adolescent children. The action of social services played out in the combative relationship. Single women often—with other children in their care, trying to cope with economic hardship and working long hours—lose control of their teenage children. When parents try to assert themselves, some teenagers blackmail them by threatening to call ACS, which can undermine their authority. In some cases I witnessed in court, teenagers reported their parents in the hopes of being placed with a close relative who exerts less control, such as a grandmother, who is perceived as more permissive. However, the prospect of kinship care is not always viable, so adolescents may find themselves in the home of strangers who are unwilling to deal with their demands and issues and who end up being more difficult to handle than their biological parents. It is not rare for teenagers to run away from their foster homes and embark on a path that exacerbates their vulnerability. Meanwhile, the parents still have a pending case with the ACS with the expense of time, resources, and energy that this entails, trying to regain the custody of the child who may not want to be reconciled. In the case of children or adolescents who have experienced foster care and since been reunified, the situation is particularly complicated. The oppositional crisis typical of adolescence is complicated by the feelings of abandonment and resentment teenagers develop toward their birth parents, who lose authority and become prone to manipu-

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lation. The many traumas children and parents face after reunification are rarely addressed by ACS, leaving parents and children with lots of emotional baggage to work through. Regaining a good degree of trust is not an easy task. Those issues and traumas can be dragged out instead of being solved. Gloria, from earlier in this chapter, described her relationship with her son as irreversibly changed after he returned home from foster care, but she thought it could have been avoided if caseworkers had organized a talk between them about what had happened. In Lisa’s case, even though her case was closed without a removal, her eleven-year-old had learned to use the threat of calling ACS to his advantage. For Lisa, the first few months were extremely complicated, given the added difficulty of coping with her son’s ADHD, which often made him unmanageable and out of control: My son became defiant, and that was playing a part in that because I was so exhausted, cause they took away my power from me. Like, that’s on me; I don’t know how to parent. But then it came to a point where one of my girlfriends kind of slapped me out of it, you know? “Let’s have a conversation here! You can’t let him win; you can’t let him have the control of the situation. You got to let them know that you have rights, and the case is open and you have rights too! You have to remind them.” And that’s where I came from because I was exhausted. You have to have a good support system. I find that a lot of these parents, they have no family. The family lives in another place, or they just don’t have family, relationship with them, and they [ACS] look at them, look at what your family support is. I had a lot of support. I have my parents that live down the block. I have my aunt that lives in Grand Concourse. You know, friends I was able to list as support, and that also worked in my favor. (personal interview, April 2012)

I witnessed a similar dynamic in a case I followed in Family Court. A woman had been accused of neglect by a younger cousin for whom she had custody, an eighteen-year-old girl with mental health issues resulting from a life marked by several tragedies. The girl wanted to leave home and move in with her boyfriend. For this reason, she had accused her cousin of not taking care of her therapeutic needs, causing her to become suicidal. The lawyer explained to me that she hoped that if the court had ordered the removal, she would have been able to go and live alone as an adult while receiving the subsidy intended for the foster family. The problem was, if the court charged the cousin—a mother of four—of neglect, she would lose her job (she was a nurse, and if you are found guilty of neglect or abuse toward a minor, you cannot work

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with children, the elderly, or the sick for twenty-eight years under the law).4 The woman claimed she had always taken care of the girl’s mental health and was not aware that she was only pretending to take her medication. In the last hearing I followed, the judge postponed the decision. Even though he was convinced of the woman’s innocence, the only way to ensure psychiatric services for the girl was to substantiate the case of neglect against the woman and send the younger cousin to foster care, for which, despite her hopes, the age of consent is twenty-one and not eighteen. Nonetheless, if the girl expressed to her attorney her desire to go into foster care, the woman would lose her job as it would be a substantiated case of neglect with child protective services. This is a typical example of how complicated things can be in some cases. In this difficult situation, the judge, torn between the institutional duty to refer a person in obvious distress to some sort of forced guardianship and the duty to relieve another person of an unfair and devastating charge, did not know how to resolve the problem fairly. Besides the forms of social suffering and structural violence seen by such complicated and fragile family ties, and the blind bureaucracy of institutional assistance/control, it is not easy to identify either a culprit or a victim. In her works, Nancy Scheper-Hughes has analyzed the multiple forms of violence to which minors are subjected in different cultural contexts, but which are still shared conditions of social suffering and marginalization. The anthropologist has, in this regard, reiterated how the reform of welfare in the United States has primarily affected the children themselves, the main recipients of the extinct AFDC program (Scheper-Hughes and Sargent 1998). Similarly, Dorothy Roberts noticed that through the workfare reform of TANF, “the public tries to absolve itself of the obligation to support poor families by calling the negative consequences of welfare reform ‘child neglect’ and holding mothers responsible” (Roberts 2002: 178). However, Scheper-Hughes herself warns—in the introduction to the volume Small Wars, which also features an essay by Philippe Bourgois on the condition of minors in East Harlem in the 1980s—how social scientists have not always been ready to denounce and condemn the negligence of minors for fear of falling into the attitude of blaming the parents, who are considered to be political or social victims (ScheperHughes and Sargent 1998: 23). We risk not analyzing the complexities of motherhood and parenting if we uncritically assume that motherhood is the same regardless of people’s socioeconomic conditions. In the same volume, Jill Korbin analyzes the self-representations of some women in prison for the murder of their children, and in par-

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ticular the way they continue to portray themselves as “good mothers” who love their children despite causing their deaths. This epistemological forcing of “mothers at all costs” seems to reverberate not only in the self-absorbed need of the mothers in question but also by the people who surrounded them, from relatives and friends to social workers (Korbin 1998). I have also heard this rhetoric of the good mother, who provides unconditional love and protection through her own sacrifice, many times during my fieldwork. Parents use it to reassert their social role, and social workers use it as an important moral standard; no matter what, this came out as the only possible option for motherhood. However, managing the difficulties, such as existential and material precariousness, was not considered a determining force in the possibilities of shaping parental styles. The research of feminist scholars in recent decades has shown how women, and especially women of color, have used self-help and mutual assistance to improve their collective wellbeing in low-income communities in the face of structural inequalities and state violence (Gilmore 1999; Bookman and Morgen 1988; Gilkes 1988; Mullings 1995; Naples 1992; Stack 1975; Susser 1988). However, if Black motherhood has always been seen as flawed and socially dangerous in White mainstream society, in Black communities, as highlighted by Collins, their expectations have always been contrastingly very high. This has led to the representation of the “superstrong Black mother,” claiming that “Black women are richly endowed with devotion, self-sacrifice, and unconditional love, the attributes associated with archetypal motherhood. Black men inadvertently foster a different controlling image for Black women” (Collins 2000: 6). In many African American communities, so much sanctification surrounds Black motherhood that “the idea that mothers should live lives of sacrifice has come to be seen as the norm” (Collins 2000: 12). However, as Gabriela asked me, “Why does neglect happen? Does it happen when it’s alone, or does it happen when the bills pile up? People do this on their own.” She referred to the isolation and lack of support that often affects the women (“she”) investigated by child protective services. The image of these “mythical mothers” is something so culturally pervasive that discussing the possibility of more sustainable maternal models is often a social taboo that brings institutions and families together. During my fieldwork, I had the opportunity to reflect instead on the strength of the women I met, who, with several children, occasional jobs, and very small apartments in difficult areas, struggled to survive and take care of their children, especially when they were of different ages and with different needs and problems. Their ability to take

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on their responsibilities, to bear a condition of constant stigmatization and marginalization, and to claim their rights to exist were aspects that struck me every time. In poverty analysis, it is easy to slip into victimization, and this is what Scheper-Hughes and Sargent urge to avoid. What is often forgotten, however, is the incredible strength required to live such complicated lives. As Rayna Rapp (1987) notes, family ties become the only element allowing people to survive in the most disadvantaged communities, although they represent the primary reason the poor are attacked. In fact, Rapp counters the accusation that their conception of the family is flawed and deficient, asserting that it is the relationship between the family and productive resources that is deficient. Learning about these women, as well as those who work with them, reveals the fragility of the functional balances they relentlessly try to create, the difficulty of their choices, and the constant tension in the survival they pursue. NOTES 1. Data retrieved from the New York Civil Liberties Union website: “Stop-andFrisk Data,” NYCLU, http://www.nyclu.org/content/stop-and-frisk-data. 2. John Rudolf, “Ramarley Graham, Unarmed Teen, Unlawfully Shot by New York Police, Lawyer Says,” Huffington Post, 9 February 2012, http://www .huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/09/ramarley-graham-new-york-police-_ n_1266715.html. 3. By the phrase “conduct of conduct,” I mean “the role of the institutions and practices through which governance (not necessarily that of a state government) operates at the individual organizational level” (Foucault 1982: 789). 4. In this regard, it is important to point out how poor women of color disproportionately work in caretaking positions (e.g., home health aides and childcare workers), all fields in which a substantiated child neglect case may prohibit employment and thus directly cause job loss for some mothers and more difficulty in finding another (Lash 2017; Lee 2016).

chapter 

The Moral Economies of Community Participation New Forms of Governance and Representative Ambiguities

KKK Not Just State versus Citizens: Grassroots and Nonprofit Organizations as Service Providers

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his chapter focuses on exploring and analyzing the forms of advocacy and participation of families and communities in the formulation and management of social policies concerning child protection. The way I entered the ethnographic field naturally introduced me to this component of child welfare, which is increasingly composed of practices, agents, and organizations that often become mediators and “translators” of the obligations to which the bureaucracy and the Court subject families. The research focus on inequalities resulted from how I accessed fieldwork—through the family advocacy and civil rights networks I encountered during the January–July 2010 semester, even before starting my fieldwork. I deemed it essential, therefore, to acknowledge, discuss, and include those networks in the analysis. They are vital components in child welfare, critiquing the institutions while being involved in the apparatus itself. To document and reflect on their existence and function holds a relevance both in terms of analysis and for practicing engaged anthropology (Davis 2012; Aiello 2010), documenting self-organization and activism in highly institutionalized contexts. It is important to highlight how child welfare is not only between users and professionals but is populated by many other subjects and entities, which increas-

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ingly shape those relationships and broaden the knowledge we have of families and the system. These new subjects can identify and raise issues that orient parents and even some professionals’ representation of the system and the particular roles they play within it (Sharma and Gupta 2006). Furthermore, to illustrate the intricate way in which governance is enacted in late capitalism, it is essential to describe the articulated heterogeneity of these participants (Cruikshank 1999; Rose 2006; Clarke and Newman 2009; Clarke 2012; Fairbanks 2009). Being at the crossroads between civil society, the tertiary sector, and the state demonstrates how dichotomies of state/individual, structure/ agency, and oppression/resistance have blurred the boundaries in daily social practices (Herzfeld 1992, 2003). This is especially true for policy areas such as the child welfare system, where “moral citizenship” (Schinkel 2013) holds a high stake and where the moral panic around child protection cripples the possibility of questioning its functions. To avoid this, these new actors want fewer foster care solutions in order to realize a participatory and collective system of care, designed and operated by those directly “affected,” namely families and their communities.

