Introduction: Race, Class, And the Child Welfare System

In their book, Children of the Storm, Billingsley and Giovannoni (1972) reported that black children were largely excluded from the child welfare system up until the end of World War I, and that it was not until the end of World War II that they began to enter the system in large numbers. The proportion of the public child welfare caseload in the United States consisting of nonwhite children almost doubled between 1945 and 1961, from 14 percent to 27 percent. This increase was due not only to reduced racial discrimination within the child welfare system, but also to a large increase in the number of black children in the general population, and not coincidentally, to the fact that increasing proportions of poor children in the United States were black (Billingsley and Giovannoni, 1972). The vast majority of children in the child welfare system had always been from impoverished families (Pelton, 1989). It is a seeming irony that whereas once we would have been rightly concerned about the exclusion of African-American children and families from our child welfare system, due as it was to the obvious racial discrimination that pervaded our society (including our child welfare system) at the time, in recent decades we have been concerned about their overinclusion. This irony is quite revealing. If we believe that the child welfare system is basically oriented toward helping, then why should we be concerned if it is engaging children and families in need of such help? The short answer is that we have deep misgivings about the nature of much of the "help" it provides.