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Molly Tierney
The other day I met up with a woman I have known for more than 30 years. I do not have a word for our relationship. Friend? No, although I do love her dearly. Caseworker? Not anymore, as that chapter of our story has closed. Relation? Colleague? Not quite.
I had called her for a favor. I’m making a movie about child welfare, and I needed someone to explain to the film director what it feels like to have a caseworker come into your home armed with the threat of separating you from your children.
First, though, we talked about what it feels like to be a mom. Having one and being one are drastically different experiences. Your firstborn crashes you into a new intimacy. The little one responds to your smell and your voice. Feeding him is the joy of a lifetime; you and you alone are keeping this beloved little being alive. We each found, inside us, a mother bear with a ferociousness we did not know we had. The need to be near our baby was desperate. We both theorize this is a thing only mothers know, and we agree that having a child restructured our sense of self. It gave us the profound understanding that the only reason we are on this earth is to care for this little person.
Next comes a part of our story that is harder for us to revisit.
When we first met, it was the early 1990s in Chicago. She had six beautiful children, four of whom were under the age of six. I was her child welfare caseworker, part of a team dispatched to families in an effort to keep their children out of foster care.
She had a lease in public housing and lived in the high rises in the Robert Taylor Homes and, later, Cabrini Green. We both recall a bleak landscape — as if the earth around brutalist buildings had been worn to a nub.
Rats as big as raccoons roaming the halls. Piss-filled elevators that were broken half the time anyway (which was great when you have six kids, a month of groceries, and a unit on the 14th floor). Radiant heat that came up through the floors, with some kind of maniacal thermostat that had the units sweltering in February. Cinderblock walls where even the best tape could not get a drawing to stick. Addicts everywhere with their dope fiend version of crazy. The constant threat of gun violence. Often, being pinned for hours in the apartment until the shooting stopped.
Like most caseworkers, I was young, eager, and well meaning. Despite never having parented, I was taught that I could discern the most vital of questions about a family: does a child belong there? The method of answering that question was to enter the family sphere — at my whim and without advance notice — to observe, inquire and interpret behavior. I was the most dangerous of combinations: bold and ignorant.
Back then, she was embroiled in heroin addiction, an unrelentingly selfish and demanding drug. This had typical byproducts: premature infants failing to thrive, very young children left at home without adult supervision, missed doctor’s appointments, poor school attendance, meager food in the house…. I thought the problem was she did not understand and went about helping her solve those problems with zeal.
When we sat together to talk, there were tears and laughter as we pulled from the depths of our memory and joined the two halves of our story. We recalled the craziness of a house with all those young children. The particular challenge of managing two of them, impossible boys, with their father’s hard blood running through their veins.
The time I saw her four-year-old walking down 41st Street on his own and we realized he had learned the bus routes. (He would exit the craziness of the house unnoticed, then at the bus stop get some stranger boarding the bus to hold his hand and slip on unnoticed to take himself to Grandma’s house.)
The time I came over to find the five-year-old had put a rubber band on his two-year-old brother’s wrist. It was constricting blood flow, and his hand was swelling. But there was so much yelling in the house no one heard his wails. We scrambled to find scissors.
The worry with which we tracked her baby girl’s feeding schedule, praying every day that she would gain weight. The way I would just pop up in public housing as if I were normal and belonged there. How I would often visit just as she was getting high, making her irritated that she had to put all her paraphernalia up until I left.
The flowered couch on which we sat the first time she trusted me and shared that her children’s father was beating the children and had choked her unconscious the previous evening. How mad she was at me when I selected for her an inpatient treatment facility that was out in the country.
The day I took her children from her. The crushing feeling of knowing her newborn daughter would not know her.
That last one is a bitter memory, so we were quiet for a while.
Then she told me the story of her son’s recent, untimely death and the arrival of grandchildren on her doorstep. She was given custody, and the state child welfare agency showed up again. They count now 35 reports to child welfare that allege she is abusing or neglecting her children. That’s when I realized that while my part of the story ended, hers has continued.
Child welfare never left.
She talked about the array of investigators she has known over the past three decades. They treated her like she was stupid because she was uneducated. They spoke to her as if she were incapable. They were always telling her what to do without understanding the context she was in. They came in with all the power and ran roughshod over her house.