Self-Help and Storytelling as Strategies of Advocacy: CWOP and Rise As the first parent advocacy organization of its kind in the United States, CWOP was founded on the notion that parents, rather than being a “problem” or a barrier, were a fundamental resource in a child welfare case and could be powerful advocates for other parents involved in the system as well. The organization was established in 1996 on the initiative of Terry Mizrahi, director of the Education for Community Organizing school at CUNY Hunter College, and David Tobis, a policymaker who, with help from an anonymous donor, created the Child Welfare Fund.1 Tobis described the child welfare system in the early 1990s as perpetually strained between reform and crisis and without public scrutiny, except when a particularly dramatic case would cause attention. At that point, the case would become frontpage news and would deepen the crisis in the system, meaning reform would be harder to come by (Tobis 2013). While CWOP’s activities in the early years were focused on pressuring local and state administration to make child welfare policies family-centered and to include parents in ACS decision-making, the organization soon built stronger partnerships with child welfare agencies. The Parent Leadership Curriculum, for those wanting to become a parent advocate and aimed

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at ACS-affected parents, was designed and implemented in 2001. As such, CWOP parent advocates became a regular presence in meetings between families and ACS in the East Harlem district. During my research, I had the opportunity to interview some mothers for whom the presence of a parent advocate would improve their meetings. At the time of my fieldwork, CWOP recruited future parent advocates mainly through its weekly support groups for parents affected by ACS, which were led by other parent advocates. After the closure or partial resolution of their cases, some parents enrolled in the CWOP leadership curriculum and became advocates. As I have mentioned, advocates empower other parents—for example, by informing them about their rights, by helping them figure out the complex bureaucracy of the child welfare system, and by supporting them in meetings with caseworkers in which decisions about cases are made. In the last two decades, parent advocacy organizations have become an integral part of the US child welfare system, forming nationwide coalitions like the Birth Parent National Network (BPNN), particularly because they are seen to improve the chances for reunification (Tobis 2013; Cohen and Canan 2006; Gerber et al. 2019). But why did parents want to continue to engage with an institutional system that had revoked their parental rights? In my experience, the reason is tied to having experienced firsthand how the ACS operates. By becoming advocates, they want to try and change the system and help other parents cope with the same punitive and unjust mechanisms. Lisa found in advocacy a way to alter her experience of child welfare from the feeling of “being ashamed” and instead becoming a “tool” to help other parents in her situation: I decided once they closed my case that I was going to turn that negative into a positive. You know, that [there] has to be some kind of advocacy group out there. I want to work in a preventive agency; I want to work somewhere where the parents are affected. . . . And I came, and I got the interview, and I went into the curriculum and I graduated last year. . . . it was a journey, and when I was in it I didn’t understand, but now I understand that my purpose was to be doing this. And sometimes I think that God uses you as a tool to bring you where you need to be, so you can help, and say, “I came from that experience, and I do this and this with my experience to help other people.” (personal interview, April 2012)

Through advocacy, Gabriela instead learned “how to navigate the system better” and “how to be involved in the community, so that you have some back up.” She stressed the importance of educating

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yourself, otherwise “ACS will eat you alive.” For Gloria, who practiced active citizenship her whole life (Clarke 2012), participating in community-based organizations for neighborhood improvement and welfare rights, her involvement with CWOP was first a crucial support during her case and then the natural continuation of her civic and political commitment. The women I met at CWOP engaged with a broad political spectrum through their advocacy, collaborating with groups focused on reproductive rights, mass incarceration, and police brutality, enacting in certain cases a form of “activist mothering” (Naples 1992) or “Black radical mothering” (Davis 2016). Many whose motherhood rights had been deprived and who had been stigmatized for their inability to take care of their children turned to self-help, mutual assistance, advocacy, and activism to cope with structural inequalities and challenge a form of governance that questions their moral legitimacy to have children in the first place (Bookman and Morgen 1988; Gilkes 1988; Mullings 1995; Naples 1992; Pulkingham, Fuller, and Kershaw 2010). Lastly, advocacy has also provided job opportunities in foster care agencies or other Community Based Organizations (CBOs) and has become an important source of employment for many parents who struggle to keep their jobs while meeting ACS mandatory commitments and/or lose their TANF benefits (Lee 2016). Thus, several interrelated factors pushed parents, mothers in particular, to begin their path into advocacy through CWOP: as a form of resistance to the oppression of the system; as a tool to use their experiences to help others and themselves avoid interacting with the system in the future; and a way to relegitimize their denied parenthood and improve their social, political, and economic conditions. But how was this form of advocacy and support carried out in the everyday practices of CWOP? They worked with parents to help them exercise their rights and also with the broader public sphere by raising awareness as well as developing more policy-related action. As I showed in chapter 3, the weekly support group for parents with an ACS case allowed collective discussion to help the parents solve their problems and concoct strategies for how to navigate the process. Sharing their experiences in these discussions helped participants to exit, even if temporarily, their status as unfit and problematic parents, providing them with a space where they could reappropriate the ordinariness of their parenthood, exchanging impressions, opinions, and lessons with the other parents. Rise magazine allowed participants to tell their own stories, which were first initiated in the support group. The magazine shared parents’

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stories on their ACS cases as a means to destigmatize them and fight the label of “the monstrous parent” through their subjective perspective. This was an advocacy tool that was used by parent advocates when dealing with child welfare professionals and the general public. Both the support group and the writing class then fostered parents’ new outlook so they would see themselves as worthy moral subjects within the context of the child welfare system. Originally conceived as a small publication, the magazine was edited by Molly, a young journalist who previously ran a newspaper made by teens in the Juvenile Justice System. Rise, through a month-long writing workshop, collected the stories of parents in the child welfare system and published articles written by parents or parent advocates on the issues they faced in the system. Rise was a publication that came out three times a year and was distributed among government and nongovernment agencies, as well as in schools of social work, with a circulation of 3,300 copies. Molly, in the interview I conducted, described Rise as a kind of tool to create compassion and empathy for parents and to make social workers and policymakers share both the difficulties that parents faced once in the system and also their humanity and capacity for agency: I think the role that Rise is trying to play is to help people understand what’s there and [what] they are not getting—to say, this parent you worked with, you may not understand aspects that allow you to see this parent sympathetically, you may underestimate what parents you’re working with can do and say because your work is mixed up and not very slow, and the Rise process is very slow . . . . I think Rise stories are a window for professionals to look at what they’re missing working with these families. (personal interview, May 2012)

Rise was funded by the Child Welfare Fund and had a small budget. Transportation expenses were covered and those involved could present their certificate of participation as an activity performed in the interest of their rehabilitation in Family Court. They also received a small payment of $100. Rise is perhaps a way of reframing the taboo of child abuse or neglect within a socially accepted narrative. It allows mothers to avoid the monster parent image and replace it with the rehabilitated parent who regains an acceptable moral position by acknowledging their mistakes and failings. But this type of narrative also means that the difficulties associated with foster care (like poverty, drug addiction, and domestic violence), and the moral and social shame that follow, can be told in a different light. The narrative offered does not deny these aspects but

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proposes a version starting with those who experience it, making them more human, which can be lost when the debate is centered on clinical and legal aspects. The victims, through telling their own stories, recover their social and moral dimension among those who deal with them in the child welfare system. Because Rise is distributed among the agencies of the therapeutic state and their professionals, as well as among parents who use their services, it creates a narrative space for the parents to escape from the intense epistemic violence to which they are subjected, although without radically challenging it.

Tensions between Empowerment, Dissent, and Compliance Despite their advocacy aims, the operations of CWOP, Rise, and other nonprofits occasionally engendered ambivalence from some parents and activists to whom I spoke. The kind of support provided to families (which could be legal, social, or psychological) can be seen as a gentle and empathetic encouragement to complete the program and encourage reunification in foster care cases. Although the objectives and the political and social affiliations are diverse, the actions of these organizations often resulted in speeding up the process of accommodating families to the procedures prescribed by child welfare. As practitioners themselves have told me, they often try to normalize families’ feelings of abuse and injustice, which make cooperation extremely difficult, when they encounter the system. These are the words of Olivia, a social worker who works with a nonprofit providing advocacy and legal support to parents: And you know what we do, as social workers and lawyers, is to normalize our clients’ feeling of injustice and unfairness. They are very aware of how the system is unfair, and what we do is to say to them that it’s normal to have this feeling, and here is when CWOP work is important. (personal interview, January 2012)

The support offered to families is thus to try and help them complete the social service programs and reunify with their children. The ambivalent support that advocacy organizations offer to families is evident in the similar attitude they show toward families’ involvement in the child welfare system. This ambivalence is well expressed by what Mary once told me about CWOP when I asked her why she refused to enroll in the curriculum despite being strongly encouraged by other advocates: “I can’t ask people to be compliant.” In her opinion, CWOP did not address parents’ anger into a social or political force to chal-

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lenge the oppressive system; it only provided a valve to vent it. On the one hand, NGOs and associations confirm their interpretation of the system and the oppression it exercises on them. However, they attempt to “normalize” this feeling and foster its acceptance as an integral part of their experience within the child welfare system. Therefore, the function of these organizations is not simply to comfort parents and foster their demands to be heard but also to provide information and suggest strategies to exit the bureaucratic maze, empathizing with their sense of violated justice. They share a similar view of the system with their clients. Their function is not strictly to support parents’ complaints but rather to legitimize their interpretation of child welfare and then facilitate their collaboration with social services. Lucy, a parents’ defense attorney, always began her first consultancy by asserting that they were not in a “fair” system. She then added that the only thing to do was to play by the rules, trying to limit the period of foster care and the damage such a case would cause them. Advocacy associations, committed to making families’ requests relevant, assume the unequal relationship between institutions and families, which makes their intervention necessary to “normalize” the situation. By “normalize,” I mean families accepting their limited power of negotiation and the necessity of collaborating with social services by showing their commitment to responding to their requests. CWOP’s advocacy model, while I was conducting fieldwork, was open to collaborating with institutions and wanted to avoid being seen as excessively parent-oriented and displaying a negative image of the system. ACS, from its side, saw collaborating with CWOP as an opportunity to reduce the level of conflict with families, showing its willingness to address the system’s unfairness and inequalities. ACS considered parent advocates as knowledge-producers of the effects of their policies (Davis 2013) and as witnesses of the disruptive consequences of their very same policies. In the case of Rise, the politics of how to represent child welfare recipients was also involved, sometimes creating a tension between victimization, unfit parenthood, and public representation of “deviance.” Molly, the editor at the time, spoke about how the dramatic stories of these mothers risked constructing a shared imaginary of marginality, telling me how criticisms toward Rise made her aware of such risk: Sometimes I get terrible emails about Rise, where people tell me: Where are the stories about wrong removals? If you put five stories of addicted parents, everybody will think they are all addicted! And I started to be very mindful about it, although we have to work with the stories available. I try

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to keep this criticism in mind and not just publishing stories of domestic violence and addiction.

