KHIARA M. BRIDGES

So thank you all for being here tonight. I am utterly humbled to be asked to speak to you, because I feel like you all know a lot about this subject and I feel like all of you could be panelists on this panel. And I'm also humbled to just be on the same stage as Dorothy Roberts and Peggy Cooper Davis. So, I'm also not used to speaking in a handheld, and so I feel like Beyonc‚, so I might--. I like it, I'll just say that. I will insist from now on.

So like everyone here, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the child welfare system, and why it looks the way that it looks, and why it operates in the way that it does, and specifically I've been thinking about why it is that the family is subjected to interventions by child welfare authorities are overwhelmingly poor, and disproportionately non-white. And I've been thinking about why it is that child welfare services operate so brutally vis-a-vis the poor families of color that are under its jurisdiction. Why does it seemingly remove children from their parents so gratuitously, and once children are removed from their families, why do family reunification plans require parents to do things that have nothing to do with the reason for their children being removed in the first instance, right? Why do these plans require parents to undergo things like anger management classes and vocational training and parenting classes and substance testing in order to be reunited with a child that may have been removed for reasons that have nothing to do with a parent's anger, or lack of vocational skills, or approach to parenting, or substance use? So, in my scholarship, I've argued that the reason the child welfare system looks the way that it does and operates the way that it does is due to the moral construction of poverty.

The moral construction of poverty is a simple idea that poverty, that people are poor because there is something wrong with them. It is a profoundly individualist explanation of poverty, meaning that it explains poverty in terms of the individual's failures, right? It doesn't look to structural causes of poverty. It ignores things like a labor market that contains fewer middle skill, middle wage jobs than it did in decades past, it ignores things like the fact that women are paid less than men for the same work, it ignores things like the nation's choice to pursue mass incarceration as its means for addressing its social problems, which is a policy choice that does a wonderful job of impoverishing already impoverished people, families, and communities. And so the moral construction of poverty ignores all *132 of these structural causes of poverty, and simply concludes that people are poor because they're lazy, or they're irresponsible, or they're promiscuous and they like to have a lot of kids, or they just don't have a good work ethic, or don't like to work, or just feel entitled to government handouts.

Now, know that if people are poor because there is something wrong with them, then there is nothing wrong with the demographics of the child welfare system, and there's no, nothing wrong with the way it operates. If people are poor because there is something wrong with them, then the child welfare system ought to be focused on poor families at the exclusion of wealthier families. The child welfare system ought to be comfortable removing children from their parents' homes, and the child welfare system ought to make parents jump through hoops before reuniting them with their kids. This is because if people are poor because there's something wrong with them, then when you're confronted with a poor parent, then by definition, you're confronting a person who has something wrong with them, but who is nevertheless raising a child. The fact of a poor parent, means, by definition, that the child is dependent on a person who has something wrong with them.

This is perfectly illustrated by the case of NANW, and I came upon this case because I read this book, I don't know if you guys heard of it, but called Shattered Bonds. So, the case involved the removal of a six-year-old girl from her mother's home because the home, essentially, was dirty. And the, and admittedly, it was dirty, the court described the home as follows: inside the apartment, the worker discovered the entire front room to be strewn with a collection of garbage, clothing, and other general clutter. Ashtrays were filled to overflowing with some knocked over. Windows and screens were missing, garbage materials were embedded in the carpet. They had about 12 kittens or cats living, in the house, squalid conditions in the kitchen, dishes stacked in the sink on the counter on the table, cat box filled with excrement found in the kitchen and some of the cats' excrement was stuck to NW, the child's clothing. So, the majority upheld the removal of the child from the home, however, there was a dissent. And the dissent rightly observed that the state would spend more time removing the child from the home than simply hiring somebody to clean the house. Now, if we, so the question is, how does this make sense at all, right?

If we view the case, and if we view it in NW's mother's home through the lens of the moral construction of poverty, the case makes all the sense in the world. We can see how providing a cleaning service to this woman would not have really solved the problem. Essentially, the dirtiness of the home is not the problem, the moral construction of poverty tells us that the dirtiness of the home is simply a symptom of a larger pathology. A pathology that touches on the moral character of a woman who would allow her home to arrive in such a state. See, so one can see an argument that there has to be something wrong with the person, morally and perhaps psychologically, for her to be willing to live in such conditions. If this is the case, then hiring a cleaning service for NW's mother and returning the child to the home is simply insufficient. Sure, the child would've been living in a clean *133 home, but she would still be at the mercy of a woman whose character is so compromised that she would be willing to live in such conditions. So, that explains why the court felt comfortable removing this child from the home, the state just can't fix the discreet problem of the dirty house, it just can't hire a cleaning service. Instead it has to fix the parent through anger management classes, through vocational training, through parenting classes, through drug testing and so on and so forth, and I think that the moral construction of poverty explains why the child welfare system tends not to try to fix isolated problems. Instead it attempts to fix problematic people. That is, poor people of color. However, recent events have caused me to question the universality of the moral construction of poverty, in other words, I've had to reconsider whether the moral construction of poverty applies to everyone.

