Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare
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Book Overview
The story of foster care in the United States is the story of the failure of the social safety net to aid poor, largely black, parents in their attempt to make a home for their children.
Shattered Bonds tells this story as no other book has before -- from the perspective of a prominent black, female legal theoretician. The current state of the child-welfare system in America is a well-known tragedy. Thousands of children every year are removed from their parents' homes, often for little reason other than the endemic poverty that afflicts women and children more than any other group in the United States.
Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed legal scholar and social critic, reveals the racial politics of child welfare in America through extensive legal research and original interviews with Chicago families in the foster care system. She describes the racial imbalance in foster care, the concentration of state intervention in certain neighborhoods, the alarming percentages of children in substitute care, the difficulty that poor and black families have in meeting state's standards for regaining custody of children placed in foster care, and the relationship between state supervision of families and continuing racial inequality.
Shattered Bonds tells this story as no other book has before -- from the perspective of a prominent black, female legal theoretician. The current state of the child-welfare system in America is a well-known tragedy. Thousands of children every year are removed from their parents' homes, often for little reason other than the endemic poverty that afflicts women and children more than any other group in the United States.
Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed legal scholar and social critic, reveals the racial politics of child welfare in America through extensive legal research and original interviews with Chicago families in the foster care system. She describes the racial imbalance in foster care, the concentration of state intervention in certain neighborhoods, the alarming percentages of children in substitute care, the difficulty that poor and black families have in meeting state's standards for regaining custody of children placed in foster care, and the relationship between state supervision of families and continuing racial inequality.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0465070590
ISBN13:9780465070596
Release Date:December 2002
Publisher:Basic Books
Length:352 Pages
Weight:1.07 lbs.
Dimensions:1.1" x 6.0" x 8.9"
Customer Reviews
1 rating
Ms. Roberts Speaks About What People Do Not Want to Hear
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 22 years ago
I read Ms. Roberts book and believe that she is on target to the destruction of the Black family. The number of African American children in foster care is not a new theory. In fact, Black children have been in the foster care system since slavery. Slavery in itself was a form of foster care. The continued systematic destruction of the black family is caused by poverty, poor education and MISeducation, as well as, a host of factors created by the racism and classification of "minority" for black people. It is very easy to place fault on poor parents but the system pays more money to pull families apart than to help form the bonds of the bloodline. In the state of Missouri, for example, black children make up only 14% of the total population of children in the state. Nonetheless, 44% of all children in the foster care system are black. A highly disproportionate number. One state, but multiply that by all states and the math speaks for itself.I highly recommend this book.
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