To Abolish Family Policing: An Interview with Dorothy Roberts
Zoé Samudzi and J. Khadijah Abdurahman
Carceral institutions never work in silos. The very existence of any industrial complex, whether the prison or the military or the medical system or another, demands the entanglement of political and corporate structures and oppressive ideologies in service of maximizing financial dividends over social equity. Throughout her storied career, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts’s work has narrated the inextricable links between chattel slavery and historical limitations and criminalizations of Black women’s bodily autonomy (Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, 1997), the state’s violent interventions into poor Black communities via the foster care system (Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, 2002), and the naturalizations of race as a bioscientific reality (Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, 2011). The trajectory of her scholarship deftly weaves a narrative of how historical anti-Black pathologies materialize into policy, and how the Black family continues to be a site of and for the state’s exercise of raced and classed power.
Roberts’s persistent and critical attunement to the interconnectedness of the law, the maintenance of racial pathologies, and the far-reaching regulatory tendrils of family policing results in thematic conflations that expand our understanding of state violence. Child welfare and its attendant concerns of childcare and enforcements of the nuclear family become a question of and for bioethics, alongside, more obviously, abortion and reproductive justice. Genetic databanks and genealogy emerging from continuations of race-based science are as much about reinscribing and enforcing notions of color-based difference and biological relation (and so, a kind of kinship) as they are about pharmaceutical and other corporate profiteering.
In her new book Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022), Roberts joins her research on child welfare systems with more forceful prison-abolitionist arguments about how “welfare” is really a euphemism for “policing,” and “child welfare” becomes the pretext through which poor Black families are surveilled and punished through legal separation. In her conversation with J. Khadijah Abdurahman, an abolitionist organizer and researcher engaging predictive analytics and the child welfare system, Roberts connects family policing to the broader matrix of carceral forms, including adult incarceration and the ongoing War on Drugs, foster care systems, and family separation policies in immigrant detention facilities at the southern border and across the country. Although their discussion took place before the Supreme Court officially overturned Roe v. Wade and ended federal abortion protections, the prescient comments that follow nevertheless reflect the historical predictability and consistency of conservative state policy around family planning and reproductive freedoms. Robert’s explicit connection of family policing to the broader movement to abolish the police is a clarion call complementary to ongoing radical negotiations of kinship that go beyond the biological and classed reproductions encouraged by the state, including systems of care and economic uplift over the punishing demands and regulations of settler colonial and racial capitalist family making.
— Zoé Samudzi
J. Khadijah Abdurahman
One of the things I was thinking about was that you published Shattered Bonds twenty years ago in 2002 and Killing the Black Body in 1997, and here we are in the wake of the publication of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. Your books are all so timely and prescient in a way that’s really disturbing. But how has the climate shifted over the past two decades? Does it feel like people are more receptive to the idea of abolishing the family regulation system?
Dorothy Roberts
There’s a consistency and entanglement in the types of state violence I’ve been writing about. Killing the Black Body was about the regulation of Black women’s childbearing, and although I wrote about the ways in which Black women’s parenting was also assaulted and devalued, I didn’t focus on it as much because I wasn’t as aware of the family-policing system at that time. Writing the book made me realize that the same women who were being prosecuted for pregnancy and childbearing were also having their newborn babies taken from them. Over the past twenty years, the entangled punishments of Black childbearing and pregnancy have gotten worse: criminalizations of pregnancy and abortion and the devaluing of Black parents’ relationships with their children are all even more acute today. It’s a more obvious and more concerted form of carceral assault on Black communities than it was when I wrote Killing the Black Body and Shattered Bonds.
The other reason why I wanted to write a new book is that there’s more of an awareness of that cohesive carceral regime. The movement to abolish the prison industrial complex has advanced and has even entered mainstream political discourse—it’s a stronger movement than it was twenty years ago, and that is a major shift. My awareness and involvement in prison abolition happened over those twenty years, and while I use the word “abolish” in the introduction of Shattered Bonds and say that the child welfare system should be abolished, I didn’t have the knowledge of what abolition means and I wasn’t aware of organizing the way I am today. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t a coherent movement to abolish family policing at the time, although, in the late 1990s, I met Black mothers in Chicago who were organizing networks on a very small scale. For example, an organization or a group of maybe ten Black mothers I met with in a church basement in Chicago were organizing to not only get their children back, but also to call attention to the oppressive system that had taken them. I was aware of other welfare rights groups that were mostly organized by working-class white, Black, and brown women who understood the connection between the denial of state support for caregiving and the removal of children from impoverished and working-class families. They began as welfare rights organizers but realized that part of the reason children were being taken was because families didn’t have the resources that they needed, and the state’s move to deny payment for reproductive labor was connected to the state’s removal of children.