By inserting someone who didn’t belong, it disrupted her ability to parent her children. She sees the child welfare system now as the enemy of families, there with the explicit purpose of doing damage. All the while, individual investigators wear convenient blinders, so they do not see themselves as a part of the problem.
From her perspective, it was the visits from caseworkers that tipped her addiction. Caseworker visits were so overwhelming that she turned to her drug of choice for relief. That’s how it works, of course; all addicts are simply seeking relief. By making the stress level intolerable, we threw her into all-encompassing addiction and then “solved” the problem we created by dissecting the family. Which is to say: we thought we were solving a problem when, actually, we were creating it. She and I can run the list of her beautiful children and name the damage it did.
Taking the long view, she is an unusual success story. After losing all her children to foster care, she fought her way back and got them home, one by one. It took years of labor, and the credit for success is hers alone. This weekend she’ll celebrate 28 years sober. She plans to open a home for women who are struggling with domestic violence and addiction — a haven like the one she needed when she was in their shoes.
She says if caseworkers could just come in open to understanding and ask simple questions. “What, in your opinion, is the problem that needs solving?” And “how can I help?” She feels sure that kind of intervention would be more likely to keep families together.
I concede to her that if I could turn back the clock, I’d like to think I would have done things differently. If so, we might have avoided so much of the damage we did. She is gracious and full in her strength of recovery, interpreting the events as critical to her healing journey. Without them, from her perspective, she might not have kicked her habit.
I am less sure. I am not certain the outcome could have been averted, if for no other reason than we arrived at her doorstep so late in the cycle. We began already too far downstream to achieve what we had hoped.
It does leave me more desperate to alter child welfare at its very core. As an industry, we presume a new policy or practice model is the first step. I wonder now if a place to start is a more personal reframe.
Instead of training caseworkers to wield power that most of them are far too inexperienced to manage, we could open their minds to the human condition. It would go something like this: not everyone gets a fair shake in life. You have the chance to stand next to someone who is struggling and see the world from their perspective. If you get it right, you might help them see choices they can make that will ease their burden.
Until then, the movie we make will have her fingerprints all over it. Maybe it’s a start.
I am white. Over the course of my 30 year career I have spent most of my time in the company of black people. Some years I was the only white person I saw every day. This was not by intention. More just the happenstance of a career in urban child welfare. I don’t recall ever feeling uncomfortable, unwelcome or afraid. I made life-long friends — the go-to kind who are at the top of the call list when I need help in the middle of the night.
This experience got me to telling myself that, on the spectrum of white-ness, I am a more than average race conscious person. As I stepped into leadership roles in social services, I did so in a race conscious way. I built racially diverse teams of world class individuals — teams I would have put up against any team in the country. I redistributed the power I had to the families we served — putting them in the position of decision-maker about their own lives. I drew my weapons and did vicious battle with institutional racism every time it had the gall to rear its ugly head.
And then: Delilah. As I grooved into being Her mom I came to understand that my experience of race up to then, while heart-felt and sincere, was informed but…intellectual at best.
And then an itty bitty person who calls me ‘mom’ took me to a primal place I did not know existed. On her behalf, I house a bottomless depth of rage at the gaping racial wound in our country and I double-dog-dared it to make itself known in her life. At every interaction with the world I rule out race as an issue issue before I lay my weapons down.
About the time George Floyd was murdered my daughter graduated from elementary school. In replacement of rite-of-passage activities, her principal put together a slide show involving pictures of kids from the lower school. A member of my extended family saw the production and asked if Delilah had been in it. You see, this family member said, its hard to tell black children apart.
I confess I have been stunned since then. If a member of her own family cannot see her as anything other than undifferentiated in a wash of color, what will the police see? They will see exactly what they saw when they pulled George Floyd from his car. And then they will act. I am now terrorized but this question: how the hell am I supposed to keep my kid alive?
The challenge of preparing my child to be Black in America is the right one. But it separates us in a way that scares me for her. I am, first and foremost, her mom. That means She and I are bound up irrevocably. It is what She needs. I am now also the white woman teaching her about being Black in America. That causes us to separate. While I can give her the lesson, I cannot join her for the journey.
She is alone in this in our house. We both are.
American government is a mess. Two things, in particular, have held my attention in the past several months: the impeachment proceedings and the Democratic presidential nomination. Just after noticing how irritated I was at the details, I shifted to seeing things in the context of patterns. One pattern leapt off the page: they might not be using dogs or hoses any more but these sure feel like the modern tools of voter suppression.
