Submitted by AutoModerator t3_z1lj0f in nyc
WickhamAkimbo t1_ixdj00j wrote
Is N.Y.’s Child Welfare System Racist? Some of Its Own Workers Say Yes.
It's sad when people get put in jail, and it's sad when people have their kids taken away, but to look at those situations and say "it's systemic racism, so we should stop doing these things" implies that you either aren't aware of the victims of the crimes that carry these penalties, or just don't care. Or perhaps that if we ignore the crime and child abuse, things will somehow work out okay. It's just magical thinking.
EDIT: And they're getting torn to pieces in the article comment section. The nonsense, hand-wavy "equity" arguments fall apart immediately when you're weighing them against the very real safety of children.
NetQuarterLatte t1_ixepvxp wrote
This was from Mister Progressive himself:
>De Blasio says there's no racial bias in the city's child welfare system
>
>...
>
>“In my eight years as the chairman and now four years as advocate where I looked at these issues and now mayor, I don’t believe that’s the case,” de Blasio said at a press conference when asked if he believed there was any kind of bias at work in the way that ACS or the child welfare system operates.
>
>“We’re also talking about a workforce that looks like the people they serve, by and large. So no, I don’t see that challenge,” he added, referring to the racial makeup of the city’s ACS workers. In Fiscal Year 2015, 81 percent of the agency’s more than 6,000 employees were black or Latino, one of the highest percentages of minority employees among city agencies.
spicytoastaficionado t1_ixweejc wrote
>"The report, prepared by a consulting firm that helped governments design more racially equitable systems, was based on conversations with those who chose to participate rather than on a quantitative survey."
Ah yes, so it is a grift.
mission17 t1_ixeteap wrote
Imagine this: the composition of ACS can be totally removed from the actual results the agency creates. Especially considering the NYT article poses problems with the agency's standards and not its composition.
user_joined_just_now t1_ixgonqt wrote
> Especially considering the NYT article poses problems with the agency's standards and not its composition.
The NYT attempts to attribute a specific label to the problems with the agency's standards and outcomes: racism.
Who is perpetuating this racism? The article gives us two possible candidates: mandated reporters and ACS employees themselves. Of course, the article doesn't actually label them as racist. It abstractly blames "the system" and "the agency" instead. Occasionally it'll mention poverty as a confounding factor before going back to talking about racism as the issue without really identifying any racist policies the agency operates under.
Are we to believe that it is the 19% non-black, non-Latino ACS employees are responsible for perpetuating all the racism of the agency? Would the racism be solved if ACS employees were 100% black? Something tells me the writer of the article and the advocates mentioned within it would agree that it wouldn't, as they talk about racism as a mysterious, self-perpetuating phenomenon.
The racism in question is the racial disparities in the outcomes of ACS procedures. In some cases, progressives will eagerly attribute racial disparities in the outcomes of a city agency to the demographics of the employees at that agency, so it's not hard to see why someone would believe that they're doing this in the case of ACS. It seems that more and more frequently though, the racism at such an agency will be the mysterious type. We can see this in the educational disparities in the city's public school system. Who is responsible for the fact that nearly 80% of black and Hispanic students in grades 3-8 fail to meet grade-level math standards, compared to 32% of Asian students? The system, the DOE, the standards themselves, and "the school". Belief in the last one routinely manifests itself in city politics as a demand to get rid of admission standards at schools where students are high-performing, in order to give other students access to these "good schools". What makes a school good? I have yet to see this articulated in a satisfactory manner, other than some people putting the blame on funding, in spite of the fact that NYC schools with poorer performance generally get more funding.
The most convenient part about this mysterious form of racism is that whenever a new policy fails to eliminate a racial disparity in outcome, it can be said that it simply wasn't enough to solve the issue. Racism arising from the actions of a racist employee can be addressed by their removal. Racism that exists in the results is much harder to address, so we throw one bright idea after another at it. With regards to disparities in the school system, we may even be able to remedy it by simply removing the results; after all, standardized testing is flawed. I expect this will become a more common demand in the near-future.
