Set to See Us Fail: Debating Inequalities in the Child Welfare System of New York by Viola Castellano

Author:Viola Castellano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Child Welfare System and the Reproduction of the Dual City

As the internal differentiation of the labor force in the child welfare system, the dynamics between caseworkers and child welfare recipients and the data on the highest concentration of cases in a few districts show how the city reproduces social and racial inequalities, which are central to the phenomenology of the child welfare system.

Global cities do not just reproduce core neoliberal dynamics but also racist, sociospatial relations that are constitutive of the city. It is not accidental that disproportionality is higher in big US cities that reproduce spatial segregation, such as New York and Chicago. This dynamic has profound historical roots that demonstrate how capital produced racial spaces in global cities (Danewid 2017). The postslavery migration of the Black population to the industrialized metropolises of the Northeast in the first decades of the twentieth-century generated conditions of racial segregation and exploitation, with the Black population relegated to specific areas of the city. This allowed real, symbolic, and “caste” borders to be erected, shaping the historical form of the ghetto (Wacquant 1997). This period, between the 1930s and 1960s, was characterized by the heavy reliance on Black labor in the Fordist industry of the time, placing the Black population on the margins of education and consequentially the labor market. During the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, when the South—still openly segregationist—as well as the North were strongly affected, areas like Harlem became focal points of activism that coordinated the movement throughout the United States. The civil rights movement changed the urban political order and questioned the traditional forms of labor division and the economic and cultural hegemonies that had spatially shaped the metropolis and regulated the production of wealth. As a response both to the renewed vitality and civic participation of the African American and Latinx community and to the disintegration of the US industrial economy and the shift toward services and financial capitalism, the ghetto was transformed into what Wacquant (2004) has called a “hyper-ghetto,” characterized by the remains of the ghetto in symbiosis with the prison’s institutional model.3

East Harlem was, in the past, one of the areas most affected by the phenomenon of urban decay and marginalization, as many of my informants had seen—also shown in Philippe Bourgois’ dense ethnography on crack dealers (2003). However, the increasing gentrification of the city is forcing those boundaries. Since the 1990s, more luxury condos have appeared, as well as expensive businesses, museums, and supermarkets that are inaccessible to most of the local population, despite the commercialization of ethnic identity that intimately connects the project of the neoliberal city with the multicultural city (Dávila 2004). Wine bars and restaurants are opening alongside the bodegas, and a part of the CUNY University has been moved to 116th Street along with housing for its students. This new situation creates contrasts even within the same block. This is especially true for those who have lived in East Harlem for decades and who share a strong

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