The recent battle over Elian Gonzalez brings to light an often neglected aspect of child welfare policy: The determination of children's "best interests." This is an intensely political question, governed as much by current power struggles as by evidence about children's well-being. The law usually grants parents authority over their children and disrupts the parent-child bond only in cases of abuse and neglect. Yet some Americans, as well as a federal appeals court, were willing to breach this relationship so that Elian might enjoy a presumably better life in the United States. The value of his relationship with his father, the significance of his five-month stay with distant relatives, and the state's role in determining custody were all subject to political interpretation.

Although more subtle, politics also governs state and federal policies affecting the welfare of American children. The political role of the U.S. child welfare system is obscured, however, by its focus on rescuing individual children from neglectful parents. The demographics of the system undeniably shows that race matters to state interventions in families. Black children enter the foster care system in grossly disproportionate numbers‹a disparity that has increased over the last two decades. By 1998, black children, who were only about 15% of the population under age 18, made up 45% of the nation's foster care population. According to 1997 statistics from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, black children were "indicated" for maltreatment at a rate of 32.6 per 1000, compared to a rate of less than 10 per 1000 for white and Hispanic children.

What has caused this striking racial disparity? The over-representation of black children in the system is largely attributable to high rates of poverty among black families. With rare exception, the families who become involved with child protective services are poor. And black children are far more likely than white children to live in poverty. Studies have reached conflicting conclusions about the strength of race as an independent variable in predicting child abuse and neglect cases. Racial disparities in reported cases of maltreatment, moreover, may reflect differences in the actual incidence of abuse or in reporters' perceptions. Some scholars have suggested that culturally biased definitions of child neglect penalize African-American families by devaluing black parenting traditions and styles. A deeply embedded mythology about black maternal irresponsibility and deviance and the mistrust of female-headed households may also influence child welfare determinations.

Further research is required to establish the precise reasons for the racial disparity‹black parents' income insecurity, caseworkers' cultural prejudices, or policymakers' insensitivity to black families. But this uncertainty does not negate the racial reasons for the imbalance nor the racial impact of the system's intervention in families. Not only do individual black parents and children experience the damaging effects of family disruption and foster care placement in disproportionate numbers; the excessive disruption of black families weakens the ability of the group as a whole to struggle against institutional discrimination and to improve the welfare of the community. The shattering of black family ties also reinforces negative stereotypes of black parental irresponsibility and need for supervision.

New trends in child welfare policy threaten to intensify the racial imbalance in state interventions in families. The Adoption and Safe Families Act, signed by President Clinton in 1997, promises to double the number of children adopted annually by 2002. The new law represents a dramatic shift in federal child welfare philosophy away from an emphasis on reunification of children in foster care with their biological families toward adoption of these children into new families. It promotes adoption through swifter timetables for state agencies to petition for termination of biological parental rights, the removal of other barriers to adoption, and financial incentives to states to move more children into adoptive homes.

Of course, states should usually facilitate adoptions of children where there is no hope of family reunification. But the new law may pressure state agencies to permanently separate poor children from families that might have been preserved with adequate resources. Congress misidentified the reason for the overcrowding of the foster care system: It is not that too few children are being adopted, but that too many are removed from their homes. Even if all the black children in foster care were adopted tomorrow, it would not cure the racial injustice in the child welfare system.

To right this racial harm we need policies that are more supportive of poor and minority families and that address the systemic sources of their deprivation. The price of present policies that rely on child removal rather than adequate family support falls unjustly on black families.

Dorothy Roberts is a professor at Northwestern's Law School, and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. Her work focuses on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues involving reproduction and motherhood. Her latest book, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty, received the 1998 Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America.