Try this:
First, the impeachment proceedings are aired on live TV and the entire country turns to watch. Even if we only dabble in the NYT video clips, viewers still see the same thing: straight white men of a certain age in positions of power. They sit at high wooden desks, they bang gavels, they speak an odd form of English to convey information to each other, and they tightly control the clock. While we may be listening to the substance, I don’t think we can avoid absorbing a subliminal message: power belongs to the demographic we see on the screen. We’ll hold that as archetype when we enter the voting booth this year and it is designed to make us less likely to see women, people of color, people with disabilities, younger people, people of different ethnicities or religions, etc. as viable candidates for office. It might not inhibit people from going to the polls, but it will limit their choices when they arrive. Round 1 to voter suppression.
Meanwhile, a dizzying array of candidates have stepped forth for the Democratic nomination. When I ask friends and acquaintances who they prefer I get a stark answer: I don’t care. Just pick one. Alas. what is likely to unfold is a phenomenon the democratic party cannot seem to shake: their candidates won’t act as a team. When the primary is over, it is in the Party’s best interest for each of the losing candidates to immediately signal to their following that getting behind the winner is a matter of urgency. Instead they will be silent or follow Mr. Sander’s lead and delay endorsement. That will have the impact of voter apathy and cause followers of losing candidates to be less likely to come out to the polls in the general election. Taking action to reduce the likelihood that people come out to vote is, by definition, voter suppression. So goes round 2.
Voter suppression has been at the core of our electoral politics since the origins of our country. It is a handy and effective tool that retains power for the few at the cost of the many. Voter supression in this modern form worries me far more than the (increasingly likely) possibility of another 4 years of Trump in the White House.
Informed voter turnout deserves our vigilant attention and any effort to suppress that should be seen as a threat to the Republic. Barring that, we’re likely to continue to have a government that represents a fraction of the country because the rest of us swallowed what we are being spoon fed.
Round 3 awaits.
Child welfare systems are troubling places. I know because I spent a career inside them trying desperately to make them work. Among all the horror stories and damage done, there are success stories. Generally speaking, adoption is considered one of them. It was a highlight of the decade spanning 2000 to 2010 across the country: children who had been removed from their parents, lingered in foster care and left the system by being adopted into a waiting family.
I’m an adoptive parent myself. The first time they showed me a grainy black and white Xeroxed photo I knew she was mine. We spent a grueling year untangling her from the foster care system, and then the healing began. After an early life where no one had paid particular attention, she unfolded from her shell (three squares a day, a lot of love and sunshine will do that to a person). I remember exactly where I was standing the first time she called me “mom.” At 4 ½ she signed herself into our adoption hearing. I hope I never forget the judge’s words to me: “In the eyes of the law, it is as if she came from your body.”
Child welfare systems are different now. The focus has shifted from adoption to work that will keep or return children to their own parents. That is for the greater good to be sure. All the better that systems are using data to drive decision making and to measure their ability to get better outcomes for children.
As I travel around the country a new measure, growing in popularity, has given me pause: disrupted adoptions. These are families who return children they have adopted to child welfare systems – sometimes years after the decree was signed. These systems welcome these children back into the foster care fold and categorize them as disrupted adoptions.
My daughter has fuzzy memories about her 4 years in foster care and the dozen foster homes through which she was shuffled. Recently they came up when she and I were talking about family. She opined that hers was very large because the people in all her foster homes thought of her as part of their family. And I thought “Oh no, darling. If they had thought of you as theirs, they would never have let you go.”
I think child welfare systems are getting it wrong on disrupted adoptions. If they categorize them in this separate way, then neither the agency nor the parents took the nature of adoption seriously. It sounds like what they really meant was “trial adoption” or “adoption if it works out”. This must be positively devastating for children who need to belong somewhere. And who must have known, the entire time, that the home and family in which they lived, even though judge and the agency had decreed it permanent, was not theirs to claim.
Me? If a parent deposited their kid to foster care saying “I don’t want her anymore”, I’d just go ahead and count it as abandonment.
Labor Day weekend and it is unbearably hot in Baltimore. Being the last weekend the pool would be open, we drag ourselves out early so as to ensure we get lounge chairs in the shade. I watch as the object of my complete devotion – my 9-year-old daughter – dives repeatedly into the deep end. She soars in the air, arcs, moves with grace and confidence through the water, touches the bottom and pushes off to the surface. I am overwhelmed with some feeling I can’t name, ‘love’ being far too weak a word to capture it.
