#ArrestCPS demands reparations for the theft of black children
During Black August, African people in six cities and regions across the United States participated in the #ArrestCPS National Day of Action, exposing the colonial family policing system and demanding reparations for the theft of black children.
Actions were organized in Durham, North Carolina; Moorhead, Minnesota; the DMV area; Orange County, California; San Diego, California; and St. Louis, Missouri.
The National Day of Action came during the 25th anniversary of the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, where the Durban Declaration recognized slavery and the transatlantic slave trade as crimes against humanity.
The enslavement of our people is not simply an atrocity of the past. The kidnapping, trafficking and forced labor of African people is the very foundation of the economic system we live under today. African land, labor, bodies and resources were stolen to create enormous wealth, while capitalism still depends on extracting labor and resources from poor, oppressed and colonized peoples throughout the world.
The institutions change. The relationship remains.
The 13th Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime, preserving forced labor through incarceration. The family policing system mirrors that same colonial relationship.
The kidnapping and commodification of black children continues today under the authority of Child Protective Services (CPS) and the broader family policing system. Our children are seized, assigned case numbers, moved through placements and institutions and turned into the basis for payments, contracts, salaries and agency budgets.
The auction block was not destroyed, it was reorganized
The family policing industry reaches far beyond CPS.
It is not just the caseworker or their supervisor. It is the company running the visitation center, the security contractor working the parking lot, the van driver transporting children between placements, the food company supplying residential facilities, the therapists and psychiatrists, the pharmaceutical companies, the foster agencies, courts, lawyers, group homes, treatment centers and private contractors surrounding them.
It is an enormous economic web.
Every layer of the system is able to extract value from the fact that our child has been stolen
There is money to investigate us, remove our children, transport them, place them, treat them and confine them. “Foster parents” are paid to care for children after the State takes them from their own families.
Meanwhile, our communities are fighting one another for scraps.
We are told to work harder, hustle harder and somehow solve individually the conditions imposed on us collectively. Families struggle for housing, food, childcare, healthcare and transportation while entire neighborhoods have been stripped of the resources needed to keep people stable and supported.
Then, once the child is taken, the money flows
The system spends enormous amounts of money to investigate our families, kidnap our children, shuffle them between placements, transport them, house and medicate them and even pay other people to raise them.
Billions can be found to manage black children once they have been separated from us. But those billions are not placed into the hands of the families and communities that could have prevented the crisis.
This system is materially sustained by the conditions that keep our families in crisis. Its jobs, contracts, budgets and institutions depend on managing poverty, instability and separation rather than eliminating the conditions that produce them.
This is why Black August is central to #ArrestCPS.
Black August was forged through the resistance of African prisoners confronting captivity and State violence. It is a month of remembrance, discipline, political education and recommitment to liberation.
That struggle cannot stop at the prison walls
The same colonial State that cages African adults seizes African children and confines them in juvenile detention centers, psychiatric institutions, and residential facilities.
Our children experience captivity, too.
To honor our political prisoners and freedom fighters is to continue the struggle for African liberation in its entirety—fighting for our imprisoned brothers and sisters AND our stolen children.
We demand reparations!
We demand the material resources necessary for the successful reunification of all stolen black children with their impacted families and communities.
We demand that the billions poured into the kidnapping, placement, confinement, and management of our children be redirected into the hands of the families and communities from whom those resources have been extracted.
What would happen if those billions were turned around and placed directly into our own hands?
Families would not have to wait until the crisis to receive support.
When a family down the street is running out of food, the community could make sure they eat. When parents need childcare, we could have collective systems for caring for our children. Elders and community members could help families work through conflict before it becomes a crisis. We could build transformative processes for addressing violence and harm without calling police or handing our families over to the State.
We could build the capacity to intervene before families fall apart.
Reparations must mean more than compensation after the damage has been done.
The wealth that is poured into the kidnapping and trafficking of black children belongs in the hands of the families and communities from whom it has been extracted.
Give our communities the resources to house, feed, heal, protect, and care for our own people, and we can build institutions that make the family policing system unnecessary.
That is the power we are fighting for.
African women and femmes: join the African National Women’s Organization and build #ArrestCPS in your city.
Our children are not property of the State.
Our families are not raw material for industry.
#ArrestCPS! Stop Kidnapping Black Children! Reparations now!
