While this documentary id dated, it’s useful to watch (even in parts and pieces if your time permits), as it concretizes (and we can problematize) many of the issues raised last class through our readings and discussions, as well as issues raised in previous weeks.

What can we make of Moynihan’s “tangle of pathology”  assertion?

What do we make of the notion of the “vanishing family?”

There were several structural issues which I did not get to raise in class, primarily that of mass incarceration and its effect on families as well as how it in turn shapes the foster care system in which black and Latino children are disproportionately represented.  Ta-Nehisi Coates’s piece, The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which was raises some weeks ago, is also again relevant to last week’s discussion.

A quote from Dorothy Roberts’s book on the subject:

“According to federal statistics, black children in the child welfare system are placed in foster care at twice the rate for white children. A national study of child protective services by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that “minority children, and in particular African American children, are more likely to be in foster care placement than receive in-home services, even when they have the same problems and characteristics as white children” [emphasis added]. Most white children who enter the system are permitted to stay with their families, avoiding the emotional damage and physical risks of foster care placement, while most black children are taken away from theirs. And once removed from their homes, black children remain in foster care longer, are moved more often, receive fewer services, and are less likely to be either returned home or adopted than any other children.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9BKXQ8ROlw