UC Berkeley

Racialized Pathways of Protection examines the history of racial inclusion in early foster care. Child welfare histories tend to focus on the processes of racialization that occurred in the 1960s as a result of racist ideologies of family pathology, legislative amendments to welfare, and the scientific “discovery” of abuse. However, this work fails to account for the vast demographic changes that occurred in the post-war decades. I argue that the history of foster care racialization actually began with the New Deal, which enabled many white children to be cared for within their own homes and gave way to vast transformations in the purpose and aims of child protection. In contrast to previous historical accounts, I find that between the 1930s and 1960s, New York City foster care transformed from a system that primarily served white youth to one that disproportionately served Black and Puerto Rican youth. I argue that the disproportionality of minorities in foster care is an enduring consequence of racial inequality in the American welfare state.

As the foster care population transformed, local private and public child welfare services struggled to define the contours of racial responsibility, creating vastly different pathways of inclusion. Using archival data from Children’s Courts, social welfare conferences, and private welfare agencies, I find that not only did the foster care demographics change in the post-war era, white and non-white youth were rarely cared for within the same services. While white youth were increasingly cared for in their own homes or in therapeutic institutions, reformers insisted on race-matched foster family care for Black youth as a way to accommodate diversity without upsetting the racial balance of orphanages. Yet Black families faced significant barriers to formal fostering, and the reliance on this method of inclusion, coupled with the discriminatory practices of private orphanages, racialized the “hard-to-place” category. As a result, many non-white youth were warehoused in temporary shelters or delinquency institutions. Non-white youth were not excluded from substitute care, but rather, incorporated through segregated channels in ways that deeply informed meanings of childhood, family, and social citizenship along racial lines.

The findings of this dissertation extend discussions of state growth in the context of a delegated welfare system. As public foster care grew, it came to absorb the many non-white youth rejected by private child welfare agencies. In the shadow of private child welfare, public programs appropriated the very classifications created by the private sector to exclude non-white children—aggressive, low-IQ, pre-delinquent. Given the role that race plays in perceptions of deservingness and opinions about welfare, the increasing association of public foster care with minority children may have shaped ideas about the social problem and investment in the subsidized care of “other people’s” children. The way New York City public foster care developed and evolved in response to private child welfare suggests we must pay attention not only to the myriad ways delegated governance fosters inefficiencies through privatization, but also how the private sector influences the policy agenda of the public sector. The analysis presented in this dissertation helps us understand how the public foster care system came to be informed by strategies of racial accommodation, private sector interests, and stratified access to policies of family preservation, and how, with a different state approach, the investment in Black and Puerto Rican children’s lives might have been otherwise.