As early as 4 years old, we knew she was a water baby. She experimented with it incessantly as a preschooler. On trips to the ocean she stood at the shoreline singing and dancing and engaging the sea as if it were a sentient being with whom she shared a special language.
Then came the pool. The pool to which we belong dates back to 1959 and is among the first integrated pools in Baltimore. I am very proud to be members of an organization with this kind of legacy. I think the joy of a swimming in a pool alongside all manner of people will provide my daughter a life lesson that will serve her well.
Like most community pools, ours has a phenomenon to ensure safety: the dreaded “deep water” test. This is a quiz of sorts that children have to pass in order to gain the privilege of enjoying the entire pool – the deep water and the diving board. Typically, this test involves swimming a lap without touching the side and then treading water for 60 seconds. Those who pass get a bright rubber anklet that cues the lifeguards as to the child’s level of water access.
My child failed this test the first time she took it. And the second. And the third. She stepped up fully eight times, over weeks, before she succeeded. I left her to it, watching her persevere and believing it was best for her long-term sense of self to do this on her own. I also felt sure it was the best thing for pool safety in general. When she passed it was worthy of our celebration that evening. We are family who believes that things that come easy are nice, but hard-fought wins are the stuff of life.
That was years ago. This day I am enjoying a lazy morning in the shade watching my daughter frolic in the water.
Then a mother comes with her blond-haired white son, who looks to be about six years old, to attempt his first deep water test. The first thing I notice is that the mom gest into the water with her son without any objection from the lifeguard. This strikes me as odd because the deep-water tests presumes that the child is wanting to be in the pool without a parent by their side. The whole point is that the kid has to be able to keep himself safe in water over his head on his own. Next, the mother swims with the child on his lap, encouraging him and continually saying “no, don’t hold on to me”. He is barely maintaining his little head above water in his final 20 yards. Once he finishes his lap, he sits on the side of the pool for a while, resting and gathering his strength for the task of treading water. This also strikes me as unusual, since the point of treading is that they do it after the lap when they are tired. Finally, he begins to tread. Reaching for his mother, she persists in telling him to let go. He manages to last the requisite time.
As he dons his new anklet, I realized that lifeguard would neverhave given my child a pass if she had shown that level of ability.
The rules of engagement – in this instance the threshold for access to deep water – sound like they are universal. But in reality, my dark skinned, dreadlocked child is held to a different standard than white children. When she misses the mark, the world presumes the problem is her – that she is misbehaving, or not paying attention or simply not good enough. She had to work eight times as hard to get the level of access so easily awarded to that little white boy. When the mark was hard for him, the world assumed something was wrong with themark. And then they moved it.
The kids all race off for popsicles either way. And I get a glimpse behind the veil as to how, every day, we create a world where our children grow up to believe that some people are just better than others.
Molly Tierney is an adoptive parent who lives in Baltimore, MD.
1 in 5 women are victims of sexual assault in this country[i]. Based on my back-of-the-envelope math, this must mean that every woman in the United States has either been attacked, planned her daily activities around avoiding being attacked, or both. Regrettably, I count myself in the latter category.
Talking about it is all the rage in the #metoo[ii]era. I hope that bringing this issue out of shadows and into the light will both reduce the risk to women and also help to shift power from the hands of white men into a more egalitarian distribution.
Then came Harvey Weinstein 2017. And I thought, quite honestly, sure he did it. All of it. This belief was confounded by an equally strong opinion that the women who went to his home, hotel room or office were participating in a profession that is riddled with all the trappings of Sodom and Gomorrah[iii]. I don’t mean to say they weren’t victims. To be sure they were. But I also heard them say some version of “I had to do it if I wanted the part.” And I thought: surely they knewthat was the deal in Hollywood. Which means they also knew that they could have stayed home in their little do-nothing towns and gotten a job at the Walgreens like the rest of us. None of this gives Harvey cause and I think he should rot in jail. But something about this story being a big splash made me see more clearly the difference between sexual harassment and rape.
