Today's Seattle Times' front page reports on a unit of the state DSHS called the Office Of African American Children's Services, whose self-described mission is to
prevent the unnecessary disruption of African American families, and to decrease the disproportionate number of African American children who enter out of home care, through the public child welfare system.Its founding assumption is that any disproportionality of outcomes in the public child welfare system is attributable to "institutional racism" in the system. The practical result, as the Times reports, is that race has become the decisive factor in placing black children for adoption. i.e. more black children are being kept in dysfunctional families that happen to be black, instead of being placed with the most loving and capable families who wish to adopt them. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at July 11, 2005 10:48 AM | Email This
This reminds me of the mother who drank heavily while pregnant, drove drunk while pregnant, killed another driver and now gets to raise her child in prison story!
How many chances do you get to prove you might not be a fit mother?
But we gotta keep em together!
Posted by: Joe on July 11, 2005 11:16 AMI would love to see the situation reversed. Imagine protesting the adoption of a white child by a black couple on the grounds that black parents couldn’t possibly know how to raise a white child.
To the editor:
I found your article regarding the special DSHS office for African American children to be quite disturbing. Apparently in our state’s foster care system Black children in King County enter through one door and White children through another. Isn’t this what Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement fought against?
Posted by: ADB on July 11, 2005 11:23 AMThere is a new department - OSWA2PFCS. This is the Office of Straight White American, 2 Parent Family Child Services. They are there to protect children of no-color that have two parents who for some reason are unable to care for the children. There is a high priority to place these children in like families, even if it takes years longer, so that they will not have the additional trauma of having to have loving and caring parents of-color.
Posted by: fred on July 11, 2005 11:28 AMIt's part of the problem with the government adoption (and foster care) system not just in Washington but in the nation.
Posted by: Sarah of WA on July 11, 2005 11:46 AMEverything from terror to welfare, they can build all kinds of politically correct models to evade themselves, but where the rubber meets the road, those models don't square with reality. And as such, you get failures like this institutional racism for adoption.
Note how many things are harmed at the expense of racial homoginization.
*The poor children in defective families.
*The defective families who are not ready for the emotional and physical burden of caring for children.
*The families who want badly to raise children, but who must go without because of the lack of children to adopt.
*The objectivity and credibility of DSHS.
*The credibility of leftist politicians and bureaucrats who continue with such failed policy.
And **most of all,** the ultimate goal of eliminating racism.
How will we ever eliminate exclusion based on color when these are the exact policies proffered by our intellectuals, politicians and public servants?
Posted by: Jeff B. on July 11, 2005 11:53 AMOh my gawd. Let me tell you, the AACS is one of the most disorganized, inept bodies of underqualified bureaucrats and affirmative action poster children you could ever have the misfortune of encountering. Getting hold of a social worker is next to impossible, apathy is rampant, and if I didn't know any better, I'd swear the King County Elections gets their staffing from this body of morons.
The ONLY organization that's worse- and then only very slightly- is the Native American Childrens' Services. The SW for one of our NA kids was crying to us about how much she hated her job, and was also next to impossible to contact.
We have never had a problem with the primary (read "non-racially-prejudiced") arm of DCFS.
The policy of having separate departments catering to different races is a huge waste of time, creates a haven for apathetic and incompetent union hacks, and erodes the quality of care for children who desperately need consistency.
The AACS and NACS systems are both big, big turds that are long overdue for flushing. But that would be racist, wouldn't it? (sarcasm off)
Posted by: ERNurse on July 11, 2005 12:11 PMWonder how many have been unnecessarily abused or died?
Only a lily-white lefty could have come up with this.
Either way DSHS is screwed though. The will be sued for discrimination by the likes of Jesse Jackson, or they'll be sued for negligence when a kid who should have been removed from a home becomes another statistic.
Who benefits?
Think about it and you can answer a lot of questions that go to the heart of what's wrong with our society, including this one.
Posted by: Jim on July 11, 2005 12:19 PMHow terrible that you are denying these poor kids the experience and their heritage! OAACS should come in there immediately and take these children and force them onto a plane and ship them off to Zimbabwe to learn what being black is really about! Learn their heritage and to where it has progressed - confiscating land based on your skin color (do you think that is where Sims came up with the CAO idea?)
All you are going to be able to teach them are American values, the English language, the American way of life in America, their home country of which they are citizens. How do you expect them to fit in and function here?
(Just in case this may sound too liberal, I forgot to turn off the hypocrisy key...)
