Is our child welfare system "broken"? Or is it ripping apart Black families by design?

In 2001, University of Pennsylvania law professor Dorothy Roberts released a groundbreaking book, "Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare," laying out the case that most children in the U.S. foster care system are there not because of abuse, but for reasons that boil down to poverty. Today, Roberts writes in her new book, "Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World," more than one in 10 Black children across the nation can expect to land in the system by age 18. As a reproductive justice advocate — Roberts' 1998 book "Killing the Black Body" is another classic of its field — Roberts has written about the child welfare system within that Black feminist framework, arguing that true reproductive autonomy must include the right to parent the children one has and to keep those children safe. In that court-based system, there were judicial orders based on petitions accusing Black parents of child neglect that sent Black children to former white enslavers as "apprentices," to work for them. When the formal child welfare system excluded Black families, we had a history of taking care of children through other means: extended kin networks; Black clubwomen providing daycare for struggling Black mothers; the Black Panther Party giving out free breakfast and health care; and mutual aid networks that sprung up during the COVID lockdown in New York City and provided groceries, diapers and health care to people when the child protection agencies were virtually shut down.