Alan Dettlaff

speaker

269 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Alan Dettlaff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Nobody Should Believe Me · Rethinking Child Welfare with Alan Dettlaff · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

Alan Detlef, Absolutely.

Well, first, thank you for the invitation.

I'm really happy to be here.

My name is Alan Detlef.

I'm a professor, I'm a co founder of the up in movement, and the author of a book called confronting the racist legacy of the American child welfare system, the case for abolition.

Yeah, it is a complex history, but I'll try to summarize it.

I think first it's important to start out in case people don't know what racial disproportionality is or what's called racial disproportionality in the child welfare system.

And that refers to the over representation of black children in the system which has existed, since the system, the modern system began in the 1960s.

So, since the system began black children have been severely over represented in foster care, meaning the proportion of black children and foster care is much larger than their proportion in the general population.

And that's been true since the child welfare system began.

I think the connection points are we tend to look at the era of chattel slavery and think about the family separations that occurred during slavery with children being sold away from their parents, black parents sold away from their children.

And we think about that as an isolated, horrific time in history.

Then we think about other times in history after slavery was abolished, family separations continued through apprenticeships or forced apprenticeships, which essentially allowed any Black child to be taken from their parents if their parents were deemed somehow neglectful or unable to care for them.

So people tend to think of those separations that happened during child slavery as an isolated time in history without realizing that after slavery was abolished, separations continued through forced apprenticeships, where essentially any black child could be taken away from their parents if their parents were deemed somehow unfit to take care of them.

And at that time, laws that were called the Black Codes made it very difficult for formerly enslaved people to access employment or housing or any kind of financial resources.

So it was very easy to say that a Black parent was unfit.

And these apprenticeship laws even gave the first bidding of a Black child to their former enslaver.

So families continued to be separated continuously.

Then we see other eras, like in the war on drugs,

where black children were separated from their parents through incarceration, mass incarceration, criminalization.

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