WickhamAkimbo t1_ixhxc7y wrote
Yep. It's yet more magical thinking. The disparate outcomes are proof of racist intent from these organizations!... even though we can't actually point to a single employee acting with racist intent, and the organization is overwhelmingly black, and each case's outcomes are justified by the circumstances noted by each worker.
magic
[deleted] t1_ixg3tng wrote
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mission17 t1_ixds23m wrote
I know it’s hard to fathom, but you can certainly reform something to treat people more equally while still protecting victims. And without “ignor[ing] crime and child abuse” (nobody in this article offers ignoring them as a solution).
If Black parents are 13x more likely to have their children removed from their homes then white children, are the benefits for children here really outweighing the disparities this program is perpetuating? Do we believe that Black parents are actually 13x less fit to parent?
WickhamAkimbo t1_ixe031m wrote
> I know it’s hard to fathom, but you can certainly reform something to treat people more equally while still protecting victims.
What if the goals are diametrically opposed? What if abuse is more common in some groups than others, and you simultaneously want to protect children and have equal outcomes? They are at odds. It's magical thinking to say otherwise.
> And without “ignor[ing] crime and child abuse” (nobody in this article offers ignoring them as a solution).
Of course not! It sounds terrible... but it is nonetheless the policy that many people would like because again, they engage in magical thinking that says mutually incompatible outcomes can occur simultaneously. They'll just ignore the evidence that suggests otherwise, which is part of the reason this crime thread was set up. It doesn't matter if you don't believe that, that's what is effectively happening.
> If Black parents are 13x more likely to have their children removed from their homes then white children, are the benefits for children here really outweighing the disparities this program is perpetuating? Do we believe that Black parents are actually 13x less fit to parent?
I'm not going to make such a broad claim, but I also don't see any reason for removals and interventions to be identical across all groups; there's a notable lack of data to back that up. Meanwhile, the article says plainly: "A New York Times analysis of 83 child homicides from 2016 to 2022 found that Black children in the city were killed by family members at about seven times the rate for white and Asian children and three times the rate for Hispanic children."
If those statistics are sound, I see no reason for outcomes to be identical across groups.
mission17 t1_ixe1c5m wrote
> What if the goals are diametrically opposed?
Unraveling systematic biases would make stopping child abuse impossible? Really? I would like to imagine there is a world where policing and child welfare could go the slightest bit further to not disproportionately punish Black folk.
> What if abuse is more common in some groups than others, and you simultaneously want to protect children and have equal outcomes?
Even the numbers in the article you gave for homicides don't begin to track the outcomes we're talking about here.
> but it is nonetheless the policy that many people would like
Who would like that? Who's saying it? Please be specific. None of these people you're talking about are quoted in the article.
You've created a boogeyman here and we see you use it repeatedly. You're not going to find a single person in this sub that would actually claim crime and child abuse don't exist. Nonetheless, an incredibly large contingent of people in this sub do much prefer the entire sub not to be flooded with crime spam. You seem to mistake those two things for being the same, perhaps intentionally because it's useful to portray them as "pro-crime" (your own words).
WickhamAkimbo t1_ixe3owu wrote
> Even the numbers in the article you gave for homicides don't begin to track the outcomes we're talking about here.
Please explain what you mean. You asked a question, I did my best to answer, and now you're giving a non-response. Those numbers give proof of very different starting conditions that would rightfully support different outcomes.
> Unraveling systematic biases would make stopping child abuse impossible?
No, the implied proposed solution of this article is not unraveling systematic biases, it's reducing policing and intervention by child protective services which, again absent magical thinking, is going to result in more abused and murdered children.
Solving systemic racism would be great, but I don't believe any solutions you would propose here would work.
> Who would like that? Who's saying it? Please be specific.
You do, and many like you on this sub. You'll never say it out loud, you won't admit it to yourselves, you don't think you do, but you do. You're interested in letting any number of incidents of crime and abuse slide a bit, loosening standards of reporting, etc to try to help abusers and criminals that you see as victims.