While these personal accounts are fundamental for sharing people’s experiences with child welfare, the need to condense them is inevitable for a magazine format such as Rise. This could result in a detrimental emphasis on marginality without describing how complex dynamics have generated it. Some more critical parent advocates argued that CWOP and Rise storytelling were ineffective in radically challenging the dynamics at play, both collectively and individually. Similarly, Fernandes emphasized how storytelling, “when based in individuating, liberal tropes and divorced from a larger grassroots and autonomous movement, has been incapable of challenging broader global patterns of gendered inequality” (Fernandes 2017: 86). Nevertheless, in shaping one’s own life experience as a tale of redemption and resilience or as a “promise for a reversal of misfortune” (Davis 2013: 32), interlocking forms of oppression may also become visible and acknowledged. Women, in general, derived a sort of relief from telling their stories, as they had been part of a system that had relegated their individuality and humanity. As instruments of empowerment and victimization, Rise’s life stories reflected the ambivalences that permeated the world of the child welfare system while helping people toward action and representation. Looking at the history of child welfare, it is evident how the aims of the reeducation and normalization of “deviant” families has shifted from children to parents. In the nineteenth century, the goal of charitable organizations was to “save” children from the dangerous classes and condition them to become good workers and members of society through apprenticeship. Over time, the parents became the ones to be reeducated. With children, however, there is no declared reformatory intent. Instead, services focus on the possible pathological behaviors as a consequence of abuse and/or neglect or on possible educational and cognitive issues. Children are subject to mental health services and institutions more than educational services because they need to be manageable while in state care (an issue that was often raised by advocacy associations as evidence of the overmedication of children in foster care). On the other hand, parents undertake rehabilitative course, which bring the family problems that led to their removal back into moral-sanitary terms (Hacking 1991). The associations that work with parents also incorporate this attitude, treating parents as subjects who need help, while countering the image of the abusive parent. If the state, in the shape of ACS, “sanctions” parents, the nonprofit, commu-

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nity-based tertiary sector “listens” to the suffering and discriminations they have experienced (Fassin 2011). In this way, the public apparatus and the nonprofit world complement each other in regulating citizenship and collaborating to bring back problematic families to a form of correct citizenship. In chapter 4, I discussed how in the notion of “confessional” technologies of the self, following a Foucauldian reading, welfare and state apparatuses’ goal is not to deny the real interests of their subjects but to allow them to help themselves (Cruikshank 1999). But because “his thought had to do with normalization and thus leaves no space for differentiation” (Fassin 2009: 53), Foucault did not focus on inequalities and on how they are reproduced through governmentality. For this reason, I aligned my analysis to those who question that such intent for normalization through self-improvement is addressed to everyone indiscriminately, noting instead the impersonal and hostile way institutions act toward racialized and impoverished families (Smith 2001; Bridges 2011). Bridges argued this in relation to women she interacted with who were under Medicaid coverage of prenatal care: The program asks a woman to confess the details of her social history to a social worker not because it expects the dialogue will be therapeutic to the woman, but because the state wants to know if, when the baby is born, it is justified in removing him or her from the woman’s home. PCAP/Medicaid appears to be as much about social control and as little about the creation of a disciplined subject as is TANF. (Bridges 2011: 201)

Bridges’ excerpt demonstrates the continuity between the welfare state and the child welfare system, showcasing suspicion toward welfare recipients instead of pushing them to help themselves, failing to listen or comprehend them and instead looking for deviancy. In this framework, I believe listening is not performed by the “carceral archipelago” but by the “nonprofit archipelago” gravitating around the child welfare system. ACS could be seen as a punitive form of government, while the many private nonprofit organizations provide services aimed at “explaining” the system’s demands and encouraging self-help through listening. Together, they enforce individual responsibility in the face of deprivation and promote a market-driven model for public services that encourages consumer “choice” (Bookman and Morgen 1988; Cruikshank 1999; Hyatt 2001; Mizrahi, Lopez, and Torres 2009; Rose and Miller 2000; Savas 2005; Susser 1996).

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Nevertheless, nuances, contradictions, and spaces for contestation arise from “neoliberal paternalism” (Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011). CWOP, for example, wanted parents to help themselves, as its advocacy was parent-led. Parents were not exclusively thought of in terms of their social problems precisely because of this. Instead, they were rehabilitated as resources and partners, as legitimate interlocutors with whom institutions must deal. CWOP, Rise, and the NGOs providing free legal representation for parents embody what Foucault called pastoral power, which moved from Christian institutions to the “therapeutic state” (Polsky 1993) but has now moved toward nonprofit and community organizations after the neoliberal turn. Nevertheless, they also create spaces where such state action is questioned, discussed, and made visible, as I will now describe.

Who Is the Subject of Empowerment? Barbara Cruikshank, a political scientist and welfare rights activist, published a book in 1999 entitled The Will to Empower. The book was born from a curiosity that turned into a real investigation to solve an increasingly intricate puzzle. Cruikshank had begun to notice padlocks that closed private and public garbage cans in Minneapolis where she lived. She asked various residents for explanations. They attributed the choice to a question of public order. However, their concerns differed as to what this meant (for some, the garbage attracted homeless people who stayed on the streets and started fights; for public officials, it provided bad food to them when free canteens were available). Since it was not just a few isolated locks but a genuine new civic behavior, Cruikshank found it difficult to work out who was behind this new waste management policy, whether it was a municipal or neighborhood association initiative or the initiative of individual citizens. However, she concluded that it was not an imposed behavior but rather one people adopted for different reasons. This small episode made Cruikshank attentive to how standards and models of citizenship are promoted and imposed through the action of institutions and administrative directives, and how subjectification can be transformed into subjectivity. Expanding on her reasoning for the blurred boundaries between subjectification and subjectivity, she also wondered if a court recommending a self-esteem course to a mother who failed to protect or discipline her child was a legal, political, or administrative act.

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Prompted by these examples, Cruikshank suggested that if citizensubjects exist, they cannot be divided into active and inactive, autonomous and dependent: a mother on welfare is both subjected to bureaucratic control and a subject able to resist and manipulate it. She recalls how welfare is both a voluntary and coercive form of government and is, in essence, a way of responding to people’s actions rather than producing apathy. Welfare, especially in its most neoliberal version, aims to let its recipients help themselves, that is, to develop in them the capacity for self-help and to emancipate themselves from state subsidies. However, as we have seen, the child welfare system is not an institutional complex created solely to help families in need, but also to protect children from the abuse and neglect their caretakers inflict on them. For this reason, it synthesizes the apparatus of care and punishment, locating itself at the exact juncture of what Wacquant has called the “male/right” and the “female/left” part of the state (Wacquant 2011; Woodward 2021). In the view of “differentiated citizenship” (Ong 2006), “Mobile individuals with human capital exercise citizenship-like claims in diverse locations, whereas other citizens are devalued and vulnerable, in practice unable to exercise any rights and subject to the state’s disciplining and civilizing/disqualifying regimes rather than to the pastoral care bestowed on citizens the state believes more worthy” (Melamed 2011: 90). As I have explained, I believe that in the case of the “devalued and vulnerable” users of the child welfare system, the missing function of pastoral care is performed by advocacy and empowering organizations. They allow parents to act as subjects within the intricate network of obligations and rules that are a feature of child welfare. In so doing, they tend to “smooth out” the cooperation with institutions, therefore facilitating less conflict, while at the same time “empowering” parents as service users. If the marginalized population’s problem is seen as their inability to self-manage and adequately participate in their rights as citizens due to their supposed self-inflicted poverty (Morgen and Maskovsky 2003), advocacy organizations try to give them back this lost status. The concept of empowerment came from the period of social change and activism that marked the 1960s and became a political strategy that united very different movements. It later entered discursive arenas and technologies of citizenship, linking the subjectivity of citizens with their subjectification and tying activism to discipline (Cruikshank 1999: 67). Empowerment has become synonymous with economic, commercial, and social development, becoming a buzzword used in many different contexts, from entrepreneurship to the fight against poverty and marginalization. One example is the Empowerment Zone’s urban

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redevelopment project, which encouraged investment by large corporations and commercial companies on 125th Street, Harlem’s center. Supported by local leaders and community activists, this commercialization of 125th Street brought prosperity only to a small part of the population, the middle class. At the same time, it destroyed the economies of many small businesses and gentrified Central Harlem, forcing many of its inhabitants to move elsewhere (Dávila, 2004). The conflicting meaning of empowerment intersects with the conflicting meaning of what community means for public policies. As Miranda Joseph notes, capitalizing on the idea of community raises questions “of belonging and of power,” making it difficult to know in advance “where the practice of community might offer effective resistance and where it might be an unredeemable site of cooptation, hegemony, and oppressive reiteration of norms” (Joseph 2002: 4). Steven Gregory (2005) provides an example of this by describing a neighborhood association he attended during his research on community activism that rejected the establishment of a foster care childcare agency, fearing the decay and danger it might bring. In Gregory’s description, the foster care agency addressed the neighborhood council with the now institutionalized language of “community development” and “racial solidarity.” However, the residents disavowed their message, ruling that they were no longer willing to serve as a foster care community and that the organization should turn to other neighborhoods. The right to “quality of life” of the African American middle-income population thus contrasts directly with the discourse on the empowerment of poor communities, who do not want to be trapped by the institutional concept of moral-racial community. The fragmentation of interests along class lines and the new paradigms of social welfare in the post-civil rights era has broken up the previous categories on which an entire emancipation movement was built. The power of the neoliberal discourse on the market economy and the difference between productive and dependent populations, the deserving and undeserving poor, has deconstructed the concept of “community” and what it means. This has generated a struggle for the reappropriation of social meaning and the practices that accompany it between institutional actors and different population groups. This has fragmented civic activism into often conflicting interests, as Maskovsky (2001) documents with his ethnography of political participation in impoverished areas of Philadelphia. One example of this conflict can be seen in the interactions between ACS and CWOP. In 2013, the Community Partnership Initiative (CPI), the ACS branch charged with partnering with the most affected communities, needed to find

