Rethinking Child Welfare with Alan Dettlaff
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True Story Media. Hello, it's Andrea. This week, we're sharing my extended conversation about child welfare and abolitionism with professor and author Alan Detlef. Just as I said with my conversation that we aired last week with Elizabeth Bartholet, there is so much here that I am still thinking about. The reality is that there are no simple solutions when it comes to what to do about child abuse and neglect. And even defining what falls into those categories is extraordinarily complex. I know from my work on this show that there are many abuse cases that are never counted because the perpetrators are never held accountable. And as we covered last season, there are many abuse cases that end up being pled down to neglect charges in criminal court.
It's definitely a morass, and I am so grateful to have an audience who can metabolize these tough, nuanced conversations. Thank you so much for having me. You can head over to our Patreon where the discussion is always robust and you get two extra episodes a month or three if you're in our highest tier. Those episodes are available by subscribing on Apple as well. Same content, a little bit less social. The team and I are working hard on season eight. It's going to be a big one, folks. And in addition to our weekly episodes, we're working on a couple of mini series about cases and stories that you've been requesting. And if you're a subscriber, you're going to get all of those at once to binge just like the big seasons.
If you've got feedback to share, you can always hit us up at hello at nobody should believe me.com. Listen, I know I hit these promos early and often, but that is because nobody should believe me is 100% listener supported. So thank you for being here with us each week. We'll be right back with my conversation with Alan Detlef. well hello alan thank you so much for being here with us i read your book with so much interest and i am really happy to be able to have this conversation and yeah i'm just really appreciative of you being here so thank you if you could start off with just telling us uh in your own words who you are and what you do
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, so if we can just launch right into talking about your book, which I just read and made so many notes in. You make a really compelling case in your book and in your work that the current child welfare system that we have in America is really on a continuum with forced labor. family separations that happened during slavery on up through Jim Crow and the, you know, sort of crack baby epidemic and all of these sort of various kind of iterations of racism and racist policies that, you know, that happened over the decades. And so I wonder if obviously this is a complex history, but I wonder if you could sort of connect some of those dots for us about how we get from This practice, this incredibly brutal practice of separating parents and children during chattel slavery to where we are today.
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.
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