WE WERE ONCE A FAMILY

A searching examination of a foster-care system that harms children more than it helps.

Asgarian, who covers the courts and the law for the Texas Tribune, takes as her point of departure a story from 2018, when six adopted children and their adoptive parents died after those parents, fleeing child-abuse investigations, drove over a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. The story made the news for all the usual sensational reasons, not least that one of the children had become a social media meme with a photograph that showed him hugging a police officer during an anti-racism protest. Look closely at that photograph, notes the author, and it’s clear that the child is begging for help. “The reality was that the children had not been okay,” she writes. “They had not been cared for. They suffered, and then they died. They were murdered.” The children were all Black, with adoptive White parents who’d been gaming the system to earn income as providers while keeping them half-starved. Asgarian deepens the story with an examination of the trajectory of an older sibling who had aged out of the foster system and been placed in a residential treatment center. As the author notes, that is all too often a direct path to prison. It certainly was in the case of the young man, who years later may have his own child separated from the family and placed in foster care. Asgarian clearly shows how the dysfunctional system hinges on racist assumptions, including that “these six Black children must be better off with the white women who adopted them” than with their Black birthparents or relatives, even though responsible relatives were available and willing to help. Asgarian closes by pointing out how the approach that punishes needy families instead of working to improve their conditions “does nothing to help the children,” and she is entirely convincing in that conclusion.

A sobering call to action demanding reform of the child-protective and foster-care regimes.