They are wildly different. Sexual harassment is pressure to choose an awful, impossible option. Rape is a violent act of terrorism. A hate crime. It occurs in epidemic proportions – and that based on the fraction of those that are actually reported. One possibility is the epidemic is due in part to the fact that rape is masked as a sex crime. A phrase that puts us at risk of paying more attention to the word ‘sex’ than we do to the word ‘crime’ – and therefore looking away because boys will be boys, or girls should not dress that way or she should not have been in that area that late at night…. And once it’s clearly categorized in our mind this way, it’s an easy road to merging sexual harassment and rape. That choice will keep us from owning up to the terrorized experience of so many women who have been raped. While #metoo may bring sexual harassment into the sunshine, rape will stay in the shadows. That will end up being a dis-service because if we – men and women – don’t own it, we can’t fix it.
Then came Bill Cosby 2018. And I thought, quite honestly, sure he did it. Probably all of it. Being a person who believes that the myth of the black man is the single greatest conspiracy in the history of time, I was ambivalent. A black culprit, especially of a sex crime against white victims, would be a brilliant method of drawing attention away from the hundreds of thousands of white men who have committed, and still commit, these very same crimes without retribution.
Then came Kavanaugh. And I am absolutely sure he’s been a beer guzzling frat boy predator who has capitalized on his privilege for the duration of his life. No doubt: he did it. He represents the circular logic of the archetype: white man can do what he wants when and to whom he wants it because he can. And in the face of this high-profile case, we rejoice in the potential power of the #metoo.
But wait. 1 in 5. And, as all victims know, every time the subject of rape comes up we are returned to the most terrorizing moment of our lives in technicolor and hi-fidelity. And now every news source – radio, print, tv – has rape and sexual assault as the top headlines. All day every day. That means that one fifth of women in this country are debilitated every time a head line hits. And the white producer is going to buy his way out of his crime. And the black actor is sitting in a jail cell. And white lawyer is going to be appointed to the Supreme Court.
This leaves me feeling painfully naïve and worrying that in the celebration of what feels like the success of #metoo, we have been blind to a calamitous detail. The power white men hold in this country is entrenched without vulnerabilities and approaches the insurmountable. This power is intrinsic to the very structure of our nation. In it, we used our own movement take ourselves out of the game without even realizing it.
[i]http://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications_nsvrc_factsheet_media-packet_statistics-about-sexual-violence_0.pdf
[iii]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom_and_Gomorrah
https://ssir.org/articles/entry/from_family_data_to_neighborhood_outcomes
From the Stanford Social Innovation Review, November 2016.
By offering better early support for struggling families, child welfare services can reduce the need for more serious interventions down the line and improve the wellbeing of whole neighborhoods.
When I became director at the Baltimore City Department of Social Services in 2008, it was among the most troubled agencies of its kind in the country. The department serves low-income and vulnerable citizens and oversees services including child protection and foster care. When I started, all of the things we worry most about in child welfare services were true: The agency struggled to keep track of its children, a large share of children were living in group homes, children lingered in foster care for years, or even their entire childhood, and some were suffering injury and dying while in foster care. I am proud to say we were able to turn those statistics around. Robust and sustained reform led to a 70 percent reduction in the number of children in foster care over a seven-year period. We accomplished this feat through an unwavering focus on mission, by developing the ability to use data to drive decision-making, and by building a discipline around completing tasks. You can hear more about this dramatic success in my 2014 TEDx Baltimore talk.
When we had achieved measurable success, though, the dust settled and revealed a larger set of problems that I had not anticipated. In short, I saw that if what we intended was to make the world a better place, then we were deploying the wrong intervention. My department was intervening after a family had already become highly unstable, meaning that by the time we arrived, we were left with no other option than to remove a child from their parents. This invariably led to more problems moving forward. A childhood spent outside the boundaries of a permanent family can make it harder for children to forge healthy relationships or mature into pro-social adults. I continue to believe that the concept of separating a child from their family is in error and that it should be used in the rarest of circumstances. At the same time, we can’t very well leave children in peril. So how can we intervene to avoid having to remove kids from families?
Fortunately, we have at our disposal an extraordinary amount of data to inform our answer. Imagine that a family’s stability could be graphed over time. Most families are doing fine. In all families, bad things sometimes happen: the car is totaled, someone gets seriously ill, or someone dies. Most families are able to immediately respond in a way that avoids disaster. They rent a car or take sick time or someone brings over a casserole. But some families aren’t able to respond this way, and so their level of stability plummets. Instability brings on all the really bad stuff: evictions, addiction, domestic violence, abuse, and neglect.