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an appropriate provider of community representatives to support parents. CWOP was one of the candidate organizations, having already provided parent advocates as community representatives for the East Harlem district. The chosen community representatives from other districts were often former social workers or “exemplary” community members (e.g., pastors, teachers), while CWOP insisted on using ex-ACS clients. In a way, ACS-designed community partnership programs evoked practices and discursive orders connected to the concept of community. However, the conditions and modalities from which they operated structured them “in dominance” (Clarke and Newman 2009)—claiming to want to pursue “system change” through figures “invested in the status quo to maintain the status quo,” as the then director of CWOP put it. If, for ACS, the community meant roughly the urban neighborhood where families with an ACS case were located, for CWOP advocates, the community that needed to be heard and empowered was that of stigmatized parents. They wanted to challenge ACS’s vision of “legitimate” partners with figures who are closer to the sociocultural reality of parents but who have “improved” themselves, avoiding their image as unfit parents, which could be made worse when comparing them with virtuous community members. In this regard, several scholars have discussed how the professionalization of advocacy and community-based services and CBOs tie them to government funding, leaving them in a less contentious relationship with the state (Marwell 2004). The CPI office resisted the adoption of the CWOP curriculum in all New York districts, imposing the condition that parent advocates must become mandated reporters and that the curriculum be redesigned. To be introduced city-wide as “community reps” would have allowed CWOP to turn parent advocacy into a fully institutionalized profession. As the Director asked during one of our interviews, “Why do we have community partnership if we are not interested in having relationships with the people in the community that are mostly affected by ACS?” The Community Partnership Initiative could not or would not acknowledge how widespread the concern was that one might lose children to foster care in low-income communities (Mullings 1997), and how the termination of parental rights is a “gendered and political act with community-wide ramification” (Kennedy 2011: 167). Even if CWOP had been contracted, the director was worried that ACS would use parent advocates as a cosmetic element for child safety conferences, giving them the possibility of “check[ing] off that box on the form.” The strongest resistance of the ACS was their identity as former users of the child welfare system. This makes parent advocates

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involvement in service management more difficult since they represent the perspective of those who are identified by institutions as responsible for abuse/neglect toward the children they should protect. At the same time, it is this positioning that makes their presence in the service industry so important, as they could have a strong role in legitimazing institutional action. The risk is that they will be expelled from the child welfare system because they are excessively parentoriented or because, as a former CWOP board member told me, they convey a negative image of the system to the parents involved in it. For the system to function as it does now, and for parents to comply with it, parents need to accept that the system is right, and they are wrong. Questioning the modus operandi of the system radically subverts the relationship constructed by the system itself. To work within its framework and through a reformist perspective then has structural limitations: even as “experts” on the system, parents cannot reverse the role applied to them and the lack of authority that this relationship entails. For CWOP, however, the fundamental problem in the dynamics of child welfare was always the absolute discredit ascribed to the parents, isolated and paralyzed by a process of blaming that very often overwhelms them, making them unable to navigate the complicated procedures of the system. This is why a figure like the parent advocate is fundamental for current parents in the system because a former user knows the frustration of being accused and treated with hostility even when the problems that brought a parent to a Child Safety Conference could stem from a lack of resources (economic, time, supervision, etc.). Many of the mothers I spoke to emphasized the importance of someone being able to tell them, “I’ve been in this condition,” and even just simply, as in Mary’s case, to hold their hand during the interview with caseworkers. The “unfit” and denied parenthood for CWOP advocates was also the main ground on which they built their political subjectivity, and the axis around which structural inequalities intersected and became intelligible while being the object of their claims against the state. Balancing financial stability, “institutional advocacy” (DeVault 1999), and more radical forms of activist mothering was not an easy task in such a complex situation. On the other hand, their collaboration and endorsements were increasingly valuable to the ACS because they could legitimize the entire child welfare system in the eyes of families, communities, and the public, who were more sensitive to negative power dynamics in public services. The problem encountered by the parent advocates at CWOP when they overcame the obstacles ACS had put in place to “get a seat at the table” reflects this context. Before its closure in 2018, CWOP’s most “compliant” part was

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incorporated as another service provided by the Administration for Children Services, through the Advocacy Office (managed by a CWOP former director) and the agencies contracted to provide community representatives. CWOP’s last two directors, both women of color and mothers who had each had a case with ACS, advocated more strongly for systemic change, distancing themselves from ACS and refusing to be financed by them. This approach undermined the financial stability of the organization, as donors and the board did not approve of CWOP’s more radical stance. Parent advocates are interesting figures. On one hand, they are legitimized by their experiences with child welfare administration and because they have learned how to cope with it. This status seems to contradict what is claimed by Nikolas Rose about the role of experts in “advanced liberalism,” to transcribe the objectives of political government in the less contestable area of technical knowledge (Rose 2006). Parent advocates are experts on the institutional mechanisms and blind spots of a system with which people are forced to relate. The difference in parents’ perceptions of CWOP compared to a generic support service lies in the fact that it is not mandatory and attending it does not imply any strong formal benefit to either the parent or CWOP itself. CWOP’s autonomy, compared to other, mandatory services that were often seen as ineffective or indifferent to the personal history each client brings, was considered a positive aspect and its intentions were generally judged to be sincere. At the same time, the trajectory of the organization seems to point out the limit the state posed in “hearing” those who are deemed unfit for citizenship. The role of CWOP, and the capacity of parent advocates to be legitimate experts, was accepted by its institutional interlocutors only if it limited itself to “explaining” the demands of the system and encouraging self-help through listening (Fassin 2011). Parent advocates, however, were more than just “empathetic listeners,” because of their lived experience and because of their potential to transform their marginalized position into an epistemic advantage. But when they decided to discontinue their compliance with the child welfare system, the organization collapsed. In this, it is crucial to highlight that CWOP was at its most financially solvent and well-respected by the child welfare system when a White male social worker was its director. This was also the time when they criticized ACS the least. Thus, not only was the grassroots, parentled model disavowed because it was too radical compared to the organizational and bureaucratic culture of the child welfare system, but

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also gendered, racialized, and classed structures shaped the possibility for CWOP to become recognized as a legitimate actor.

Missed Encounters: The Case of Community Forums As I have said, community is an entity that is continually invoked but difficult to identify. Policymakers often idealize it as a space characterized by social solidarity, homogeneity in racial and class affiliation, and shared political interest. During my fieldwork, I had the chance to reflect on how “community” is treated and represented differently depending on the situation, such as in the struggle for defining community representatives between CWOP and ACS. There were also other occasions in which I could observe the use of the idea of community in institutional and grassroots settings. One is that of a community forum promoted by the ACS to present an initiative to bring youth in the juvenile justice system closer to their families, named “Close to Home.” The institutions in which juvenile offenders are incarcerated are mostly located outside of New York City, several hours from Manhattan. This makes communication difficult because they live in total isolation, losing ties with their families and finding themselves in a marginalizing condition. This program, created by a collaboration between the Department of Juvenile Justice and the ACS, aimed to relocate some of the institutions to the main boroughs of New York City, where most of the youth came from. I followed the Manhattan community forum, held in the Silberman School of Social Work, the university’s premier social work educational institution. The other forums were held in community centers and public spaces in the most impoverished neighborhoods for each borough, namely the South Bronx for the Bronx, Brownsville for Brooklyn, and Jamaica for Queens and Staten Island. At the community forum held in East Harlem, the audience consisted almost entirely of staff from major child welfare and juvenile justice system agencies. The only outsiders were a few CWOP parent advocates, including Brianna. At the time, she was a community representative for the Highbridge neighborhood where she resides. At some point, after the formal presentation of the program by a panel of White administrators who acted paternalistic, Brianna stood up, took the floor, and argued that the initiative had been poorly publicized in the community. ACS circulated the event almost exclusively on the Internet, which excluded many of the local population who did not own a

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computer or did not know how to use the Internet (it was 2012 and the initiative was addressed to parents and grandparents of the detainees), and mostly through professional and institutional channels. Brianna accused the two commissioners of not treating the meeting seriously as the program was about to be implemented anyway. Even if the invitation read, “Now we want to know from you what we need to include in the plan to best serve the community’s youth,” in her opinion, this was not a real intention but simply a rhetorical escamotage. Brianna’s comment, therefore, implied that the two departments were not interested in hearing from the community on how to change the plan, and the inability (or lack of intention) to engage the audience reveals an instrumental use of the rhetoric of direct community involvement. The second case is that of the community forum organized by local associations, including CWOP and Community Connection for Youth. The number of participants was much higher than Close to Home, featuring mainly young people and families who spoke on stage with a juvenile justice system judge and some activists. The atmosphere was very different. It was also an opportunity to meet and socialize, with a buffet and tables for eating arranged around the stage, and chairs in the audience. The theme was also certainly more heartfelt by the audience. It concerned the age of criminal responsibility in the State of New York (sixteen at the time, now moved to eighteen), the lowest in the US together with North Carolina. The community forum hosted the stories of some teens who had gone through the juvenile justice system and came out well, earning a high school diploma and moving on to a professional or college career. After them, the stage was given to mothers of incarcerated teens. In the final collective discussion, people from the audience expressed their concerns about the measures taken by the police, speaking of the abuses they suffered as detainees and young people. Overall, the event was circulated much more successfully than Close to Home mainly because the organizers had real ties with the neighborhood and its associational network and were generally respected for their work in the community. Moreover, it was a heated exchange, openly critical of institutional measures, and therefore more engaging for the families living in the area. These families, therefore, deserted the presentation of a new service provided by the city’s administration but instead participated in an initiative for contesting city and state policies. These brief examples show how the concept of “community” can be problematic in its definition but at the same time viable as a model of participation and engagement when there is a real connection between

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families and various associative realities. As in the case of the Community Partnership Initiative, it can illustrate how the concept of “community” has been incorporated into institutional, discursive practices to become the prerogative of government programs that want to demonstrate sensitivity to local contexts. But as Close to Home showed, this doesn’t mean that those living in targeted communities buy into the institutional use of this concept. The second example demonstrates how communities can be effectively mobilized by grassroots organizations that cultivate social ties. This tension has a long history. The political-administrative notion of community was most prevalent in the Lyndon Johnson era of the 1960s, when with the Community Action Program, the federal government aimed to establish an alliance with the population of degraded Black urban areas. The Office of Economic Opportunity, and their programs for every age group, wanted to promote the activism and empowerment of the African American communities of the Rustbelt. They became the center of a new policy of participation on a racial basis that culminated in the Black politicization of the 1960s and 1970s. For this reason, the War on Poverty programs came into conflict with local municipalities, and Community Action Agencies became an invisible presence to state authorities, especially in the South, because they resisted them with the endorsement of the federal government. Washington reduced the possibilities of free participation in such organizations when protests reached their peak in the second half of the 1960s. The Green Amendment of 1967, in particular, severely limited the participation of the poor in the governing boards of Community Action Programs, as Cazenave highlights in the book Impossible Democracy (Cazenave 2008). However, this one occasion of cooperation between local organizations and state institutions remained in US politics. Its example became a rhetorical resource for subsequent liberal economic development programs that attempted to use Black Power’s promotion of community self-governance to publicize entrepreneurial activities in Black communities (Ferguson 2007). Thus, invoking “community” in public policy for marginalized neighborhoods in the United States has a particular political history that remains appealing to the state.

