NYU Hosts Elie Hirschfeld’s Inaugural Symposium

In a panel discussion at the first annual Elie Hirschfeld Symposium on Child Welfare, leading experts on family law and racial equality called for the system’s abolition.

Panelists included NYU Law’s Peggy Cooper Davis, John S. R. Shad Professor of Lawyering and former judge of the Family Court of the State of New York, as well as professors Khiara Bridges, associate dean for Equity, Justice, and Engagement at Boston University School of Law and author of Reproducing Race; and Dorothy Roberts, founding director of the Program on Race, Science, and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. Chris Gottlieb, co-director of the Family Defense Clinic, moderated the event.

The current child welfare system is based on a view of poverty as an ethical shortcoming, according to Bridges, and it fails to acknowledge the systemic structures of poverty that impact black and brown communities. “The moral construction of poverty is the idea that people are poor because something is wrong with them,” said Bridges.

This perspective results in a child welfare system that percieves individual moral failings through chaotic and emotionally tumultuous family separations. The resulting impact is hurting entire communities, which are overwhelmingly poor and black.

“You can’t explain mass incarceration, the explosion of foster care, and the abolition of welfare without seeing how racism fueled all of these and how they have led to these disproportionate numbers of black people in the system,” Roberts said.

Cooper Davis compared the child welfare system to a kind of colonialism where, “you have an entity, a child welfare system, that assumes authority over and supervises and alters the terms of life in a community and in families that had thought of themselves as autonomous, and it does so…with a presumption of cultural and informational, if not biological, supremacy.”

In order to change the way that black and brown children and families are treated in the child welfare system, Cooper Davis called for legislation that more definitively protects constitutional human rights. The 14th Amendment, which was supposed to ensure equality for minority groups, is too vague and fails to be implemented in state-level institutions such as the child welfare system, she said.

The first step, the panelists agreed, was not reform, but abolishing the current system.

“The system itself was designed to be unjust, to control and police and punish and marginalize whole groups of people, and therefore, it’s not enough to reform it,” Roberts said. “What you have to do is abolish it in the sense that the entire philosophy of it, the enelietire structure, needs to end, and something different, something radically different needs to take its place.”