We have to PROTECT and not NEGLECT

How do we Protect when we Neglect?

Written by Terry Alves-Hunter

As I sit back and replay the atrocities that have taken place on US soil, and I see the war on humanity in other countries, I wonder how the US could be transformed. How many school children would not be killed in their classrooms, how many gang members would not have access to weapons but education and have child protection agencies that would protect and not police families. We celebrate Memorial Day as a remembrance of those who fought in other countries and gave their lives to protect our nation. A veteran is indeed the definition of a hero. Yet, we continue to neglect to provide the same attention, finances, and government intervention in our own country, on our own soil, and no accountability to the people whose taxes enable these decisions to be made.

We assume as different images permeate the different news outlets, that black people maintain the heavyweight title on killing each other, and mass shootings and that when a black child goes missing, they are addressed with the media bias of either being put on the back page in the small print of a newspaper or are neglected to be given any attention at all.

Here are some facts that we, the public, do not seem to acknowledge or attempt to acquire the data to change the narrative.

● Rates of white people killing white people and black people killing black people is nearly the same. 80% white 90% black

● Black women and black men are significantly killed at a higher rate by police. Black men are at 2.5% more than white men and black women are 1.4% than white women

● The rate of black-on-white killing and white-on-black killing is only separated by 8%. 16% white and 9% black (rounded off the nearest number)

● The second highest statistic of black youth deaths is from ages 15 to 22 is by suicide

● From 1982 to 2022 School Mass Shootings per race:

○ White - 68%

○ Black- 21%

○ Latino- 11%

○ Asian - 8%

○ Other - 5%

○ Native American - 3%

○ Unknown - 13%

● Black children make up a third of missing children in the FBI database, yet they are covered by 20% by the media, in a 2015 study it was even bleaker; they made up 35% in the database yet only 7% of coverage

● Poverty does not equate to neglect. Poverty does not mean a child is unsafe, in unloved or their parent lacks the capacity to care for their child. However, it is clearly documented that poverty is a way of life in communities of color. The faces of children in child protection are either Black, Brown or poor White children. 60% of families have had a finding of neglect only. In research, the justification that is used for removal has been changed to “a suspicion” of neglect. Without any evidence, is there any wonder why there exists no trust between families of color or white families in poverty?

Gun violence is the most critical health epidemic in our country. This is magnified and increased with the lack of acceptance, support, and intervention of mental health. The right to bear arms does not give anyone the right to take a life. My right to live supersedes your right to own an assault weapon. The toll of gun violence on our children is not being addressed as we all casually sit back and ignore the ACES (Adverse Childhood Experience Score). In a calculation of children murdered worldwide ranging in ages from 0 - 14, the US owns 87%. Firearm injuries are the leading cause of children in the US. Children of color who grow up in underserved communities, not only have a higher risk, but also maintain the long-term effects of witnessing and experiencing gun violence.

Addressing these issues is always met with the canned response, “it takes time”. However, when any issues affect the white straight male with no disabilities, that does not apply, and changes are made swiftly. Did it take time to create a vaccine for COVID? Did it take time to pass legislation and support unemployment during the pandemic? Yet, the Blackdemic continues to exist, flourish, and be ignored. As a black woman, I need a law for the right to vote, to have the opportunity to apply for a job without my race being considered, and need to be cognizant that to receive any immediate success in this society I have to subscribe to beauty being defined as being white with straight hair. The closer my appearance resembles that ingrained image, the more likely I am to be accepted and heard.

Our country will pass legislation to send billions of dollars and American soldiers to other countries to address food shortages, violence, and war. In comparison, the US fails to address these issues on our own home soil. Close your eyes, imagine billions of dollars being used in the US, and being invested in our communities. Our children would be safe going to school, poverty would not be a family’s legacy, and mental health services would have providers and services that would be culturally competent and equitable. Providing free pre-school and daycare, would significantly stop interference from child protection agencies and prevent parents from putting their child in the care of someone based solely on what they can afford. Responding to the housing crisis instead of just addressing it. Place actionable policies that embrace humanity instead of supporting the divide that exists according to race.