The Struggle for Advocacy Research looking at the results of the introduction of community partnership, or community-led state programs and social policies, emphasizes the lack of investment from government agencies (Kramer,

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Hurley, and White 2012). The few social actors who are involved as volunteers or quasi volunteers in the same institutions lack the support of local associations and the resources that allow such community empowerment. For this reason, the individual community representatives find themselves embroiled in the complicated institutional bureaucracy. They become “street bureaucrats” of the same institutional systems, in this case ethnographic, child welfare, and juvenile justice systems, as Gloria told me about between ACS and CWOP. The moral economies (Fassin 2009) that mark these initiatives are characterized as ambiguous spaces in which the image of the community is played out as an important agent of change or as a problematic entity depending on the context. For some time now, social sciences have been reflecting on how the new forms of neoliberal governance push for the empowerment of new social subjects, namely civil society and communities, to lighten the load on public services. Their aim is to introduce a form of self-government or self-help that rebalances social and personal situations marked by various kinds of deprivation (Hyatt 2001; Susser 1986; Bookman and Morgen 1988; Rose and Miller 2000; Clarke 2008) and which can exploit the networks of solidarity and spontaneous support that have always been present among minorities, especially for African American women (Stack 1975). Empowerment programs for people defined as “poor,” “disempowered,” and “underdeveloped” are implemented around the world. Despite utilizing a sophisticated understanding of “local” needs and the contexts in which they operate, these programs continue to be based on a set of universalized norms and hegemonic meanings of poverty, powerlessness, and tradition (Sharma and Gupta 2006). Here, however, the “expert client or patient” is instrumental in stabilizing the established knowledge–power node. Citizens need to be adequately informed by experts to become responsible interlocutors in the dialogue about services, as do communities or interest groups (Clarke and Newman 2009). Neoliberalization produces not only politicaleconomic phenomena but also cultural meanings and practices that affect individuality, market, state, and city (Brash 2011; Kingfisher and Maskovsky 2008), while using preexisting signifiers selectively (Hyatt 2001). For this reason, it is difficult to distinguish between chosen or imposed subjectivities or between their consequent social expressions. In a game of refractions and reappropriations, social actors manipulate existing signifiers and use them as tools to pursue their ends. Ethnographies are invaluable in uncovering the terrains of production, exchange, and contestation around cultural meanings and how they are positioned in different areas of power. They reveal the strat-

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egies of real estate developers who speak the language of Black selfdetermination (Maskovsky 2001), or of former drug addicts who reinvent themselves as social workers within the disintegrating service system, thus designing their own individuality within the morality of self-governance (Fairbanks 2009). Among these hybrid political subjectivities, I see the figures of parent advocates. Through the suffering of losing their children, they tried to reinvent their role, both privately and politically, inserting themselves into the institutional devices that have affected them and in which they can use their experience as a form of knowledge and authority. Despite the controversies, I believe there is large degree of resistance from the parent advocates that is not only related to their social, racial, and gendered belonging, but also to their direct experiences with the dysfunctional and unfair system, in which they hope to promote change by turning their marginalized position into an epistemic advantage. This has made them important figures in regard to what activists and academics have been discussing in recent years: that instead of walking the fine line between cooperation and critique, as Robert told me, the child welfare system’s basic functions need to be completely reimagined.

Note 1. The Child Welfare Fund was established to improve the condition of families and children in New York City, implementing a bottom-up approach to the child welfare system through the involvement of its recipients. Now it is more focused on providing services for families’ immediate needs and for developing parent-infant attachment.

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KKK Inequalities, Child Welfare, and the City

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ne morning in the Spring of 2012, I walked into the Brooklyn Family Court. After passing the control at the entrance, I met with Leah, a young lawyer working for an NGO providing free legal representation to parents in the child welfare system, and whom I would shadow during her court hearings. We entered the courtroom where her first case of the day was to be discussed. People were still taking their seats and arranging their papers, and she decided to take advantage of the moment to introduce me to the judge. To test the judge’s reaction, she provocatively told him that the subject of my research was racism in child welfare. I felt a little uncomfortable, not wanting to be so explicit in such an institutional setting, but the judge was unfazed. Without looking up from the documents he was reviewing, he casually commented that I was in the right place. The casualness of the judge’s comment, as many other remarks I heard over the course of my research, seems to suggest not only that the child welfare system is seen as profoundly unequal and grossly dysfunctional, but also that these aspects are somehow accepted as the order of things. During my time analyzing how institutional mechanisms produce inequalities in New York, I wondered if such resigned acceptance was present in fields beyond child welfare policies. For child welfare, a crucial ingredient was added to the mix: the moral panic that child abuse and neglect generate in society. As I show in this book, this aspect is a cumbersome obstacle to an open and public discussion of these inequalities, shutting down debates within circles of experts or in limited advocacy networks, which remain partially invisible in the public sphere. But in this regard, it is essential to remember that the vast majority (74.9 percent in 2017) of cases lodged with Child Protective Services are for neglect rather than abuse, and neglect is a much broader category strongly related to poverty. To counter a

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hegemonic narrative that combines a criminalization of families with inefficient child protection policies, I tried to describe some of the complicated and fragile lives I have observed during my research, and how the child welfare system could worsen their situations. This is not simply due to dysfunctional state institutions, a perspective that would retrace the negative perception of public services and civil servants so widespread in US society, but reflects more complex historical, socioeconomic, and racializing forces at work in defining what being a citizen means and for whom. What Simona Taliani defines as the social removal of our institutions (Taliani 2012, 2014), a significant act that conceals their historical and cultural construction, is visible in the child welfare system. As I have demonstrated throughout this book, the act of removal concerns the genealogies of welfare policies and their connection with those of child protection, neoliberal economic restructuring, and racial formation in a sociocultural continuum that stigmatizes and obstructs Black mothering. All these factors are simultaneously expressed and reproduced by traditional family standards against which parents are judged in the system: an idealized middle-class White family that is far rarer now. In the first chapter I briefly retraced the history of welfare policies in the United States, describing the shift from a more Keynesian welfare model to a neoliberal workfare. For this type of political-cultural hegemony to take hold, it was necessary to rationalize social, economic, and racial hierarchies to promote a civic model based on independence and self-government rather than the “dependency” of using the state. Parallel to the evolution of welfare policies, the chapter discussed the origins of child protective measures, which were initially managed by philanthropic and religious initiatives to save children from the “dangerous classes” and channel them into the labor force. Subsequently, with the legal and medical definition of child abuse and neglect, it became the state’s responsibility to police the right to parenthood for those seen as problematic (i.e., impoverished and racialized communities). The rate of racial disproportionality in the foster care population serves as a litmus test to trace the longue durée of social inequalities in the United States, especially of its urban centers. As I discussed in the second chapter, the rate of Whites among child welfare users in New York is so exaggeratedly low that it can only be considered the result of a broader racial gap in which Whiteness is associated not only with better economic and material conditions, but also with a higher social legitimacy and civic “fitness.” In the discussion, I documented how racial disproportionality was intermittently acknowledged, handled, and debated within institutional circles, and how the complex, slip-

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pery, and “unmanageable” nature of its data made the subject difficult to be treated in child welfare circles. Despite intending to acknowledge and act upon it, “racial disproportionality” hides in plain sight throughout the long and layered process of racialization in the United States. According to Howard Winant, this process configures itself as the slow inscription on bodies of a certain phenotypic meaningfulness that finds its genealogy in colonial domination and slavery, but also as an important act of expression and storytelling (Winant 2000). This definition can be integrated with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s, which envisions racialization as a social infrastructure that needs to be updated, upgraded, and modernized metaphorically, being enhanced by state practices protecting certain racial groups and in other times sacrificing them (Gilmore 2022). The policies on racial disproportionality unveil the kind of storytelling that surrounds it, focused mainly on the problem of biased individuals making decisions while failing to grasp its “infrastructural” dimension and intersectional genealogy. When exposing the policy conundrum of racial disproportionality, it is crucial to point out how it is not only class, race, and gender that have an intertwining relationship but also how the postracial, colorblind rhetoric of neoliberalism, which is nevertheless intimately racializing (Davis 2007), obscures such links. The child welfare system shows instead an exemplary, almost didactic case study of how intersectionality works. The women I present in the various chapters are “overlooked” in the sense that they are both neglected and surveilled by state institutions—because they are single mothers, because they are women of color, and because they need to rely on public assistance and institutions. In other words, they are the subjects most likely to suffer from the “organized abandonment” (Gilmore 2022) late capitalism reserves for specific groups while simultaneously being policed in their mothering and educational practices because they are perceived to be unfit parents and citizens. The crippling feeling of becoming a “monstrous parent” when they “catch a case” with ACS adds to this scenario, increasing their vulnerability in terms of mental health, economic stability, and even substance abuse. As I discussed in the third chapter, to be exposed to the punitive gaze of child welfare institutions makes them chronically unfit, suffering from the overwhelming stigma. The same conditions, such as the financial precarity generated by the bureaucratic/rehabilitative takeover of people’s everyday lives or the emotional distress caused by a removal, become reasons to delay reunification or rehabilitation by the same child welfare institutions. The consequential exasperation, anger, and frustration parents experience is coupled with the feeling of pow-

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erlessness from their children being in the turbulent foster care system, which is not necessarily better than being in the original household. As a result, parents develop various responses and copying mechanisms, which characterize different moments in the child welfare system. They range from a refusal of mandatory services and antagonization of child welfare professionals and foster families to bureaucratic acculturation, performative compliance, and agreeing to the rehabilitative mandate, which in some cases can become a transformative experience capable of giving parents better tools and services to deal with their complicated family lives. In analyzing the dynamics at play in the interactions between child welfare professionals and families, I also tried to show how the child welfare system is embedded in a broader system of urban policing that can depend on the economic and racial features of New York neighborhoods. Parents notice this and often think ACS acts like the police or the criminal justice system because they can see how the groups complement each other in their labor of policing their communities. Parents and advocates, as I discussed in chapter 4, see them as not being interested in their welfare but rather “set to see them fail,” simultaneously criminalizing parents and neglecting their children to maintain an exploitative structure profiting from the poor for the benefit of the city administrators and foster care agencies. They also learn how to manipulate the system’s rules and mechanisms, such as with medicalization, and try to reappropriate its logics or use the threat of the system to negotiate their freedom (as in the case of some adolescents) or regulate personal conflicts with former partners, relatives, or neighbors. The bleak vision they have of child welfare policies inform their approach to professionals; but, as I showed in chapter 5, this view could also lead to mutual aid and support and the will to advocate for other parents in their condition. This volume does not attempt to exhaust the discussion on the intimately controversial, contradictory, and at the same time absolutely necessary presence of services for the social protection of minors. Rather, what I wanted to expose and analyze is how the “broken system,” its commonsense, and its discontent are produced through social and institutional relations worked within raced and classed urban geographies and were informed by gendered ideals of parenthood. In such a framework, measures and policies of child protection do not act as a depersonalized, frictionless, and objective intervention: they are subjected to many interpretations and to the inevitably discretionary and spurious ways in which they are translated into human interactions.

