Last Friday, Jess Dannhauser, commissioner of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, sent a resignation letter to Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He didn’t offer any reasons, but sources told The Imprint that “it was due to personal reasons, as opposed to lack of alignment with the young Democratic Socialist mayor’s progressive and ambitious agenda.”
There’s no reason to think that Dannhauser—who has made reducing reports of abuse and neglect, diverting investigations into child maltreatment toward “support” actions, and offering material resources to families involved with the child welfare system the centerpieces of his administration—was philosophically out of alignment with the Mamdani administration. But if we want to understand the ideological priorities that will guide Mamdani in choosing Dannhauser’s replacement, we need look no further than an event held downtown a few days before his retirement.
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Last Tuesday, I participated in a debate at the Soho Forum with Martin Guggenheim, an emeritus professor at the New York University School of Law. Guggenheim is a giant in the child welfare field. He has taught at NYU since 1973. He also co-directs NYU’s Family Defense Clinic and has argued cases before the Supreme Court.
The event was packed, and the most vocal participants—both in heckling me and speaking during the Q&A portion of the evening—were Guggenheim fans. Also in attendance were activists like Angela Burton and Joyce MacMillan, who have “lived experience” in the child-welfare system (meaning that they have been investigated and had their children removed). Today, they spend a lot of time pressuring officials in New York City and beyond to adopt policies that give more latitude to parents reported for abuse and neglect—policies which can mean child-abuse victims get less of a voice.
Guggenheim and I were there to debate the resolution “Government-run child protective services should intervene more in the lives of children.” Arguing in the affirmative, I noted that more than 2,000 children die each year as a result of maltreatment, and the vast majority of their cases involved reports to authorities (often several) made before the fatal incident. I noted that substance-use disorders are a factor in up to 90 percent of families involved with the child-welfare system, and that most of the children in danger are very young and disproportionately likely to be disabled—even nonverbal. I argued that there is no way to protect these children other than investigating, keeping tabs on families where children are at risk, and sometimes removing children into foster care.
Guggenheim argued that the government routinely, unnecessarily, and intentionally separates poor and black children from their families. He claimed we could help children by being more like Scandinavia: providing universal health care, free childcare, better public housing, more generous welfare programs, and the like.
What made Guggenheim’s position confusing is that he seemed to think both that the U.S. government is evil, corrupt, and incompetent, and that it should vastly expand its footprint, making it responsible for “family well-being.” Guggenheim, who made it clear that he thinks America is an awful country—“We need to look in the mirror. We need to find disgust in ourselves,” he told the audience—seemed nevertheless to have extraordinary faith in the nation’s ability to fix what ails its most vulnerable families.
Guggenheim is not alone in this. Everywhere, child-welfare leaders suggest anti-poverty programs as the solution—even cash payments to families known to have drug problems. There is little evidence to suggest these programs protect kids in danger. The second theme of the evening was the power of white guilt. Numerous questioners suggested that I shouldn’t be speaking on the issues of child protection or foster care because I had no firsthand experience with the system and hadn’t spent enough time talking to black families. One woman even held up a sweatshirt to the audience that said, “It’s the Caucasity.”
I noted that my opponent was also white, but that didn’t seem to faze anyone. It apparently doesn’t matter if you’re white as long as you proclaim progressive ideology.
Guggenheim argued that child welfare is the most important civil rights issue of the day. I couldn’t agree more. We should be more concerned about the fact that black children are three times as likely to die of maltreatment as white children.
But many progressives working on child welfare seem to be concerned only about the rights of adults. Dead black children are not the priority.
At the reception after the event, one of these activists accused me of being complicit in American slavery. One of my colleagues was asked where her family was from, and after answering was told she had “bad blood.” It’s easy to see how white liberals have been beaten down by all this nonsense. No one wants to be called a racist.
“In the age of white guilt,” Shelby Steele wrote in 2006, “whites support all manner of silly racial policies without seeing that their true motivation is simply to show themselves innocent of racism.”
Nowhere is this truer than in the field of child welfare. And nowhere is it more dangerous.
Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images