In this episode, Torn Apart shows that the child welfare system was designed from its beginning to oppress marginalized communities. The episode explores how the child welfare system's roots in slavery, settler colonialism, and white supremacy, taking listeners on a journey to the separation of enslaved children from their mothers on plantations and the return of freed Black children to former enslavers as court-ordered apprentices. It uncovers how over time, the child welfare system went from neglecting Black children to over policing, surveilling, separating and punishing Black families.

Meet Dorothy Roberts:

Dorothy Roberts is a distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Founding Director of its Program on Race, Science & Society. An internationally acclaimed scholar, public intellectual, and social justice activist, she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Medicine. She is the author of the award-winning Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty ; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare; and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century , as well as more than 100 articles and book chapters, including “Race” in the 1619 Project. Her latest book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World , culminates more than two decades of investigating family policing, calling for a radically reimagined way to support children and families.

With Guests:

· Laura Briggs is an expert on U.S. and international child welfare policy and transnational and transracial adoption. She is a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Briggs' latest book, Taking Children: A History of American Terror, examines the 400-year-old history of state removal of children from marginalized communities—from the taking of Black and Native children during America’s founding to Donald Trump’s policy of family separation targeting asylum seekers.

· Daniel Hatcher is a professor at University of Baltimore School of Law and author of The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America's Most Vulnerable Citizens and Injustice, Inc: How America’s Justice Style Commodifies Children and the Poor. His scholarship reveals how state agencies commodify vulnerable populations they exist to serve, often with the assistance of private contractors—violating ethics, laws, constitutional requirements, and agency purpose.

· Kelley Fong is an assistant professor of sociology at UC Irvine whose work focuses on state intervention into motherhood and families. Her first book, Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services, was published with Princeton University Press in 2023.

· Kathleen Creamer is the Managing Attorney of the Family Advocacy Unit at Community Legal Services, which uses a holistic family defense model to help parents involved with the child welfare system maintain custody of or reunite with their children in Philadelphia. Ms. Creamer led the coalition that developed and lobbied for the successful passage of the 2010 Healthy Birth for Incarcerated Women Act, which curtailed the practice of shackling incarcerated women during childbirth in Pennsylvania’s jails and prisons.