The article talks about raising the standard for what constitutes abuse and neglect of children. It's just part of the larger pattern of magical thinking that you can somehow "go easier" on abusers and criminals without necessarily hurting their victims. It doesn't work that way.
mission17 t1_ixe49qh wrote
> You do, and many like you on this sub. You'll never say it out loud, you won't admit it to yourselves, you don't think you do, but you do. You're interested in letting any number of incidents of crime and abuse slide a bit, loosening standards of reporting, etc to try to help abusers and criminals that you see as victims.
No. More crime and more child abuse is not my goal. What is wrong with you? How do you expect people to rationally engage with your philosophy on addressing crime when this is how you address anybody who doesn’t agree with you?
WickhamAkimbo t1_ixecvp3 wrote
Oh I never said it was your goal, and you can go back and re-read everything I've said above to verify that. I said that a big chunk of people will ignore abusers and criminals using magical thinking as part of their goals for equity and ignore hard reality and choices. They will choose to favor abusers and criminals in various situations and just hope that it doesn't cause more victimization. When it inevitably does... they ignore it. It's pretty simple.
newestindustry t1_ixeimu3 wrote
Everything seems simple when you're a moron
WickhamAkimbo t1_ixhxnp3 wrote
Is that the best you can do?
Honestly, who cares about your feelings and naive political identity when the stakes are so high for these policies. I'd rather prevent more kids from being abused. Go cry somewhere else.
newestindustry t1_ixi7568 wrote
Stupidity only matched by self-righteousness
WickhamAkimbo t1_ixj68kq wrote
And yet you offer nothing even remotely constructive or insightful in your responses.
What specifically is stupid? What specifically is self-righteous? And why should anyone care about your feelings here over the real-world outcomes that I'm talking about?
Maybe just for a moment consider the fact that your feelings don't really matter compared to the other things at stake here.
newestindustry t1_ixj8cm6 wrote
Oh damn, delusional too
WickhamAkimbo t1_ixkcx6k wrote
And still nothing constructive. You have nothing of value to offer and weren't worth the responses to begin with.
[deleted] t1_ixi72db wrote
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NetQuarterLatte t1_ixf098q wrote
>still protecting victims.
How can we tell if victims are being protected equally? Should it be just a quota on the number of victims per race, then the remaining victims are out of luck?
mission17 t1_ixf10jh wrote
I’m really not sure what you’re trying to say here, but is there really any evidence that victims are being protected equally now? Here is what the ACS workers themselves indicated per the article:
> But according to the survey, A.C.S. workers and other participants said that rather than starting from a presumption of innocence, “Black and brown parents are treated at every juncture as if they are not competent parents capable of providing acceptable care to their children.”
> Caseworkers said they felt pressured to push their way into people’s homes and not tell parents their rights. They “feel complicit in the harm that A.C.S. can cause Black and brown families” and powerless to change the system, the report stated. Most A.C.S. caseworkers are Black, as is most leadership in the agency’s Division of Child Protection, the agency said.
NetQuarterLatte t1_ixf1p61 wrote
In this story, the victims are the parents or the children?
mission17 t1_ixf236l wrote
A fair reading would pretty much indicate the entire families are getting fucked in these situations.
NetQuarterLatte t1_ixf2k0h wrote
Maybe this is one of those rare case where the workers in a city department are admitting that they are doing more harm than good.
30roadwarrior t1_ixg50kg wrote
Reaching a bit no?
mission17 t1_ixf2myy wrote
Yeah. That’s what the article would indicate.
30roadwarrior t1_ixg5guj wrote
Why is everything looked at through a racial lens. Has historic racism led to greater share of broken homes in African American communities. Does that affect the capacity to manage children with less support and resources. Children with less supervision get into more trouble and in turn ACS gets involved more frequently. Unpleasant how exploitation in the past still has residual effects today.
elizabeth-cooper t1_ixdmnqv wrote
The article is paywalled, is there a link to the full report?
WickhamAkimbo t1_ixdn2vh wrote
Ah sorry, edited with the unlocked link.
elizabeth-cooper t1_ixdqxb0 wrote
Thanks.
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