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The APA (American Psychological Association) published a written apology in January 2021 for the systemic racism and disparity in treatment that is built into their foundation. Their apology to people of color was for promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racial discrimination and human hierarchy. The resolution was adopted on October 29, 2021. They admitted that many historical records and narratives are based on whiteness. This lack of addressing the past into the present has continued to harm people of color without any purposeful intervention. As you take the time to marinate on that information, consider this; all mental health providers and practices are educated, produced, and employ this learning and how it is conveyed to people of color today and their therapy.

The war on drugs only became an exigent circumstance when it was destroying white America. Crack cocaine and other street drugs have been prevalent in underserved communities of color. The legal policies we have provide a wide difference between legal penalties for crack versus cocaine powder. Social and White privilege has accepted their use as “medical need”. In one study from 2015, it states, that “exemptions created for white middle-class participants in the underground marketplace were not only epiphenomenal but rather constitutive of the expansion of the carceral state”. (Lassiter). The drug war operates because of the reciprocal relationship between the criminalization of blackness and the decriminalization of whiteness. Instead of our country addressing the communities of color with addiction programs and supports, they are put in jail, lose their children, and are not offered any services to address their addiction. Addiction is tied to changes in the brain structure and functions and fundamentally makes this a disease in the brain. No different than alcoholism which is categorized as a disease. We must address equitably that addiction at its core is a consequence of the changes in the brain and the goal should be to treat and compensate for those changes in the brain. Drug dependency is a mental health illness. It does not morph into something else when the degree of melanin in your skin changes.

The official data shows that Black Americans are 6 - 10 more likely to be found guilty of a drug offense. The White Opioid crisis, which included OxyContin, used support and services and decriminalized of white drugs. The White Drug War has carved out a less punitive clinical realm where drug use is not considered criminal. There is a more punitive system for people of color. One will just need to research how deeply racism is ingrained into our medical system. The invention of the Spirometer, created in the south during slavery to prove the physiological inferiority of black people, continues today to naturalize racial difference through race correction and normal reference. Spirometers use a race-based correction or a so-called ethnic adjustment, which assumes a 10–15% smaller lung capacity for Black patients and 4–6% smaller lung capacity for Asian patients compared with their White counterparts.

This information should open your eyes and minds as to why people of color do not trust law enforcement, child prevention services, or agencies that promise to provide help. When a person of color, or a person who has a foreign accent, attempts to reach out for assistance they are held to the initial bias that this country continues to harvest. They do not receive help, instead, they receive hurt. If a person of color reaches out for help with child protection, they are not helped, instead, they are policed, forced to have a continued relationship and involvement in their lives and abandon their own cultural practices, and forced to follow a service plan that they are not allowed to collaborate on.

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If child prevention agencies were made to follow a blind review process, we would then see an effective change in initial biases as they pertain to race. A blind review could consist of the agency being provided with a report that does not give a last name, a race, an address, or any information that will clearly state this family is not white. This would allow any investigator to address the information as it is written, not on who it is written. A study was done in child protection services in New York using this model. The findings in this study are significant. The percentages of removal or interference by child welfare dropped from 55% to 27%.

Are you honestly able to objectively look at a situation without making excuses? If your answer is yes, then I redirect you to the insurrection on January 6, 2021. If the Proud Boys were the Black Panthers and those who attacked the capital were black, would they still be alive? Would we have those in Congress stating that it was not an insurrection or attack on our capital? Would this incident have garnered sympathy and outrage for Trump supporters? Would any sitting president refer to the Black Panthers as “good people on both sides” as Trump did with white supremacist groups?

