In Every Way –
Mar. 28, 2019 – If you take the time to spend a day in any family court, what you will see is disturbing: Benches full of parents of color and little black and brown children in despair. See, what is not talked about in the same breath as mass incarceration are the rates at which families of color are being torn apart. More meaningful to me than statistics is the real suffering of these families that I have often witnessed.
There was wall-to-wall media coverage of the forced family separations happening at the US-Mexico border. Yet this has also been happening—for decades—in the communities targeted by the War on Drugs. One mother I knew, whose child was removed due to her drug use, had carried years of trauma with her and used substances to numb her pain. That did not take away from the fact that she was a loving mother, one who went above and beyond for her child.
