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Excerpt: from Eula Biss' book of essays,
Notes From No Man's Land
To me, the gun was not the story. This was in part because the crime had already been punished. Ms. Johnson served her probation without incident, and her sentence did not include any restrictions on raising her grandchildren. But, more important, I was beginning to understand that the gun in Ms. Johnson’s story was functioning, again and again, as an excuse for the inexcusable. And after working my way through the file of letters that had been sent to the Voice by parents whose children had been taken away by Child Protective Services, and after doing some more interviews, I was beginning to understand that there was always a gun, there was always a crime being punished, no matter how far outside the law the punishment was ranging.
In the case of Tonya, a young mother who asked me not to print her last name, the gun was a fistfight with her sister. Tonya’s mother had called the police to break up this fight, and the police officer who responded had called in a social worker because Tonya had two small children. The social worker took Tonya’s two-week-old infant and her toddler because she mistook the birthmarks on the infant’s back and bottom for bruises. “It was like an abduction,” Tonya told me. A child-abuse expert later identified the bruises on Tonya’s baby as permanent birthmarks, but the baby and his brother were not returned. After seven months of taking mandated classes and appearing in court and dealing with first one social worker and then another, Tonya still did not have her children, for reasons that were entirely obscure.
I wasn’t unfamiliar with child-protection agencies, or their services, when I began working for the Voice. My stepsister had a baby a few years after I left home for college, and when her baby was around a year old, she got drunk and passed out long enough for the baby to start wailing and for her landlord to call the police, who arrested her for endangering a child. The New York State Office of Children and Family Services took the baby, and for some time my mother and Barry cared for her. This would have been all right if Barry hadn’t been in the process of losing his mind, a process that had started very quietly but was just reaching a crescendo. He was, during that time, screaming at my mother and then pulling the phone out of the wall when she tried to use it. I had left some potted plants with my mother when I moved out, and when I came back for them the pots were smashed. Back then, when the baby was passed on to another relative, I was relieved.
And that’s the story the papers like to cover. When the San Diego Union-Tribune covered stories about Child Protective Services, they tended to cover the story of a father who beat his infant to death, or the story of a mother who tried to stuff her toddler into a trash can outside Taco Bell. These stories occasionally carried an implicit criticism of CPS for not acting faster and for not taking children away from their parents sooner. But they never suggested that CPS might be systematically removing black children from their family networks and that, in light of America’s history of eugenics, this might be problematic. Perhaps now that we believe that nurture plays at least as much a part in child development as nature, we simply take black children away from black women instead of sterilizing them. At the time this thought occurred to me, I did not know that African American parents are much more likely to be investigated for abuse and neglect than parents of any other racial group, although African American parents are no more likely to abuse or neglect their children. And I did not know that several studies over the course of several decades have determined that “race is the most consistent factor contributing to the decision to remove children and place them in foster care.” I knew only that the stories I saw unfolding in front of me were disturbing enough to suggest the possibility that black children were now routinely confiscated by the government for the same reasons that black men and women were once sterilized by the government. But that was not something I could report.
Excerpt from "Black News" copyright 2009 by Eula Biss. Reprinted from Notes from No Man’s Land with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota. All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org
Eula Biss will take part in the event An October Sort of City on Thursday, Oct. 22. Click here for details.