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I will close by asking you to ponder these thoughts. We fully acknowledge, address, and agree that the Holocaust is a historical horror that cannot be forgotten and that still affects people today, and they were given reparations. When a white high school student is killed in a car accident the school district and community will hire grief counselors because their staff of counselors is not equipped to address it. When children are removed from their families by child protection agencies, white children are reunified at a higher rate with their birth parents than children of color. Additionally, 90% of black foster children and put into white foster homes, but these homes do not have the knowledge or experience needed to care for their hair, skin, or cultural needs.

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Please address:

Why isn’t slavery addressed as the Holocaust?

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When black children witnessed a modern-day lynching live on all different types of media, where were the school district and community providing trained professionals with racial trauma expertise?

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Why aren’t white foster parents taught about respecting and addressing the importance of culture and the unique needs of children of color?

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Why are there different legal consequences and treatment offered to you that are determined if you are white or black?

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How can any white person say that racism doesn’t exist when it is not something they cannot experience or authentically can explain?

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When will you stand up and acknowledge the Blackdemic? When will the depth of someone’s skin color not be seen as a weapon or activate initial bias?

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How can anyone address and apologize for the land that was stolen from the Native Americans YET not address the generational wealth that was stolen from black Americans with free labor? Both are an assault on humanity, what is the greater sin, stealing land from their people, or stealing people from their land?

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We seem to forget about the Emancipation Compensation---they reparations PAYED to slave owners in 1861. $300 per slave which in 1861 money was 1 million dollars!?Did you learn that in school?

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Did you learn about the Mayflower and 1620 landing in Massachusetts??I bet you did, BUT you didn’t learn about the ship The Desire built in Massachusetts that was built and sailed in 1636 YES 16 years after the Mayflower that was SLAVE SHIP.?

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I encourage everyone to sign up for the daily updates in history on the harm of POC.?The site is

https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/jul/08

Ship Carrying Over 100 Enslaved Africans Arrives in Alabama Despite Ban on Slave Trafficking

On July 8, 1860, more than 50 years after Congress banned the trafficking of enslaved Africans into the U.S., the slave ship?Clotilde?arrived in Mobile, Alabama, carrying more than 100 enslaved people from West Africa. Captain William Foster commanded the boat and was later said to be working for Timothy Meaher, a white Mobile shipyard owner who built the?Clotilde.

Captain Foster evaded capture by federal authorities by transferring the enslaved Africans to a riverboat and burning and then sinking the?Clotilde. The smuggled Africans were subsequently distributed as enslaved property amongst the group of white men who had financed the voyage. Mr. Meaher kept more than 30 of the Africans on Magazine Point, his property north of Mobile, Alabama. One of those Africans was a man who came to be known as Cudjo Lewis.

In 1861, Mr. Meaher and his partners were prosecuted for illegally trafficking the Africans into the country, but a federal court dismissed the case as the Civil War began. No investigation or remedy ever involved the actual African men and women central to the case; while the federal case was pending, the Africans Mr. Meaher had claimed remained on his property left to fend for themselves, and were offered no means of returning to Ghana.

In 1865, after the Civil War ended and slavery was widely abolished, the?Clotilde?survivors once held by Mr. Meaher were free—but still trapped in a foreign land far from their home. They settled along the outskirts of Mr. Meaher’s property, at a site that came to be known as “Africatown,” and developed a community modeled after the traditions and government they had been forced to leave behind. Unlike the?vast majority of newly freed Black people in the country, who had either been born in the U.S. or seized from Africa many decades before, the people of Africatown had a direct, recent connection to their African roots and vivid memories of their culture, language, and customs. Well into the 1950s, descendants of the?Clotilde?passengers living in Africatown maintained a distinct language and unique community of survival.

Cudjo Lewis lived to be the last surviving?Clotilde?passenger in Africatown. In 1927, Black anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Alabama to interview Mr. Lewis about his life, and produced a manuscript documenting his story. The book was not published in her lifetime, but in 2018, the story was released as?Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo. Today, many descendants of the Africans trafficked on the?Clotilde?continue to live in northern Mobile, Alabama, and in December 2012, the National Park Service added the Africatown Historic District to the National Register of Historic Places.