An unexplored aspect of racial disproportionality in the child welfare system is its community impact. Just looking at the statistics of disproportionality misses the system's racial geography. Many poor neighborhoods of color have extremely high rates of agency involvement, especially foster care placement.

In Chicago, New York, and other cities most child protection cases are clustered in a few predominantly African-American, Latino, or Native American areas. So many children of color grow up in neighborhoods with a lot of state supervision of children and families while relatively few white children do.

What does this mean for the way in which children view themselves, their families, their communities, the government and the relationships among them? Because such intensive state regulation disrupts family and community relationships, I believe that the system's racial geography has negative consequences for communities of color.

These starkly disparate neighborhood experiences are surely an important component of the child welfare system's racial disproportionality.  The spatial concentration of child welfare agency involvement in minority neighborhoods is what makes the child welfare system a distinctively different institution for white children and children of color in America.

-- Dorothy Roberts