In Child Welfare Cases, Most of Your Constitutional Rights Don't Apply

[Ms. Toad]

25. The point isn't whehter individual poor/minority children

might need to be removed from their families - but that the process disproportionately removes poor and non-whilte children from their families under circumstances in which richer, white children would not have been.

It is a lot more subtle now - and in some instances may be unconscious built-in biases (of the sort which is embedded in laws which imposed far more severe sentences for the use of crack (the drug more frequently used by poor minorities) than equivalent quantities of cocaine (the drug more frequently used by rich white folks).

But it is, in a very real sense, an extension of the deliberate anglicization of native children in the 50s by removing them from their native families and placing them in white families.

My parents were inadvertently part of this theft - thinking they were giving a home to children who had none. My older brother was taken from his mother, a member of the Omaha nation. His mother was an alcoholic, but he was well nourished when he came to us and we have since learned he was well nourished and cared for by extended family when his mother was unable to do so. He would never have been taken from his family had he been white.

We were told, initially, that my younger brother and sister were abandoned in a grocery store with their siblings. We have fewer objective details about their removal from their Lakota mother, but we have since learned that they were not abandoned.

This removal of native americans to white famlies was formal Anglicization policy at the time my siblings were torn from their communities. While it is no longer formal policy, it is still happening in poor/minority comminities because of biases which are built into the system about how children should be raised, becasue of lack of resources to support families who simply lack the financial resoures to support their families, and because of the lack of resources to hire attorneys to fight termination of the family relationship.

That doesn't mean that there wasn't individual justificiation to remove some of the children poor/minority children from their families - simply that as a system, a disproportionate number of poor/minority children are permanently separated from their families under circustances under which minority/white children would not be.