Women who were being prosecuted for pregnancy and childbearing were also having their newborn babies taken from them.
The foster-care industrial complex mushroomed to astronomical levels from the 1970s and through the 1990s, and it began with advocating for children to be removed from their home because poverty was viewed as neglect. This resulted in kicking Black mothers off their welfare benefits because they no longer had children at home to support. And when you fast-forward to the Clinton administration, we see this happening all over again with the abolition of federal entitlement to welfare in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, and then again on the heels of that in the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act, which sped up the termination of parental rights and prioritized adoption over returning children to their homes.
The state taking children from their families was, of course, fueled by white supremacy. The laws that targeted Black families were animated by racist stereotypes about Black familial dysfunction: about absent Black fathers, Black mothers who didn’t really care for and were harmful toward their children and supposedly passed down their depraved lifestyles. This is another connection to the work I was doing that led to Killing the Black Body, which began because of my opposition to the vilifying stereotypes and prosecutions of Black women who were pregnant and used drugs—this includes the myth of the so-called crack baby and images of these mothers wanting drugs more than they cared for their children.
All of these policies—the overlapping retrenchment of welfare and the simultaneous increase of child removal and family separation—led to more people becoming caged or otherwise involved in the carceral system. The easiest way for the state to deal with the community devastation caused by deep structural inequities is to punish the people who are most disadvantaged by them and blame them for the hardships and suffering and, in fact, increase their suffering by assaulting them in these violent terroristic ways. The practices are all connected.
JKA
And what about in the context of the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that indicated the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade?
DR
Justice Amy Coney Barrett recommended that people who seek abortions should, instead, just turn over their babies to safe havens or put them up for adoption. That’s a logic of forced pregnancy, followed by a forced relinquishment of babies, many of whom are not going to be immediately adopted. They’re going to be in so-called foster care and suffer the harms of that system in addition to the harms of being adopted. None of that trauma or violence is taken into account, just the apparently easy solution of enduring pregnancy and giving up the baby.
JKA
A lot of adoptees have been pointing out that three of the Supreme Court justices are adopters themselves, which probably shapes the kinds of laws they feel are acceptable.
DR
I try to avoid arguments based on the potential motivations of people supporting racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-poor politics. But I’ve noticed that many of the staunchest defenders of these oppressive systems, including family policing, have adopted children, specifically Black and brown children. You have to wonder whether the decisions they have made related to families affects their willingness to support these oppressive systems.
JKA
And with regards to transracial adoption, there are echoes of “kill the Indian, save the child”: that by taking in these Black children away from their depraved poor Black mothers and sending them to white families, it’ll remove the stain of the “crack baby” or “super predator” and we can produce good political subjects.
I want to ask a question about Torn Apart. You share this anecdote about being at a parent-teacher conference and your son’s teacher admonishing you because your child had too many unexcused absences. The teacher approached you with suspicion, but then you clarified that you took him on an international vacation and that you’re a professor; in that moment, that suspicion was suspended enough for your child not to get punished. The family-policing system targets poor Black people generally, and I’ve been thinking about Tamika Joyner in particular. Initially, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) came to remove her grandson. But because they claimed Tamika and her teenage daughter (the child’s mother) assaulted multiple NYPD officers, they ended up taking Tamika’s son! The NYPD bodycam footage that circulated on social media clearly shows the police officers brutally beating her and her daughter. Tamika asked me to share the recordings on Twitter, and I did, but I had a real ethical dilemma because of what I’ve learned and understand about the consumption of Black suffering: it doesn’t lead to liberation and there’s almost an orgiastic enjoyment of it even as it’s being shared to raise awareness. But at the same time, in one video, you hear Tamika shouting “Please video this!” to her son as a police officer has his fist against her teenage daughter’s face, and in another video she’s screaming for help as multiple officers kneel on her body. Her daughter says to the police in another video: “You’re on camera. If you kill me, you’re going to jail.”
There’s a tension between the recognition that images of Black suffering won’t alone change anything and the fact that the video makes visible the hyper-specificity of whom the ACS targets in New York City. The highest rates of removal are people involved with the shelter system, which is what happened with Tamika, and then second highest are probably in New York City housing projects—it’s not just Black people in general. As an academic somewhat removed from that socioeconomic context, I’m wondering how you approach the specificity of poverty in your work and in the promotion for the book.
