(Listen to tiny's extended Podcast on the same story by clicking here)
“They used to make me fight with the dogs for food…” My mama eyes would drop into that shaded place, where stories always led to other violent stories of her abuse in a string of tortuous foster homes that she spent her entire childhood in. Stories like the middle class white couple who were abusing their adopted children of color for years with barely even anyone noticing until they drove them selves and three of their children off a cliff last week
My mixed race, Afro-Boricua, Irish orphaned and tortured mama never wept, just like she never hugged or touched or kissed. She did yell though and scream and curse and punch and kick and throw. Thats all she knew , thats all that had been done to her in all those foster homes and eventually the orphanage for “poor girls” she was placed in. I don’t tell this small slice of my poor mamas painful story to reminisce. Actually even writing it brings me back to the helpless silence i felt when i would hear her string of violent stories, unable to, as i wanted, take away all that hurt from her body and soul. I tell them to illustrate the impossibility of the system that criminalizes , destroys and separates families based on class, race and ancient eugenicist based policies.
The foster /adoption/CPS , Juvenile Dependency court system in the US is rooted 525 years of missionary lies, colonial theft of land, spirit, traditions and mothers and finally the post-colonial concept of eugenics (pure race science the Nazi’s learned from the US). This country and other so-called developing countries have been stealing, pillaging and removing children for profit and lies for a long time under the guise of the sentence and its many variants, “Its in the best interest of the child,”
Sadly i don’t know the back story of the six children who were adopted by these two women and are now dead and disappeared. What i do know is some agency or series of agencies decided that these two middle class ( possibly upper middle class) white women with no relation to the childrens culture, community or spirit were seen as “better” than their homes of origin.
The decisions to remove children from their homes, parents of origin happen in many different ways which are ALL rooted in class privilege. If the birth parent or parents are seen as “unstable” which is code for many things, all class related, i.e, homelessness or not having stable housing, not gainfully employed, not educated, or more subtle like acting ghetto, angry, or frustrated in front of the anti-social work industry, you risk losing your child if the system is in your life.
The sick, sad, classist paradox is these multiple systems will grant foster parents and group homes up to $4,500 to raise your child ( and often times much higher is the child is disabled or Severely Emotionally Disturbed) and yet you, the parent, is given nothing but grief if you admit your poverty and struggle to the system.
And again this notion of best interests of the child comes from a missionary, colonizer long-held belief that mere access to wealth deems you a better parent than someone poor. It is why they have long been forcing sterilzation on poor and indigenous women who have children, conflating with race as well when it comes to the evil or colonial beliefs about white supremacy and class supremacy
My mama’s mama was encouraged by multiple so-called social service agencies and the state to give up parental rights to her daughter. She was never offered support for raising her own child , Rather, then like now, their was a financial incentive to take children from their homes and parents of origin and her poor catholic, guilt -stricken, domestic violence victimized and confused teen parent self was criminalized and shamed for being undeserving with titles like "Out of wedlock" and bastard child in referring to my mama, her daughter, not to mention the shame of having a mixed race baby Today CPS recieves 12,500 to remove children from their parents. Something my Mama Dee and me and other poor parents WeSearched in 1999 and published in the Courtwatch project of POOR Magazine.
But the real place that white supremacy plays in, is the way that these white women with class privilege were even granted the ability to adopt these children without being subjected to a psychiatric evaluation like us poor folks are systematiclly given when our children are taken away from us and when these women were obviously abusing these children of color.
Similar to one of my mamas most evil foster parents who was a rich white woman who systematically raped and physically and mentally abused my mama for over 5 years of her childhood ( from 4-9 years old) and was never caught for it, these women seemed to go un-phased and un-watched when they perpetrated abuse on their adopted children and only had to pick everything up and move into more and more isolation where no-one seemed to even look in on them. Allowing these wealthy white people to go un-checked in their violence and insanity, because they weren’t reliant on the state for support.
That said, i do not have an answer as their are many mamas, who like my mama used to say, don’t have the mama gene, so lets not rush to the only answer being all children should stay with birth parents, but what i do say is we could cut at least %50 of these racist/classist adoptions and CPS removals if we were changing the way this system supports poor parents to raise their own children. This is some of the WeSearch all of us welfareQUEEN's at POOR Magazine have been doing for years and their are many powerful Black and poor parent led movements across amerikkklan who have been proposing and fighting these abusive systems for years
In San Francisco in the 90’s they used to have a model/demonstration program for poor black families that actually “fostered” the whole family with a foster grandparent, encouraging and enlisting the strength of African and indigenous deep structures of kinship to support the whole family into healing rather than further the cult of separation that runs thru the CPS and Foster care systems all across amerikkklan. Something my mama uncovered in the landmark POOR Magazine Volume 4 MOTHERS issue in her interview with Black dcholar Wade Nobles.
"She tried to kill me multiple times, Im not sure how i got out of there alive, once she found out having me didn't fit with her image of the perfect mother and child and no-one ever seemed to care," my mama's voice trailed off in one of her re-telling sessions with me and then she just stopped talking about it at all leading her to become more and more trauma-filled and depressed for the rest of her life . I hope that this horrible story, like all the other horrible stories that rarely if ever get told could lead to a different path of care for parents in poverty.