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Anthropologists who have done ethnography in bureaucratic structures emphasize how they are also configured as generators of fears, expectations, and even joy due to the unpredictability of the bureaucratic encounter (Graeber 2015). The arbitrariness inherent in it, although constitutive of its very nature, is concealed by the image of the supposedly rational machine bureaucracy embodies (Herzfeld 1992; Nuijten 2003; Hoag 2011). Marcus, for example, has highlighted how the “dominated segment of the dominants,” as in the street-level bureaucrats charged with mediating between institutions and citizens, can be both complicit and antagonistic toward the apparatus for which they work and sympathetic toward the population they serve (Marcus 2000). This is even if, as Lipsky noted, “Clients are not a primary reference group of street-level bureaucrats,” as they serve their institutional goals first. If a degree of symbolic and epistemological violence is present in any institutional apparatus, especially if it is pedagogical (Bourdieu 1992), the peculiarity of the child welfare system is seen in its working with other institutions that have been described by US critical social scientists as making up the “carceral state” to a degree that make social services indiscernible from these (Gilmore 2022; Roberts 2021; Kelly 2021), despite many of its professionals thinking of it as a means to support and protect vulnerable people.

Understanding the Tension between Neoliberal Governance and the Carceral State As Herzfeld points out, institutional classifications structure the space individuals and groups must occupy and thus establish where “marginality” is and what it is by devising mechanisms of exclusion for those unable to stay “in their place” (Herzfeld 1992: 64). In this regard, John Clarke argued that three types of people/citizens emerge in contemporary governmental discourse: those who are “independent,” those who need empowerment in order to become so, and the “residual,” or those who require containment and control (Clarke 2008: 141) and who can also be conceptualized with the Marxist category of “surplus population” (Gilmore 2007). Most of the people in the child welfare system belong to this third category—excluded from becoming active and legitimate citizens and the subject of governmental action through the form of direct and explicit surveillance, as shown by mass incarceration, police brutality, and, last but not least, foster care placement. The child welfare system

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and the carceral state “are engaged in a symbiotic relationship” (Kelly 2021: 255), enacting something more akin to family policing than to the support and protection of vulnerable children and families. It is no coincidence that the restriction in accessing state subsidies implemented by the transition from AFDC to TANF has led to a significant increase in the number of minors in foster care. To this, someone could object, arguing that the expenditure in maintaining children in foster families and for the rehabilitation of parents could exceed that foreseen for AFDC. This would be a contradiction for public expenditure and thus of the purely economic rationalization between the cost and the benefit to which neoliberalism aspires. However, several scholars have pointed out how the concept of neoliberalism—understood in the exclusive terms of limitless expansion of the market, deregulation of labor, and the withdrawal of the welfare state—can be limiting. If we do not understand the profoundly authoritarian nature of neoliberal governance, we risk being confused, for example, by the contrast between the doctrine of individualism and the free market and the extremely intrusiveness policies of child welfare services. How can we reconcile the coexistence of the opposing governmental teleologies of the reduction of public spending and the costs of maintaining children in foster care? Both perspectives on neoliberalism, the Marxist one of political economy and the poststructuralist idea of governmental technologies, identify economic morality and profit as the cornerstone principles of the neoliberal social order (Clarke 2008). Since the seventies, other authors have advanced a different reading of late capitalist societies, such as the one presented by Stuart Hall and his coauthors in the classic Policing the Crisis (1973), which claims that the political hegemony of neoliberalism is constructed vis-à-vis the enforcement of a law-andorder approach in moments of crisis, legitimated by the creation of certain “moral panics” through the media and public sphere. Through this framework, the “foster care crisis” of the nineties, which led to the creation of ACS and the spike in foster care placement, appears to be tied with the moral panic generated by the trope of the injured-forlife crack baby, even if not true, as I explained in the first chapter and as also Laura Briggs argued (Briggs, 2021). Nevertheless, this moral panic led to a massive use of children removal as a strategy to cope with potential child endangerment. This shift created a culture among child welfare practitioners of a preventive, fear-driven approach toward communities that were impacted by lack of public investment and welfare rollback. In the same years, Giuliani’s New York became the global model for the policy of “zero tolerance” and the consequent

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expansion of what Wacquant called the penal state (Wacquant 2000). In Wacquant’s opinion, the restraining measures implemented for the “residual” population derived from the need to both manage and justify the condition of impoverishment and precariousness in which the inhabitants of the so-called “inner city” found themselves as a result of the process of estrangement from the productive center: “For members of the subordinate classes, pushed to the margins of the labor market, abandoned by the state and targeted by the policy of ‘zero tolerance,’ the imbalance between police activism, the squandering of resources that supports it and the clogging of the courts due to lack of resources undoubtedly takes on the face of an organized denial of justice” (Wacquant 2000: 32). This is something that can be seen in my interlocutors’ regard for the child welfare system and its political economy, which I presented in chapter 4. For Wacquant, in fact, the shift to the penal state has a productive function, in the Foucauldian sense: productive of new categories of undesirable citizens; productive of new ways of constructing social security, guaranteed only by the devices of discipline and control, even for the same excluded communities; and productive of the new form of expertise from consultants and auxiliaries of security. The latter in particular, by producing knowledge about social insecurity and categories at risk and being concerned with the management of both, ends up being self-fulfilling, with the help of media representations of the same social projections (Wacquant 2000). One of the goals of neoliberalism is the regulatory function of a supervisory workfare, an invasive police apparatus, and the cultural trope of “personal responsibility” to cement them together (Wacquant 2000: 210). Wacquant does not introduce entirely new elements in this, as the three aspects described have been emphasized by numerous other scholars of neoliberalism (Clarke 2004; Ong 2006; Morgen and Maskovsky 2003; Susser 1996; Hyatt 2000). In this regard the analysis of the carceral state made by Ruth Wilson Gilmore can be helpful in highlighting how neoliberal policies advocating for “less state” are coupled with “more state” to police a certain part of the population on which racial capitalism feeds. The population the state sees as incapable of helping itself and therefore in need of being policed is the subject of what Gilmore calls the anti-state state: a state that “grows on the promises of its shrinking” and models “behavior for the polity . . . naturalizes violent domination.” Its shrinking can also be seen in the withdrawal of state support for those who are not capable of market freedom, what John Clarke defined as residual. Support is substituted with policing, especially in times of a decline in

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US geopolitical hegemony, which introduces racialized discourses for those who deserve public resources, making White supremacy a key element of the anti-state state. In this sense, redirecting disciplinary measures exclusively toward those portrayed as anticitizens proves to be a profitable strategy politically, especially when compared to that of maintaining state subsidies. Basically, the anti-state state relies on anti-Blackness and xenophobia, as well as patriarchy, to work with increased violence and attacks (a modus operandi that became more obvious recently) on migrants, social and racial justice movements, LGBTQI subjectivities, and women’s reproductive rights (symbolized by the overturn of the Roe v. Wade federal act on abortion as I write these very words). Even if the state forces women to be “mothers at all costs,” it deprives them of the means to sustain that role once their babies are born and simultaneously blames them for being unfit mothers. The vast majority of single mothers in the child welfare system are required to be mothers first and foremost. We have seen, however, that TANF requires these actors to become flexible workers. How can these two different demands be reconciled? These irreconcilable aims create many difficulties that can delay the possibility of reunification. The standards with which parents are judged as fit or unfit appeal to an abstracted raced and classed idea of parenthood (and motherhood), which disregards not only the historical conditions of Black women in the United States but also the alternative ways of caring they develop as a strategy. While families are deprived of the means, in terms of economic resources, as well as access to services and childcare, they are pushed into the unskilled, precarious labor market where their parental practices are simultaneously subjected to greater state surveillance because of the privacy-invasive screening criteria of TANF benefits, as well as the presence of mandated reporters in public institutions.

Beyond a Reformist Approach: Future Directions In this landscape, it was not surprising when an exasperated mother, after fighting to regain custody rights for months, asked during a group session: “What can I do when I know the system is wrong?” This question is, in my opinion, rather emblematic of the difficult issues I question in this research: an institutional system seen as “wrong” by its users, the limited options this leaves them, and the need for those who find themselves swallowed in this labyrinth to accept its existence and seek a way out.

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In conducting this research, I followed the suggestion of Sharma and Gupta (2006), who encourage anthropologists dealing with state and institutions to reveal the cultural nature of some key contemporary issues: how conduct is conducted and toward what end, what “caring” means, how welfare is perceived, and how a population or community is defined. For this, it is crucial to look at which representations of institutions are elaborated by those who are forced to interact with them and their policy subjects. Looking at institutions through their social location, it is clear how people within their systems can negotiate and reappropriate the categories through which institutions frame them, as parent advocates do with the one of the “unfit parent,” trying to change institutional and public narratives. Social scientists look at neoliberalism not exclusively as an economic model but also as a set of ideas, moral economies, and desires that seek to be imposed without doing so fully (Clarke 2004; Ong 2006; Kingfisher 2002). Aihwa Ong, in particular, has advanced a view of neoliberalism as a set of practices that are adopted over the sites into which it continually seeks to expand. The temporal and spatial dimensions of neoliberalism make it liable to be deconstructed and recomposed when applied. The flexible, unfinished, and always fluid nature of its practices lead to the coexistence of contradictions that can prove socially fruitful. An example of this may be the insistence on citizen empowerment and on the rhetoric of self-improvement and selfgovernance that pushes for active civic participation. However, this is not presented as a political choice but as “good” and “efficient,” thus as a pure exercise of social rationality, something that depoliticizes people’s engagement. As with technologies of self-esteem, acquiring it means doing yourself and the state a favor (Goldstein 2001), just as parenting according to the required standards does not mean conforming to a political set-up of social norms but wanting the good of the family and the child. In this regard, the child welfare system is a particularly opaque institutional area because of the contradictory nature of its statute, always stretched between the protection of the child and the support of the family. This balance between punishment and support, between disciplining and pastoral power, makes the system prone to contestation since the ambiguities of these approaches, which are perceived as opposing, can lead to practices becoming fragmented. In the last chapter, I focused on the ways in which groups are attempting to reform the system and reshape its devices. The associations I mentioned are trying to redefine an agenda that starts from the families’ experiences of inequalities, institutional and not, and to make institutions account-