DR
I think it is very important to highlight, firstly, that this is a system that has always been designed for poor people, whether we’re talking about white people or Indigenous people or Black people. It came out of the Poor Laws, which were Elizabethan-era laws created to maintain social order and extend relief to poor people. But this social structure differentiated between treatment for children in impoverished families and for children in families that aren’t impoverished: the structure’s racial capitalist foundation requires people to rely on the market to take care of their children, and if they can’t do it, they’re going to be punished and potentially have their relationship with their children severed altogether. This has always been a system that particularly and disproportionately targets Black and Indigenous communities as a weapon of social warfare and a means of community disruption, and that’s important for understanding how family policing operates today.
I would also add that the system forces caregivers and their families to conform to the state’s standards of behavior, which target people based on their disabilities and other health-related conditions, as well as identity. For example, we’ve seen Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s directive that Child Protective Services workers should investigate the families of queer and trans children who receive gender-affirming care: this is the deployment of family policing to target a particular group that the state sees as failing to conform to proper, heteronormative behavior. There is an overall carceral approach to caregiving, but in acknowledging family services as an instrument of racial capitalism, we also have to pay attention to the political specificities of each historical moment.
But to your point, so-called child welfare and family-policing operations are concentrated in particular communities. It’s not just that certain children and certain families are more likely to be investigated: it’s that segregated and impoverished Black communities are specifically targeted by this system, and so everybody in those communities is affected negatively by the system’s policing. Even though Black families don’t share the same risk profile, if you live in a predominantly Black neighborhood, everyone in the area is vulnerable to, if not being directly policed by, the system. The system will impact your life and your children’s lives. If you’re a Black child going to a school in a segregated Black neighborhood in any big city where virtually all investigations take place—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, housing projects in San Francisco—I guarantee you know a classmate or a friend or a cousin who has been taken from their family. But even if you haven’t, you’ve felt the firsthand impact of this violence on your life, which is a completely different experience from anyone who lives in an affluent community.
JKA
Relatedly, I want to ask you about gender. I really appreciated the Washington Post article you wrote after Abbott’s directive to investigate the parents of trans kids who receive gender-affirming care and to threaten healthcare providers and other professionals who failed to report with criminal prosecution. After his order, I immediately saw a lot of seemingly white middle-class parents creating GoFundMe campaigns in case they had to leave the state. I don’t want to minimize those feelings of precarity and insecurity that the directive immediately produced. But the first group of people I was immediately concerned for were the trans kids already in foster care, whether in group homes or residential centers.
Complicating the state’s regulation of gender and sexuality through family policing is David Hansell, the previous commissioner of the New York City ACS, who is a white cis gay man. In 2020, during his tenure, ACS created the LGBTQIA+ Action Plan to specifically address the needs of LGBTQ children, which was kind of shocking because the majority of foster parents at that time were Christians. On a superficial level, the institution seems very pro-LGBTQ. In actuality, we’ve heard reports from parent advocates who’ve attended family team conferences and shared that, if the birth parents are trans, that identity is labeled as a risk factor even as the ACS claims to be pro-LGBTQ. How do you think of family policing as a gendered practice? How do we situate Abbott’s directive within this broader context without separating white trans people from Black people as though Black people are ungendered?
DR
I think it’s important to pay attention to the fact that Black trans youth, both children and teenagers, experience a lot of harm. I would wager that they are the most likely to experience violence and to be put into violent prisonlike residential “treatment centers” or be moved around to multiple placements—basically to experience disruption and trauma as an ordinary part of their lives in the foster industrial complex. Even when we talk about allegedly pro-LGBTQ policies, we have to remember that they are still shaped by white supremacy. Whether we’re talking about Black people or poor people or queer people being targeted by family policing, violence is enacted through multiple axes of oppression: it’s simultaneously anti-queer, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and ableist. The foster industrial complex is anti-LGBTQ if you look at how queer and trans children are treated and suffer, and even though foster care agencies are less likely to respond positively to same-sex male couples, they will likely still reach out to queer white men to adopt or foster Black children over preserving those children’s familial ties—that’s the racism.
JKA
When I was invited to interview you, I misread the invitation’s description of the theme: I was being asked to talk about family abolition rather than abolishing the family regulation system. What ended up being a typo sent me down a rabbit hole because of how I remembered the different ways Marxists advocate for the abolition of the family. I bring this up because I’ve noticed how in discussions about Black queer people, there’s this assumption, which is sometimes true, that Black trans kids are inherently more unsafe with their biological families and the “more progressive” thing is to have a chosen family. And I’m thinking about this alongside the ways family gets articulated as a political project in the public sphere. I would describe the ACS branding itself as pro-LGBTQ while terrorizing Black families as pinkwashing or what Jasbir Puar describes as a queer necropolitics: there’s this sense that the state is bringing modernity to savage Black people that are more homophobic by nature. I think a lot of people have a deep discomfort around this notion of family, so I’m wondering how you think about the family as deeply related to understandings of gender and sexuality.
