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wrcsolace:

randomly wikipedia search on Bill Clinton had me reading up adoption law reform in the late 90s and early 00s.

now perhaps it is because of my inclination to think of all of Clinton’s policies as bad for poor people (but good at making middle class folks think they did something good for poor people) that i was hesitant to accept the wikipedia-inflected ‘neutrality’ of the article on the Adoption and Safe Families Act.

So i said to myself, google it and find out! and low and behold Dorthy Roberts (author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty<— GO FIND A COPY OF THIS AND READ IT RIGHT NOW) wrote a book with a chapter on the subject ASFA in 2003 entitled Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare.

The title of her chapter on ASFA? “The Assault on Family Preservation.”

Of course this is an underloved book so you can get it for cheap on Amazon (sighface, this is a travesty as Dorothy Roberts is, in my mind, one of the important people trying to craft a critical conversation about Blackness and family-making, and the racialized gender politics of medicine/health. but who cares about that stuff right? especially who cares about listening to a Black woman talk about it.)