Posted by: fred on July 11, 2005 01:35 PMRegards,
JC Bob
For those not familiar with the whole setup. We have a case worker that oversee our foster licensing, the kids have a case worker looking out for them, the parents have a case worker seeing they get the services they need to get their act together. Each of those has over 100 cases they are watching. Getting any information around all the bases requires a lot of followup by the foster parents.
Layer on top of that is I have no idea how many layers of bureaucracy. Mid and upper management are almost exclusively highly educated people, lots of degrees, certifications, seminars, training's, paper read and written. And no experience other than academic and management.
Right now DSHS is cutting back on services provided to biological parents. In order to terminate parental rights DSHS needs to show that all reasonable services have been offered to the parents, and the parents have shown no indications of getting together enough to regain their children.
Cutting services means it takes longer for parents to get the services to show they are not competent to care for children. This then causes the children to be in foster system longer, increases the chances if DSHS doesn't get the service to the parent then child will be put back with the abusers before they are ready. Increasing the likely hood they will abused again and start the cycle over again.
While DSHS is frittering away money on levels of bureaucracy, racial profiling, service that will help out the kids gets cut.
Just Wonderful.
Posted by: JCM on July 11, 2005 02:36 PMI wonder what the response to the headlines would have been if the Times had a gutsy staff writer pen the following:
"State Agency Decides Child Better Off In Abusive Home Rather Than Stable Adoptive Home Because of Race" According to Ima Idiot, head of the OAACS, factors such as good food, a safe, nuturing environment, and loving parents are secondary to keeping African American foster kids with their own kind. "Just because the extended family has criminal records and other problems is no reason to deny a child of being brought up in this unique culture. This is something the OAACS team is working hard to convey to all those non-African American couples out there who are trying to adopt. We are proud of our culture and are doing everything we can to maintain it" she said.
It's tragic that anyone who speaks out against OAACS will be considered racist and intolerant. As Ceasar told Brutus "The faults, dear Brutus, lie not in the stars but in ourselves." (This is probably not the exact quote, but I don't have my Shakespeare tome handy.) It's too bad OAACS will look to outside when the real problems are within. We must keep the children in our prayers.
Posted by: Burdabee on July 11, 2005 05:24 PMExcellent point!
Posted by: Shannon K on July 11, 2005 06:07 PMThanks for opening your home, too. My wife and I also do foster-to-adopt, as well as permanency placement. We focus on medically-fragile babies. (You might say that I leave work to go to work...) Occasionally we do emergency placement, which is when we had our encounters with OAACS. Never again.
I have to say (without hesitation) that 99% of the time, our kids' social workers and CASA workers are absolutely fantastic. They soldier on in the midst of a bureaucratic hairball. And they do marvelous work. We love them and let them know it.
But our experiences with OAACS have just never been pleasant. Maybe our kids had different social workers than your kids. I don't know. But when we had to get a diabetic 3-year old in a ketoacidotic state into the hospital right freaking now and the OAACS social worker never followed through with her "yeah, sure, I'll get to it" about getting us this kid's care plan two weeks ago, never answers her phone or her messages, and can't be bothered during her lunch break, I have a big damn problem with that.
Has the main unit dropped the ball? Once or twice. But they caught up pretty damn quick. The OAACS people can't seem to face up to the fact that someone screwed up, let alone do anything about it.
And the kid who we took in because her mom never came home from work and this two-year old was all alone in her house for two days? Turns out her mommy was busted for smoking crack. She posted bail (God only knows how)and guess who got her kid back the same day? And when we tried to advocate for this kid's safety, all we got was, "This is how it works. Get over it."
I assert that the OAACS is useless. It needs to be scrapped, and the people who perpetuate this travesty need to be sent packing. All this organization does is ghettoize children who deserve a good, safe home, but are robbed of the chance because of the color of their skin.
Posted by: ERNurse on July 11, 2005 08:59 PM-endquote-
While clearly this is not genocide in this case... who knows what craven arguments someone might decide to make further down the road? Arent we already seeing glances at reparations?
Great site.
Posted by: Jesse on July 12, 2005 07:12 AMIf you think for a moment, that's not necessarily inconsistent. Children have the same race (or skin color to be precise) as their biological parents, so placing children in families of different race adds a complication. (I don't think it's a terribly important complication compared with the importance of getting kids placed in a good family, but I'm not an expert and don't know the data.)
On the other hand, children's gender preference does not appear to be correlated to their parents'; after all, most gay kids come from straight parents. Therefore, what's wrong with placing straight kids with gay parents?
My point is not to defend the DSHS policy on race -- I don't know enough about it, but I find it disturbing -- but rather to shoot down the parallel between that and policy toward gays.
Posted by: Bruce on July 12, 2005 09:38 AM