DR
I think we have to deeply interrogate what we mean by “family,” what it means to “defend families,” and what needs to change in order for families to be more humane and equitable and caring. But we shouldn’t believe that the state is going to take better care of children than their families. One of the ways family policing operates is to enforce the norms of what the family ought to be: to monitor and correct families that fail to meet the still-dominant ideal of the nuclear heterosexual family. Part of the movement to abolish family policing is to abolish these norms themselves. I see this as a movement not to support some idealized version of family, but to inspire a radical change in how we think about the kind of caregiving that the family usually provides.
The movement to abolish family policing is a movement to expand our ideas about family.
Part of the reason why Black mothers are targeted so much by these carceral systems is because Black woman-headed households don’t conform to the state’s ideal family—this was made explicitly clear in the 1965 Moynihan Report, which claimed that the rise in Black single-mother families was a result of social erosion and deviance within the Black community. When I defend Black mothers against the family-policing system, I’m fighting against the state’s violent compulsion to produce a particular kind of family unit that will either be celebrated or demonized. Black communities also have a long tradition of expanded notions of family beyond children and two parents: family doesn’t need to rely on coupling, which is what the Supreme Court emphasizes in placing marriage at the center of family life. The main view of families in Black communities expands beyond biological relationships to include close family friends who help with caregiving, and there are many Black people whose family members aren’t necessarily their birth parents. My daughter’s best friends call me Auntie Dorothy: they know they can rely on me to support them and I feel love toward them like my own children. The movement to abolish family policing is a movement to expand our ideas about family.
JKA
One of the first signs from the Abolish ACS campaign was “They separate children at the border of Brownsville, too.” One of the reasons we chose the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn is that it has both one of the highest poverty rates and one of the highest rates of investigation and removal in New York City. Andrew White, the Deputy Commissioner for the Division of Policy, Planning, and Measurement at ACS, said that, between 2010 and 2014, something like one in three children in Brownsville will be investigated by the time they turn eighteen. The movement’s abolitionist reorientation of our understanding of family emphasizes a positive freedom: for example, it imagines the material conditions necessary for Black communities to have economic and political self-determination because these child welfare services are a form of state surveillance. How do we as a movement connect these material conditions for self-determination in New York City and other domestic struggles to the separation of children at the U.S.-Mexico border?
DR
We need to remember that Black people are also separated at borders, either the southern border or through the other routes that migrants travel into the United States. Whether these Black migrants are Afro-Latinx, African, or from the West Indies, they experience the same heightened forms of family separation at U.S. borders as they do if and when they’re found later in Black communities—parents are sometimes deported and separated from their children as a result of ICE policy, and it’s the same state entities separating undocumented and other immigrant families as the ones separating Black citizen families. Even though this doesn’t make it into the popular consciousness, these experiences share a kind of trauma. Children-separation policies at the border made national and international news, and there were numerous reports and news stories about how the policy violated United Nations conventions and international human rights law and would be psychologically harmful for the children. The same considerations ought to apply to families who aren’t at the border, yet I haven’t seen the same kind of attention to this trauma when it comes to Black communities. This shared experience and hypocrisy is at the heart of the campaign billboards: the fact that they also separate families at the borders of Brownsville and Harlem but it doesn’t receive the same public outcry.
The actual abolition of family policing has to happen in two critical ways. The first is to shrink the current system until we dismantle it through various legislative efforts, protests, changes in policy, refusals to participate in and getting rid of mandated reporting. Simultaneously, we have to build up ways of supporting families and caring for children within communities that aren’t reliant on the family-policing system and the state. Mutual aid networks and other kinds of community-based programs would provide resources to meet people’s material needs outside of and completely disconnected from policing systems, because the main objective of those so-called preventative services like ACS, Homeland Security, or the Office of Children and Family Services is still the practice of terrorizing families, even if they claim to be reducing foster care populations. With these coercive services, there’s always going to be the threat that if you don’t adhere to requirements, your children will be taken away. That’s how punitive systems operate: the threat is always there, and as long as it exists, it drastically limits the kind of help the system can give. In fact, it deters people from seeking any kind of help at all and expands the scope of the state’s surveillance, which makes it even more difficult to build ways for families to be noncoercively and generously supported. I like that you said economic self-determination: that’s what we should be working toward.
Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies. Her major books include Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022) Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997).