The longer that instability lasts, the harder it is for a family to rise back up. At that point, placing children in foster care may be the only option available to us. But what these families really need is intervention at the top of the curve—when they are beginning to struggle but are still relatively stable, and when the intervention wouldn’t involve breaking up families.
We can shift the point of intervention by focusing on data points that provide child welfare services much earlier indicators that a family is struggling. Chronic absenteeism from school in young children, arrests in early adolescence, the electricity being cut off, children appearing in ERs for psychiatric interventions, and families arriving at homeless shelters are all great examples of data that indicate earlier moments when milder interventions might be able to stave off the dissection of a family unit. By arriving early in the trajectory, we can help support vulnerable families as they respond to misfortune.
Efforts of this nature by my department have shown early signs of success in Baltimore. Under cautious and thoughtfully crafted agreements, we are privy to information from partners, such as public schools, about families that are showing early signs of distress. We can then intervene with methods designed to turn a family’s trajectory in a positive direction. Child welfare caseworkers can engage a family while their children are still at home and provide coaching, connections to community resources, access to treatment, and a steady presence in sometimes chaotic households. Because they arrive at the earliest signs of trouble, they are able to offer support long before things have gotten so bad that we have to send in a child protection investigator. Using this approach, we are able to create partnerships that support family stability and avoid separating a child from their parents.
This is important work. But the fact is that even when we get good at it, we’ll still be moving too slowly if we remain tied to a model of child welfare that manages one case at a time and defines positive outcomes only in terms of individual children. This approach ignores broader demographic trends in many struggling parts of urban America. In Baltimore, like most cities, a subset of neighborhoods post awful outcomes across the spectrum of predictors of family stability. One particular Baltimore neighborhood is the source of almost 40 percent of the reports of child abuse that come to my organization each year. Were you to drive through the area you would clearly see chronic unemployment, vacant housing, rampant substance abuse, a general lack of community resources, and the constant threat of violence. It seems painfully obvious that the factors that contribute to instability occur not in the privacy of individual households, but across entire neighborhoods. And yet we wait for the call, intervening family by family and failing to notice that our efforts are not producing a net effect on the community.
As an alternative, we could start by taking a broader frame of reference. For instance, we could map a particular neighborhood using three years of data for what we call a child’s “home of origin,” the address where a child lived when we took them from their parents. We could analyze this data less to see the specifics of individual homes and more to look for patterns. We might notice that a significant portion of the children who came to the agency’s attention were infants who were injured after having been shaken. We might then theorize that there is an insufficient amount of information in the neighborhood about the dangers of shaking a baby and about what one could do when their newborn will not stop crying. Those insights, which are uniquely available to child welfare services, could inform the decisions of neighborhood leaders: what the preacher might say from the pulpit, what the pediatrician might say at the well-baby visit, what the principal might send home in the backpack. Using data in this way can enable social services to flood the neighborhood with the kind of information and support that would allow vulnerable families to make course adjustments when needed.
These choices would mean that child welfare departments could continue to do the important work of managing individual cases, but with critical insights that could help direct our work at the neighborhood level. Combined, these efforts might actually lead to the net effect that I believe we all hope for.
This shift in approach will be an enormous challenge, largely because the way we measure success in child welfare systems now is by counting negative outcomes such as reports of abuse and neglect, the number of children in foster care, and the number of children who cannot return to their own families. A better approach would ask that we consider additional ways of measuring performance and the possibility that the absence of a negative outcome is itself a positive. Fewer reports of abuse and neglect, fewer children in foster care, and fewer adoptions—if due at least in part to the choice to intervene with families earlier—would actually represent better outcomes because we would have kept more children safe at home with their own families. It will be challenging to learn to see the absence of these negative statistics as a measure of success, but it’s a challenge worth pursuing.
April 2016
A friend (white, educated, kind and fabulous) came for dinner last night. She was timid (albeit brave) in raising the concern she has: upon hearing “Black Lives Matter” she thought there might now be a norm where it is not ok for her to say “All Lives Matter”. I shared with her my sense that she might be taking the first phrase too literally. What those behind it might mean to say is that black lives have not mattered nearly so much as white lives over the course of the history of our country and that its time that they do matter. I offered the standard set of evidence often provided in these conversations: overrepresentation in public systems like prison, foster care,and special education by people of color, the growing sets of data that glaringly suggests opportunity is doled out based on race and zip code, the demographic fact that the quality of housing and educational opportunities falls along racial lines, the array of systems that are structured to protect wealth and power for white people.
