What if one of the greatest challenges facing Black families involved in our social service and justice systems isn’t simply a lack of resources, inadequate policies, or even individual bias?
What if part of the problem is much deeper? What if the systems themselves were built around cultural beliefs and expectations that were never intended to reflect the experiences of all the families they would eventually serve? Consider the institutions that hold tremendous influence over the lives of families: Child Protective Services, foster care, the courts, law enforcement, and public assistance programs.
These institutions have different histories, responsibilities, and purposes. But many developed during periods when Black Americans were excluded from positions of power, denied equal protections, or subjected to discriminatory laws and practices. Their structures and standards were shaped largely by people whose understanding of family, parenting, responsibility, and social order reflected the dominant culture of their time (white).
To understand why this question matters, we need to examine history.
In 1854, the orphan train movement began transporting poor and homeless children from eastern cities to families in rural America. Its founders believed that removing children from impoverished urban environments and placing them in rural, predominantly Christian households would offer them a better future. Some children found loving homes. Others experienced exploitation, mistreatment, or permanent separation from their families and communities. The movement was not specifically designed to assimilate Black children. In fact, Black children were often excluded from early mainstream child welfare services.
But the movement reveals something significant about the philosophy that influenced early child welfare: the belief that changing a child’s environment, including the values and customs surrounding that child, could be central to improving their future.
An even more explicit example of cultural assimilation occurred in the treatment of Native American children. Government policies separated children from their families and communities, placing them in boarding schools and, later, foster and adoptive homes where their cultural identities and family connections were often disregarded.
These histories are distinct. Yet both demonstrate how institutions have sometimes defined children’s well-being through the values of those holding authority rather than through meaningful partnership with the families and communities affected.
For Black families, the history also includes slavery’s destruction of family relationships, discriminatory apprenticeship practices, segregation, and exclusion from social welfare institutions. In response, Black communities developed their own systems of care, including extended family networks, mutual aid organizations, churches, and community-based supports.
These were not simply alternatives to formal services. They were expressions of family and community responsibility that had developed under extraordinary circumstances. And they deserve to be understood as strengths.
Family does not look the same in every household, neighborhood, or culture.
In some families, responsibility is concentrated within the immediate household. In others, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, close friends, and community members play essential roles in raising children.
Extended family caregiving is especially significant in many Black communities, although no single-family structure represents every Black family. But what happens when a formal system approaches family stability through a narrower definition of household responsibility?
What happens when a grandmother providing daily care is viewed primarily as an informal arrangement rather than a source of stability?
Or when a parent’s reliance on extended family is interpreted as an inability to manage independently rather than as evidence of a functioning support network?
These are not arguments for overlooking unsafe conditions. Children deserve protection regardless of culture. They are arguments for asking whether our assessment tools distinguish actual harm from differences in how families organize care, responsibility, and support. Cultural difference should not automatically become evidence of family dysfunction.
There is another layer to this conversation that cannot be ignored: poverty. Families experiencing poverty often encounter public systems more frequently because they rely on public assistance, subsidized housing, publicly funded healthcare, and other services.
That contact can create opportunities for support, but it can also increase exposure to scrutiny. Consider a parent who lacks reliable transportation, struggles to maintain housing, or cannot afford childcare. These circumstances can create genuine safety concerns that require intervention. But they can also reflect a shortage of resources rather than a shortage of parental love or commitment. The distinction matters.
A family may need stable housing, financial assistance, childcare, or employment support. Yet the intervention they encounter may focus primarily on evaluating their parenting or requiring compliance with a service plan. When families are expected to demonstrate stability without receiving the resources necessary to achieve it, we have to question whether our approach is solving the problem or simply documenting it.
This is especially important for Black families, who have experienced longstanding economic inequities alongside disparities in child welfare involvement. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has identified poverty, limited access to services, racial bias, and cultural misunderstanding as contributing factors in the disproportionate involvement of Black children in foster care. The research does not suggest that every disparity is caused by discrimination or that every intervention is inappropriate. It does tell us that the relationship between poverty, race, institutional decision-making, and family outcomes is too complicated to address through standardized processes alone.
To be fair, significant reforms have occurred. Child welfare policy has increasingly recognized the importance of family preservation, prevention services, relative caregivers, and maintaining children’s connections to their communities.
The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 explicitly addressed the disregard for tribal relationships and cultural standards in child custody decisions. The Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018 expanded opportunities to fund services intended to prevent unnecessary foster care placements.
More recently, federal changes have allowed states to establish separate licensing standards for kinship foster caregivers, recognizing that relatives may provide safe and loving homes without fitting every requirement originally developed for unrelated foster families.
These are meaningful changes. But are we changing the culture of our institutions, or are we changing policies while preserving the same underlying assumptions? A system can provide cultural competency training while continuing to use assessment tools that fail to recognize culturally grounded family strengths. It can promote family engagement while maintaining decision-making structures that give families little influence over what happens to them. It can prioritize prevention while directing substantial resources toward intervention after a family has already reached a crisis. And it can encourage collaboration while still defining success primarily through institutional compliance rather than sustaining family stability.
Reform matters. But reform and transformation are not necessarily the same thing. Perhaps the next stage of systems improvement requires more than asking how families can better navigate existing institutions. Perhaps we should also ask how institutions can become more responsive to families. That could mean examining the assumptions embedded in assessments, service plans, courtroom expectations, and definitions of family support. It could mean involving parents and community members with lived experience in developing policies, not simply asking them to provide feedback after decisions have already been made.
It could mean treating extended family networks as assets and providing them with meaningful support. It could mean ensuring that poverty-related barriers are addressed with practical resources whenever possible, while maintaining clear and consistent standards for child safety. And it could mean measuring success not only by whether families complete required services, but also by whether they become more stable, connected, and capable of sustaining their progress.
None of this eliminates the need for accountability, child protection, or appropriate intervention. It asks us to consider whether those responsibilities can be fulfilled more effectively through approaches that recognize the histories, relationships, and strengths of the families involved.
The purpose of examining these histories is not to suggest that every professional working within these systems perpetuates discrimination. Many dedicate their careers to protecting children, supporting parents, and helping families navigate extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Nor is the argument that Black families share one culture, one parenting style, or one experience. The issue is whether institutions have developed enough flexibility, cultural understanding, and shared decision-making to respond to the diversity of families they serve.
For generations, families have been asked to understand the rules, expectations, and culture of the systems responsible for helping them. Maybe it is time to ask an equally important question of those systems. Because a system’s ability to enforce its standards is not necessarily the same as its ability to strengthen a family. And if our goal is genuinely to protect children, preserve safe family relationships, and build stronger communities, then understanding the families we serve cannot be an optional part of the work.