Until recently, I felt pretty confident as a general matter that people have assumed that people are poor because there is something wrong with them. Now I've always recognized that structural explanations of poverty, which again, insist that macro, large scale forces sort of work to impoverish people, I've always recognized that those sorts of explanations of poverty have some degree of salience in the US. For example, in the early days of the 2016 presidential election, Jeb Bush, back when he was trying to secure the Republican nomination, he had this quote that circulated in all the major media outlets in which he said that Americans needed to “work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families.” And then he got pilloried for making that comment. People said that Bush was arguing that workers were not working hard enough if they were not earning enough money to support themselves and their families. Essentially, people said that Bush was saying that if people couldn't make ends meet, it was their own fault, and note that people were accusing Bush of embracing individualist explanation of economic successes and failures. The kicker is that Bush eventually disputed this explanation of his work longer hours remark. He stated that the remark was not an argument that workers who were having trouble supporting their families were lazy, instead he said, it was an indictment of the lack of full-time jobs available in the labor market. He said that his comment was a measure of his concern for the 6.5 million part time workers who wanted to work full time, so note that Bush recognized the political inadvisability of blatantly individualist explanations of poverty and low-income, and in light of that political inadvisability, he instead embraced structural explanations of the phenomena, arguing that the country needed “high-sustained economic growth in order to solve the problem of the evaporation of the livable wage.”

So, the Bush incident suggests that structural explanations of poverty and low-income have had some degree of traction, that said, although these explanations pop up every now and again, I have always felt confident in concluding that they have not deeply saturated the culture, at least not to the extent that individualist explanations of poverty have. For example, there is a substantial literature documenting that the most favored explanation of poverty in the US is one that *134 identifies individual behaviors as the route of indigence. There's a social psychologist who has done a poll of the polls, essentially, she's done, she's summarized all of the literature on this question. And she says: most of these studies find that Americans believe that there are multiple determinants of poverty, but that individualistic, or internal causes, examples being lack of effort, being lazy, being low in intelligence, being on drugs, those individualistic causes tend to be more important than societal or external ones, like low wages, like being forced to attend bad schools. So, she's summarized the literature and found that, for the most part, people embrace individualistic explanations of poverty, people embrace the moral construction of poverty. And then there was a poll that was recently conducted by the Pew Research Center, and the poll confirmed that the majority of Americans believe that the poor are responsible for their poverty. 60% of the respondents agreed with the proposition that “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they're willing to work hard.” And that same poll showed that 76% of Republicans versus 49% of Democrats reported holding the belief that most can get ahead through hard work. Now those figures are interesting, right, and one might cite them just to show that conservative, folks with conservative politics are more likely than those with liberal politics to believe that individual effort, and the lack thereof, produces economic successes and failures. But that same poll can be shown to cite or can be cited to show that close to half of those folks with liberal, “liberal politics” believe that individual effort produces economic successes and failures.

So yeah, I've been pretty confident that most people would believe that people are poor because there's something wrong with them, most people believe that the moral construction of poverty explains poverty. However, I had a come to god moment, if you will. It was November 8th, 2016. Trump was elected to the presidency. And it was only then that I realized that individualist explanations of poverty, and the moral construction of poverty, have a great deal of traction when they're offered to explain the poverty of those without race privilege. It was only on November 9th, after I woke up with this migraine, that I realized that structural explanations of poverty have a great deal of traction when they are offered to explain the poverty of those with race privilege. Very few people believe that individualist explanations of poverty can explain the white poverty of the rust belt. Very few believe that individualist explanations of poverty can explain the white poverty of the people who live in coal country. The country has, for the most part, both sides, right, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal politics, both sides have rejected the idea that white folks living in that part of the country are poor because they're lazy, or irresponsible, or have a bad work ethic, or are promiscuous, or feel entitled to government handouts. People on all sides of the political spectrum are convinced that white folks in the rust belt and coal country are poor because of structural forces. The industries that once supported these families have been moved overseas, or environmental regulations have limited the profitability of certain industries and have gone elsewhere. These are decidedly structural *135 explanations of poverty; they are not individualist explanations of poverty. So recent events have caused me to take even more seriously the way that race impacts the explanations that we offer for poverty.

Structural explanations are the domain of the race-privileged. And individualistic explanations of poverty are the domain of those who lack racial privilege, and so it leaves us to wonder, and to think through how we might leverage this embrace of structural explanations of poverty of those with race privilege, how might we get folks to embrace structural explanations of the poverty of the people of color who were under the jurisdiction of the child welfare system? I firmly believe that if we as a society thought that these poor parents were fundamentally good, then our child welfare system would look a whole lot different than the way it currently looks, and it will operate completely differently from the way that it currently operates. Thanks.

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