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able and committed to finding solutions agreed upon with families and communities. In discussing the work done by CWOP, Rise, and other communitybased organizations, I highlighted the potential for them to be coopted by the authorities, showing the fine line between compliance and dissent with ACS. Several scholars have discussed how advocacy professionals and community-based services are tied to government funding, locating them in a less-contentious relationship with the state (Marwell 2004). This phenomenon has been defined as the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, which manages and controls dissent, incorporating it into the state apparatus and making up a “shadow state” of nonprofit organizations that complement government agencies in social services while allowing the government to expand punishment and proliferate market economies through private/public partnership (Smith 2017; Gilmore 2017). John Clarke, on the other hand, points out that the drive to become active citizens of the state could stimulate forms of resistance that are not necessarily depoliticized but could serve as a repoliticizing mechanism (Clarke 2008). A free market model of welfare, where recipients are seen as consumers, could paradoxically create some space for policy subjects that could be used to make requests of system change. In the case of parent advocacy, for example, ACS swung between the need to consider them as experts regarding the consequences of child welfare policy (Davis 2013) and rejecting them as witnesses and products of their system’s mistakes. The mobility of the symbolic universe of contemporary governance constructs a porousness that can decentralize its production and unwittingly return it to the citizens themselves. The case of CWOP in particular provides insights into the political dimensions of parenting by focusing on how disenfranchised mothers use advocacy as a platform for interacting with the state and turn their experience of stigma into a form of public and critical knowledge. Although such knowledge is used to demand institutional change, CWOP’s trajectory, which ended in 2018 because of financial issues partly due to their refusal to work with ACS, shows how the state is not as willing to hear their demands or value their insight. As I argued elsewhere (Castellano 2021), its turbulent story reveals the ambivalent relationship between empowerment, compliance, and dissent in the politics of nonprofit and professional advocacy, and in a fragmented and increasingly privatized welfare regime. Despite its complexity, CWOP’s activities also potentially contributed to the substantial decrease of children in foster care from its creation in the 1990s (when ACS had around fifty thousand children in its care) to the current sit-

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uation (with fewer than nine thousand), demonstrating its ability to be an agent of change and not just a community-friendly organization helping its members avoid the punitive elements of the institutions. Therefore, fragmentation, decentralization, and the increasing privatization of services could also accidentally create anomalous political and social subjects, such as associationism in communities, which can push for a change in the current arrangement. This is not to say that such devolution and privatization should be hailed as the solution to their own contradictions, nor that it is possible to completely reconceptualize these ongoing attempts at reappropriation as a form of counterhegemonic resistance. It is useful, however, to think of this condition as more unpredictable than its objectives and as the location of an ongoing struggle to redefine administrative and legal priorities. To this, it is important to add how large urban centers function both as “laboratories of carcerality” (Maskovsky 2022: 36) and centers of freedom and struggles. New York City’s child welfare is one of the most controversial nationwide because of the inequalities it highlights; but because of New York’s rich political and civic life, it has created enough debate to generate a terrain of confrontation and negotiation between citizens and institutions, an outcome not at all taken for granted in the rest of the United States. The type of associationism that characterizes New York’s neighborhoods is difficult to find elsewhere in the United States, and the city has always played a pioneering role in political engagement and in the laboratory of participation (Sanjek 1998). In the last decade, calls for an abolitionist perspective of oppressive state policies has gained momentum thanks to national and global movements for racial and social justice. This call has been extended, even if less prominently than for prison systems and police brutality, to the child welfare system itself. Those who expressed the need for an abolitionist perspective on the child welfare system do not want to end the support, protection, and care of vulnerable children and youth. On the contrary, they argue that continuing a reformist approach will not drastically change the core functioning of the child welfare system nor its premises based on a criminalization of poverty and anti-Blackness. The BLMM/M4BL, which quickly spread throughout major US cities and sparked a global uprise against racial inequalities and institutional racism, contended not only with police brutality and racial discrimination but also with the very structure of White privilege and White suprematism that enable them. The protests, in a way, exposed and questioned on a massive scale the muted and hidden structures of racial inequalities in the United States. Though not explicitly institutionalized like during segregation, they are constantly reproduced

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through institutional and social arrangements. These structures affect the Black and Brown populations through forms of physical, epistemic, intimate, and affective violence, where police brutality is just one problem, in the same way that the Black population has suffered disproportionately from COVID-19 deaths. Referring to the call made by BLM activists to defund the police and redirect public money to social services for disadvantage communities, Dorothy Roberts (2021) has warned against an uncritical assumption that health social services would automatically benefit. As she advocated in her engaged scholarship, the child welfare system is indeed another form of family policing that complements the action of more “classical” parts of the carceral state. Nevertheless, she and other scholars of child welfare emphasize the need to join different fights for social and racial justice to achieve a broader understanding of how to move toward an abolitionist society. Despite the bleak political time, she claimed a certain optimism toward child welfare, mainly because of three factors: the efforts to reduce racial disproportionality in foster care, the expansion of the prison abolition movement, and the organizing by parents and children impacted by the child welfare system. This book is a limited contribution in this sense, portraying the debates and initiatives around inequalities in the child welfare system as I witnessed and participated in them between 2011 and 2013. Even though the Obama-era liberal hopes have been shattered by the election of Donald Trump and by a general conservative turn of politics in the Global North (Brown 2019), the pandemic, and now the rejuvenation of global warfare, I believe the discussion on how late capitalist state institutions, including the child welfare system, reproduce inequalities has substantially grown—and will continue to do so.

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Index

KKK abolitionism, 23, 153 abuse, 64, 78, 84, 86, 129. See also neglect child, 16, 41, 43, 70, 78, 82, 106, 126, 142–43 guilty of, 118 in temporary families, 101 of minors, 5 substance, 102 activism, 90, 125, 132 of Black communities, 44, 139 addiction alcohol, 38 drug, 38, 78–80 Administration of Children Services (ACS), 3, 36n2, 46–47, 55, 57, 84, 105–6, 118, 130, 135–37, 145, 151 child welfare system and, 48 collaborating with CWOP, 128 adolescent, 101–102, 117 African American, 58 “Adopt-a-Child Project,” 42 Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), 22, 28n10, 46, 55, 77 advanced liberalism, 106, 109, 136. See also Rose, Nikolas. advocacy, 76, 124–25, 151. See also parent advocate association, 9, 48, 86, 128 parent, 47, 151 parent-led, 131 Advocacy Office, 136. See also Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) Affirmative Action, 35

Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), 29–30, 42 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), 29–32, 34, 43, 49, 119, 147. See also Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Alliance for Racial Equity, 58 anti-state state, 23, 148–49. See also Gilmore, Ruth Wilson assistance. See also dependency institutional assistance, 119 mutual, 120, 125 public, 24, 34, 48 association. See also advocacy, organization charitable, 4 community-based, 4 neighborhood, 133 “battered child syndrome,” 43 Bench Card, 58 Bhabha, Homi, 74 Billingsley, Andrew, 40, 43–44, 54–55 Birth Parent National Network (BPNN), 124 Black Lives Matter Movement (BLMM), 23, 27n3, 57, 152 Black Power, 139 Bourgois, Philippe, 91, 119 Brash, Julian, 99 Bridges, Khiara, 110, 130 Briggs, Charles, 87 Briggs, Laura, 23, 32, 37, 45, 147 Bronx, 94

170

Index

South Bronx, 91, 137 Bronx Family Court, 8 Brooklyn, 53, 94, 137. See also Brownsville Brooklyn Family Court, 8 Brownsville, 53, 71n3, 137. See also Brooklyn Bureau of Child Welfare, 42 bureaucracy, 104 institutional, 130 rehabilitative, 111 capitalism, 30 financial, 91 industrial, 33, 37 late, 144 racial, 23, 77, 148 Cardi, Coline, 84 caseworker, 85–89, 101, 114 Casey Foundation, 56, 58 Cazenave, Noel A., 139 Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment, 15 Chapin Hill, 56 child African American, 58 BIPOC, 55 Black, 43, 53–54, 70, 108 in foster care families, 85 Latinx, 8, 53, 56 Native American, 53 with “special needs,” 102 White, 8, 55, 70 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), 43 Child Protective Services (CPS), 5, 15–16, 18, 77, 117, 142 Child Safety Conference, 115, 135 child welfare, 3–4, 6, 14, 17, 19, 26n2, 55, 93, 122, 152. See also Child welfare system history of, 44, 129 institutions, 55, 144 policy, 17, 40 racial disproportionality in, 57, 66 child welfare agency, 6, 66. Child Welfare Fund, 123, 126, 141n1. See also Tobis, David; Rise

Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP), 9, 16, 94, 123–24, 127–28, 131, 133–36, 138, 151 Child Welfare Reform Act, 44 child welfare system, 1, 3–5, 7, 19, 26n2, 45, 54, 57, 73, 77, 82, 104, 110, 116, 132, 142–46, 150, 152–53. See also child welfare in the early 1990s, 123 history of, 39, 47 and the juvenile justice system, 105–06 mental health policies of, 81 paradoxical elements of, 85 prison system in, 106 punitive, 47, 80 racial disproportionality in, 52, 64 welfare state and, 130 Children’s Aid Society, 41 citizenship, 2, 8, 22, 33, 37, 94, 112, 131 “correct,” 1, 110, 130 “differentiated,” 132 full, 33, 37, 66 “moral,” 123 “unfit,” 73 City-Wide Coordinating Committee, 30 Clarke, John, 19, 146, 148, 151 “Close to Home,” 137–39 Cloward, Richard, 19, 30 Collins, Patricia Hill, 43, 120 community, 19, 92, 105, 133–34, 137, 139 African American, 42, 90, 120 Black, 35, 43–44, 54–55, 139 of color, 43, 50 concept of, 133–34, 138–39 empowerment, 140 forum, 137–38 Latinx, 91 low-income, 104, 120 low-income and racialized urban, 6, 30, 77 marginalized, 7 partnership, 55, 62, 134, 139 resilience of, 50 Community Action Program, 139 Community Action Agency, 139

Index

Community Based Organizations (CBOs), 125 Community Connection for Youth, 138 Community Partnership Initiative (CPI), 133–34, 139. See also Administration of Children Services compliance, 145, 151 “coercive,” 110 Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System (CCWIS), 27n4 Courts Catalyzing Change (CCC), 58–59 criminal justice system, 106 criminalization, 38 of cocaine users, 45 of crack use, 45 of poverty, 100, 152 Cruikshank, Barbara, 131–32 custody, 40, 77–78. See also removal children in state, 8 unitary, 40 Davis, Dána-Ain, 31 Department of Juvenile Justice, 137 dependency, 24, 32–34, 37–38 welfare, 31, 36–37 deviance, 16, 73, 97, 128 social, 6, 31, 35 discrimination, 50, 64 racial, 49, 54, 152 Disproportionate Minority Representation Committee, 58–59. See also Courts Catalyzing Change (CCC) dissent, 25, 151. See also compliance Dollard, John, 31 dual city, 93, 95 economy deindustrialization of the US, 34–35 industrial, 35, 91 moral, 140 neoliberal, 31 political, 112, 147 Education for Community Organizing school, 123. See also Mizrahi, Terry

