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Dorothy Roberts

Scholarly contributions

5.7 "The Child Welfare System's Racial Harm"

In her piece "The Child Welfare System's Racial Harm," Roberts deconstructs why the child welfare system is overpopulated with black youth, and how the fatal flaw of the child welfare system continues to create, facilitate, and perpetuate the material welfare gap between black and white Americans. She begins by arguing that poverty and racial bias are the two main structural pillars contributing to the insufficient equality of opportunity between the blacks and whites. Roberts makes the case that parental income is a higher correlated indicator for forced child removal by child protection services than the actual alleged severity of the abuse toward the child by the parent(s). Adding further that since blacks are disproportionately poorer than their white counterparts due to systemic inequities, there is a carryover effect that perpetuates institutional racism in the child welfare system by reinforcing explicit and implicit stereotypes. Roberts argues that the cultural conflict between the white nuclear family structure and the black shared parenting cooperative structure results in blacks being falsely accused of child neglect when in fact, black parent(s) are simply attempting save money on child care costs while strengthening their network of kin. She then delves into the impact of how removing black children from this extended family, albeit under the guise of child protection from parental neglect, ultimately only serves to fracture the black community by stunting the social development and stability of their youth.

This disconnect between white and black familial structures she argues, is the source of the child welfare system's fundamental flaw. In essence, while the black community believes that "it takes a village to raise a child", America's white hegemonic individualistic culture assumes from the start that children's basic needs for sustenance and development can and must be met solely by the parents; any failure to comply with this cultural assumption is socially perceived as culpable deviance and implies that such parents are unfit for parenthood. Roberts contends that this fatal flaw is the impetus for a myriad of governmental shortcomings in the child welfare system. Among them, the government's failure to recognize the external economic, political, and social constraints that can prevent black parents from adequately providing for their children; the state only coming in to retroactively save children who are experiencing difficulty as opposed to proactively increasing their welfare benefits in order to preempt such negative results; and the government's refusal to address systemic inequities, such as the affordability of childcare, in favor of saddling the blame for parental failure on the parents' predetermined inadequacy alone. Roberts concludes with the argument that all of these factors culminate in the disintegration of black family life due to the increasing number of black children who never achieve a stable and loving home life during their most formative years of childhood. As such, these youth are prone to deep-seeded senses of insecurity, lack of identity, and low self-worth which deteriorates the black community over time. Case and point, the so-called "school-to-prison pipeline".

5.8 "The Social and Moral Cost of Mass Incarceration in African American Communities"

In her piece "The Social and Moral Cost of Mass Incarceration in African American Communities," Roberts details how and why the skyrocketing growth of prison population, particularly of black inmates, is morally unjustifiable, empirically detrimental in the long-term, evidentially misguided at best and politically predatory through its use of identity politics at worst. She argues this from an intersectional perspective on 3 fronts; the damaging of social networks, distorting of social norms, and the destructing of social citizenship. Roberts begins by dissecting the what she deems the 3 distinctive features of American Incarceration. First, the shear scale in number, and disproportionality in percentage of the black prison inmate population relative to their white and Hispanic counterparts. Especially considering the fact that African Americans are an outright statistical minority in the national population of Americans which, she notes, subsequently makes them overrepresented in the prison population. Second, the rate of incarceration and, third, the spatial concentration of the disadvantaged communities that produce these inmates. Roberts argues that the fracturing of these localized social networks, specifically by mass incarceration, is what reverberates into decreased social mobility for the entire black community. She emphasizes that a large part of the problem in properly conducting prison research resides in seeking to punish the individual causes of crime as opposed to alleviating the communal consequences of mass incarceration.

In utilizing her communal consequences approach, she uncovers how mass incarceration damages social networks by over-relying on extended family members for financial assistance, childcare, emotional support, and transport to and from visiting appointments with the incarcerated family member. Furthermore, Roberts connects this process to the distorting of social norms by reducing the number of role models and father-figures youth have to look up to as they come of age. She also establishes the link that less black male and female presence in a disadvantaged community puts it at greater risk of crime because the adults that remain are too preoccupied with compensating socioeconomically for their household to partake in the social groups such as, churches, clubs, and neighborhood associations which would normally enforce the social controls that preserve community safety. Lastly, she articulates how social citizenship is destroyed post-incarceration via felon disenfranchisement, labor market exclusion, and social isolation. She laments that mass incarceration of African Americans is shortsighted in that it fails to account for the long-term socioeconomic status costs of reducing the pool of potentially skilled laborers by discouraging potential employers, eroding job skills, and undermining social connections to stable job opportunities, particularly for convicts of petty offenses.