Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to examine the analytical category of racial disproportionality in the New York City child welfare system. Racial disproportionality is a generic definition which indicates over or under representation of a certain racial group in a determined social phenomenon or institutional realm. It is usually considered the outcome of a discriminatory dynamic and in this specific case refers to the over-representation of people of color in the institutional arena developed to protect the well being of children subjected to abuse or neglect in their households. In New York, the 94% of children in state custody are indeed black and Latino. I trace a genealogy of racial disproportionality in the child welfare debate and how this category became an object for policies, political claims and activism. I examine in particular politics of counting and categorizing through race as a practice embedded in the administration of welfare state and, more widely, in the process of racial formation in the US. Looking at anti-racism groups, committees and grass-root associations working on racial disproportionality, I discuss through ethnographic examples how this data is rationalized, re-appropriated and explained depending on the social subject involved and how they struggle to tackle the social complexity of inequalities and exit from the conceptual inflation of race-based datas.
In my conclusions I argue that a strict focus on racial disproportionality could be an ambiguous conceptualizing frame if we do not take into account also other structural features, which co-produce this outcome, like class, gender and urban inequalities.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter is a further elaboration of my dissertation, titled “What can I do when the system is wrong? Rappresentazioni delle disuglianze nel child welfare system a New York City” (Castellano 2014).
- 2.
You used to find such data at: http://www.nyc.gov/html/acs/html/statistics/statistics_cd_snapshot.shtml at the time I conducted my research, between 2011 and 2013. It is interesting to notice, though, that in the latest version of the Administration of Children Services website, created in the first half of 2015, community snapshots with data about the racial component of child welfare recipients disappeared. As it is possible to verify in the section “Data and Analysis” of the new ACS website (http://www1.nyc.gov/site/acs/about/data-analysis.page#Agency-Wide%20Reports) statistical data about NYC child welfare population are now based only on community districts. It would be important to investigate how and why this new policy was adopted by the main governmental agency, which changed is Commissioner in 2014.
- 3.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) is a child welfare foundation, born as a philantropic organization, focused on improving the well-being of American children and is one of the dominant organizations in child welfare issues in the U.S
- 4.
Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago is a research and policy center, focused on a mission of improving the well-being of children and youth, families, and their communities.
- 5.
I would like to acknowledge and thank some of the professors at the Department of Anthropology of the City University of New York Graduate Center, where I was a visiting scholar between March and June 2013, who gave me precious suggestions and directions of research. In particular I would like to thank Jeff Maskovsky, Dana Ain-Davis, Michael Blim and Leith Mullings, whithout whom precious reflections I would’t have been able to develop the main arguments of this chapter. Anyway I take full responsibility for all the statements express here and I, by no means, intend to attribute any of them to their suggestions, which I elaborated personally.
- 6.
Aiwa Ong inaugurates this concept drawing from Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality and technologies of the self (Foucault 1988). With technologies of citizenship she identifies the practice through which individuals produce and shape their life, as particular categories of citizens. In Ong’s sense, we can also see the dynamic of producing and interpreting data about the population as a technology of citizenship.
- 7.
In order to protect the privacy of my informants, I will put just their initial in the entire chapter.
- 8.
The Court Catalyzing Change Initiative describe racial disproportionality as the way in which, according to researchers, ‘children and families of color are disproportionately represented in the child welfare system and frequently experience disparate outcomes. While children of all races are equally as likely to suffer from child abuse and neglect, the percentage of African-American children who enter and remain in out-of-home care is greater than their proportion in the population’ (National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. The NCJFC register. http://www.ncjfcj.org/our-work/courts-catalyzing-change. Accessed 25 June 2016).
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Castellano, V. (2017). The Politics of Racial Disproportionality of the Child Welfare System in New York. In: Decimo, F., Gribaldo, A. (eds) Boundaries within: Nation, Kinship and Identity among Migrants and Minorities. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53331-5_4
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