As a Black ‘transracial’ adoptee who survived both foster "care" and an adoption placement into a white family, I am particularly well-positioned to consider the serious ethical questions that have been largely unexplored in research, policy debates, public discussion, and legal decisions related to this policy agenda. I have spent the entirety of my academic career and community work critically interrogating and addressing the family policing system (misnamed the "child welfare" system). Many essays and presentations from undergraduate school set the framework for my now-published Master of Social Work research titled 'From Topic and Evidence to Architect: The Development of Black Diasporic Interpretative Phenomenology and The Resistive Strategies of Black Child Welfare Survivors.' I have always been interested in renarrativizing the carceral and deadly conditions of the family policing system from a perspective that doesn't lean into reform, incrementalism, and "best practices." Instead, my main concern is providing a critical vocabulary to/for child welfare survivors, families, and the public more broadly in hopes to challenge the multitude of ways child welfare survivors, particularly those who are Black, are pathologized, criminalized, maddened, violated, harmed, and killed in the name of "child welfare."
Research
In 2020, the Ontario government announced its policy agenda to make children and youth in the child protection system, many of whom are Black, easier to adopt. Concerns over Black children’s overrepresentation at all stages in the child protection system, combined with their bleak socioeconomic outcomes that result from the extensive length of time they typically spend in the system, are among the driving forces (Ontario Government, 2020). Yet, there are also concerns in relation to the ‘transracial adoption’ of Black children into white households, much like in regard to Indigenous children. My dissertation’s central question is: whether the experiences and outcomes of the legal adoption of Black children into white households reflect the paramount purpose of the Ontario’s Child, Youth, and Family Services Act, 2017 (CYFSA) with respect to promoting the best interests, protection, and well-being of children? This requires attending to the following sub-questions: (1) how are the ‘best interests,’ ‘protection,’ and ‘well-being’ as distinct concepts understood in relation to Black children and are they capable of being rendered in ways that reflect the realities and needs of Black children? (2) what other considerations, concepts, and practices better attend to Black children in need of support?
My research is interdisciplinary in its reliance on critical, decolonial, poststructural, and abolitionist paradigms, particularly critical legal studies, Black/Feminist/Queer Studies, and Disability and Mad Studies. These ways of thinking aid in critically engaging notions of ‘best interests’, ‘protection’, and ‘well-being’ with respect to Black children, and support the intellectual framing of my proposed methodology of autoethnography.
Autoethnography is useful in its “ruthless self-reflexive” interrogation of one’s own histories as research data to grapple with the impact systems and institutions have on everyday life. Such an approach is particularly needed in light of the dearth of research on this topic in the context of Canada. Due to the global lack of literature and rigorous critical research that centres the voices and thinking of Black adoptees placed in white households, autoethnography offers the opportunity to interrogate and expose unarticulated tensions while also providing the chance to ask better questions for future critical inquiries in this area of research.
My overall objectives for my dissertation are to: (1) trouble the notion that the legal adoption of Black children into white families is necessarily a form of exit from the violences of state child protection systems and a ‘golden-ticket’ toward protection and the nurturance of well-being; (2) provide a better articulation of what the nurturance of ‘best interests’, ‘well-being’, and ‘protection’ mean for Black children to inform a more nuanced and textured judicial decision-making process; and (3) support the development of life affirming conditions and practices of care for Black children both in/outside the context of child protection systems.