171

El Barrio, 91–92, 94. See also Harlem, gentrification emancipation, 49, 67. See also empowerment empowerment, 49,76, 132–33, 139–40, 151 female, 80 of poor communities, 133 Zone, 132 family, 79, 100, 110, 149 adoptive, 42–44, 55 African American, 41 biological, 44, 77–79, 101, 117 BIPOC, 73 Black, 8, 31, 42, 55–56, 65, 70 foster, 77, 101–2, 147 history, 6, 84 ideal of nuclear, 6 idealized middle-class White, 143 immigrant, 101 intimacy, 64 kinship, 102 Latinx, 55 low-income, 117 marginalization of, 112 member, 114, 116–17 middle- and upperclass, 94 of single mothers, 50, 93 and social services, 109 policing, 153 preservation, 18, 44 proximity between caseworkers and, 89 racialized and impoverished, 130 support provided to, 127 temporary, 85, 101, 106 therapy, 79 ties, 121 unequal relationship between institutions and, 28 White, 68, 70 Family Assistance Program (FAP), 31 Family Court, 4, 47, 58, 78 Farmer, Paul, 81 father, 70, 71n6. See also parent as potential caretaker, 40 Ferguson, Ann Arnette, 108

172

Index

Fernandes, Sujatha, 129 Fernandez, Fabrice, 85 foster care abuse in, 101 agency, 47, 101, 112, 133 children in, 46, 53, 68, 79, 113, 129, 151 “crisis,” 147 parents who have grown up in, 84 placement, 146–47 system, 45, 47, 49 Foucault, Michel, 73, 97n1, 109–110, 130–131 Fraser, Nancy, 32–34 Frazier, Franklin, 31

economic and social, 70 gender and class, 70 racial, 68, 90, 108, 152 social, 38, 90 structural, 37, 50, 73, 120, 125 in the United States, 4, 143 infantilism, 37. See also dependency inner-city, 5, 35–36, 43–44, 74, 92–93, 148 Izquierdo, Eliza, 46

gentrification, 36, 91–92 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 23, 144, 148 Giovannoni, Jeanne M., 40, 43–44, 54–55 Gomez, Herminia, 87 Gordon, Linda, 32–34 governmentality, 109–10. See also Foucault, Michel Green Amendment (1967), 139. See also War on Poverty Gregory, Steven, 133 Gupta, Akhil, 104, 113, 150

kinship care, 5, 46, 102, 117 kinship network, 41, 43 Korbin, Jill E., 119 Kornbluh, Felicia, 30

Hall, Stuart, 147 Harlem, 90, 133 Central, 91, 133 East, 12, 62, 91, 94, 119, 134 Renaissance, 91 Harrison, Faye V., 67 Herzfeld, Michael, 98n4, 146 HIV, 46 housing, 42, 117 social, 46, 91 Hyatt, Susan Brin, 50, 81 “hyperghetto,” 91. See also Wacquant, Loïc ideology racial, 36 racialized sex-political, 31 inequality, 2, 7, 67–68, 73, 93, 99, 142

Jamaica, 137. See also Queens Jimenez, Jillian, 39 Joseph, Miranda, 133 juvenile justice system, 58. See also child welfare system

Lee, Tina, 4, 19, 44, 89 Legal Aid Society, 87 legal contract, 39–40 Lewis, Oscar, 34 Lézé, Samuel, 85. Lipsky, Michael, 17, 89, 110, 115, 146 maltreatment, 49. See also abuse Black children suffer, 70 child, 53–54, 70, 80 federal law regarding child, 43 Manhattan, 137 Mantini-Briggs, Clara, 87 Marcus, George, 146 marginality, 146 marginalization, 38, 94, 112, 132 Maskovsky, Jeff, 22, 133 matriarchy, 31 “media-visible periphery,” 50. See also Susser, Ida Medicaid, 55, 110, 130 medicalization, 21, 81–83, 114–15, 145 of parents and their children, 18 Medicare, 55 mental disorder, 18, 82 mental health, 83

Index

services, 58, 83, 129 mental illness, 15, 84, 86 Miller, Peter, 110 minority, 104, 140 Mizrahi, Terry, 123. See also Education for Community Organizing school moral economy, 85 Morgen, Sandra, 22 mother, 125, 135. See also family, parent, woman Black, 24, 31, 38 in child welfare, 79 crack-using, 45 “good,” 120 “mythical,” 81, 120 pathologization and primitivization of Black and Indigenous, 19 single, 31–32, 37, 84, 144, 149 single and low-income, 22 unfit, 85, 149 “welfare,” 43 motherhood, 48, 73, 81, 95, 119–20, 125, 149 Black, 18, 31, 38, 48, 120 mothering “activist,” 125, 135 “Black radical,” 125 movement civil rights, 30, 67, 90 feminist, 30 prison abolition, 153 for reproductive justice, 39, 70 for social and racial justice, 149, 152 Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), 23, 27n3, 57, 152 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 31 Mullings, Leith, 23, 27n7, 36, 68, 93 Murray, Charles, 34–35 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 42 National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS), 53–70 National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), 30

173

neglect, 42, 64, 78, 82, 117, 129. See also abuse child, 16, 43, 86, 119, 126, 142–43 of children, 43 emotional, 101 guilty of, 118 of minors, 5 related to poverty, 142 in temporary families, 101 negotiation, 128 “neoliberal paternalism,” 131 neoliberalism, 33, 37, 49, 93, 109, 144, 147–48, 150 New York (City), 8, 30, 42, 47, 90, 94, 99, 106–08, 137, 152 population in, 53 New York (State of), 44, 60, 138 New York Bureau of Children Services, 46 New York City Civil Court, 47 New York Police Department, 107 New York State Bar Report, 16 Non-Profit Industrial Complex, 151 Occupy Wall Street, 2, 22 Office of Economic Opportunity, 139 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA), 34 Ong, Aihwa, 80, 150 oppression, 19, 99, 105, 123, 125. See also resistance gender, 39 organization, 41–42, 95, 128 advocacy, 123, 127, 132 community-based, 125 empowering, 132 nonprofit, 130, 151 nonprofit and community, 131 parent advocacy, 124 “organized abandonment,” 144 “othermothering,” 43 “parens patriae,” 39 parent, 65, 112, 120, 126, 131 “anti-citizen,” 73 biological, 77–79, 111, 117 monster, 21, 110, 126

174

Index

parental rights for biological, 55 perfect bureaucrats, 114 rehabilitated, 126 rights, 46 “unfit,” 63, 85, 150 parent advocate, 19, 27n6, 76, 116, 123–24, 128, 134–36, 141 Parent Leadership Curriculum, 123 parenthood, 12, 41, 50, 73, 95, 149 Black, 18, 67 Park Slope, 53, 71n3 pathologization, 19, 81–82 of dependency, 38 patriarchy, 149 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), 32, 106–7 Piven, Francis, 19, 30 police, 92, 108, 110 brutality, 22, 107, 125, 146, 152–53 policing, 109, 148 Polsky, Andrew J., 85 poverty, 33, 48–49, 50 criminalization, 100, 152 “culture of,” 34, 108 demonization of, 106 “industry,” 112 and neglect, 42 as a social fault, 33 preventive service, 44, 102, 104. See also removal prison mother in, 119 system, 106, 152 protection child, 17–18, 40–41, 44, 46, 100, 150 of minors, 39–40 “public secret,” 63. See also Taussig, Michael Queens, 137. See also Jamaica race, 11, 42, 64, 66–67, 70 racial disparity. See disproportionality racial disproportionality, 8–11, 52–54, 56–59, 64, 66–69, 90, 143–44. See

also child welfare, child welfare system racialization, 40, 50, 64–65, 89, 94, 106, 144 in the child welfare system, 11, 63–64 of poverty, 40 racism, 27n7, 43, 54, 64–65, 67–68, 70 anti-Black, 68 biological, 11, 33 in the child welfare system, 11, 63–64 institutional, 12, 56, 59, 63, 152 structural, 2, 56, 94 Rapp, Rayna, 121 rehabilitation, 21, 77–78, 80, 144. See also Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) program, 65, 80, 111 rehabilitative service, 48, 55, 110 removal, 47, 78, 82, 95, 100–102, 104, 144, 147. See also custody, preventive service act of, 143 of child/children, 17, 44, 46, 77, 83, 85, 147 preventative removal, 80 reproductive rights, 23, 39, 125, 149. See also movement “residual,” 111, 146, 148 resistance, 123, 125, 141, 151 reunification, 46, 65, 76, 80, 82–83, 109, 144 Rise (magazine), 125–29, 131. See also Child Welfare Fund Roberts, Dorothy, 49, 55, 106, 119, 153 Rolock, Nancy, 56 Rose, Nikolas, 109–110, 136 Sargent, Carolyn, 121 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 81, 119, 121 school, 109–10 public, 94, 105, 108 segregation, 68, 90 Sennett, Richard, 73 Settlement House Movement, 41 Shange, Savannah, 68, 109 Sharma, Aradhana, 104, 113, 150

Index

Shore, Chris, 20 Silberman School of Social Work, 137 silencing, 63, 65 Smith, Anne Marie, 110 social disadvantage, 33, 36 Social Security Act, 29 social worker, 18, 46, 78, 82, 84, 101, 106–7, 120. See also caseworker Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Humane Association (SPCC), 41–42 Stack, Carol, 43 State Children’s Home Society of Illinois, 41 Staten Island, 137. See also Jamaica stereotype, 19, 77 Black women, 19, 31, 68 stigmatization. See also dependency of dependence, 38 of non-English-speaking destitute families, 41 of welfare users, 48 stop-and-frisk, 107–8 storytelling, 129, 144 surveillance, 48, 80, 85, 92–93, 104–5 Susser, Ida, 50 Swann, Christopher, 49 Sylvester, Michelle Sheran, 49 Taliani, Simona, 143 Taussig, Michael T., 63–64 teenager, 116–17. See also adolescent Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), 32, 49, 79, 110, 119, 147, 149. See also Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and the child welfare system, 48 Testa, Mark, 56 The New Poverty Studies, 20 therapy, 79, 83 Times Square, 45 Tobis, David, 123. See also Child Welfare Fund trauma, 84, 86. See also abuse after reunification, 118

175

of separation, 101 Vera Institute of Justice, 105 victim, 110, 127. See also abuse, violence blaming, 38 violence, 110, 119, 153 domestic, 32, 80–81, 86 epistemic and symbolic, 112, 146 of removing, 110 state, 120 structural, 39, 85 Visweswaran, Kamala, 11 Wacquant, Loïc, 49, 91, 99–100, 132, 148 War on Drugs, 45 War on Poverty, 30, 139. See also Green Amendment welfare, 30, 93, 132, 106 dependency, 37 economic, 4 neoliberal, 132 policy, 39 program, 29, 34 “queens,” 31–32 state, 42, 130 for women, 30 White feminism, 38 White privilege, 152 White supremacy, 39, 67–68, 149, 152 Whiteness, 95, 143 Wilson, William Julius, 35–36 Winant, Howard, 144 woman, 70, 80, 82, 120, 129, 144 African American, 140 “angry Black,” 19 Black, 31, 38–39, 49, 120, 149 of color, 120, 121n4, 144 White, 38 Wright, Susan, 20 Yorkville, 91, 94 “zero tolerance,” 147–48