After my predictable comments came the predictable response from my friend: “but I didn’t do any of that. Its not my fault.” I assured her she was correct and added that it was also no less true that the beneficiaries of white privilege have an awesome responsibility to disrupt the current set up.
I awoke with the sense that I had not gained any ground with my friend. It occurred to me that “Black Lives Matter” and “All Lives Matter” are misleading insofar as they suggest that the two comments are in the same conversation. “All Lives Matter” is clearly the voice of white privilege. It comes from “I”. Its the very “I” that blinds those of us with white privilege to its origins and pathways. This “I” suggests that my success was available to everyone and “I”, by myself, just did what “I’” needed to do. Others who did not enjoy the same outcomes just made other choices. This furthermore confirms that “I” have no connection to, impact on, responsibility for any others who might not have faired so well. When it is suggested that I do, the “I” retreats further into itself as a protective and defensive measure, only subconsciously aware that straying from the “I” success story is a risky proposition.
“Black Lives Matter” conversely, comes from “we”. It suggests “we” are interdependent and all in this together and that some of us doing well while others are struggling is an ill fated path that is doing damage to all of us. For some this path has been perilous. The moral outrage that this could go on for so long without notice and corrective action is now aptly placed in public arena.
I think the “I” of All Lives Matter is inadvertently taking over the “we” of Black Lives Matter in conversation. When both show up at the same time, All overshadows Black, pushing the Black Lives Matter conversation away as if to say “we get it and now its ok”. The responsibility for splitting this two conversations rests with the “I” of White Privilege. It will mean brutal self reflection on the benefits the “I” has enjoyed even if it means pangs of guilt for having done so well for so long just by luck of the parents to whom we are born. It will require the courage to admit we rest in avoidance to avoid our fear that giving up the current structure might negatively affect me. It will mean sitting on your hands and listening deeply to substance of the Black Lives Matters conversation.
Allowing All to overtake the Black conversation smacks of a modern method White Privilege use to divert a challenging conversation about race — one our country desperately needs to have. Disaggregating All and Black into the two very separate conversations might just get us started.
April 9, 2016
Over the recent past a splash of anti-gay backlash has erupted. Mississippi’s governor signed legislation allowing for individuals and businesses to cite religious objections and refuse service to gay people. Just prior, North Carolina’s governor signed a law that banned anti-discrimination protections for gay people outright.
In the aftermath there has been an impressive show of moral fiber, with large corporations, big money celebrities and other governors refusing to do business in these two states. Its hard to imagine that the economic impact won’t bring hatred around and that’s something for us all to look forward to.
I have been equally intrigued by the fervor of comments on social media signaling outrage at both Governors. This as if to say they, alone, acted and the people who live in each state are victims to a rogue political figure. I can’t help but notice each Governor played but one role (his conscience be damned just to have it said). Each signed legislation that was put on his desk. Each piece of legislation was passed by the 102 Senators and 242 Representatives that comprise the General Assemblies in these states combined. Each of those Senators and Legislators represent the roughly 13 million people who live in both of those states. Those folks arranged, by decision or default, for those individualist be elected and to have pen in hand when this idea got legs. What did we think was going to happen?
I’m not mad at the Governors of either Mississippi or North Carolina. Or their Legislators. I am grateful to them for making themselves known. Before now, bigots hid in the shadows and I could not tell who was who. When they have the gumption to speak at least I can see them clearly. That, as compared to the past, is a gift.
Neither am I mad at the citizens of either state. I live in Baltimore. In the last election an estimated 20% of the citizens of my beloved home town got up off the couch and went to the polls. Everyone else was….busy. Its surely true that 80% of the folks who live here have an opinion about our elected officials. I know because I hear about it with some regularity. I do always wonder, when I am listening to some impassioned critique, what the odds are that the speaker cast a ballot on election day. Probably low. So we are in no place to point fingers.
It is however an interesting opportunity to look in the mirror and imagine that civic engagement at the local level may be the most important tool we have at our fingertips now. I wonder about what we could do to transfer the cache of our smart phones to our opportunity to cast a thoughtful ballot.
