By Sara Tiano, The Imprint, July 13, 2021
Los Angeles County leaders committed on Tuesday to test out “colorblind removals” in child welfare cases — an attempt to correct long-standing patterns that draw disproportionately more Black and brown children into foster care than their white peers.
Beginning in November, one of the county’s 20 regional offices will operate a pilot program relying on the method, which was developed on New York’s Long Island more than a decade ago.
In colorblind removals, social workers decide whether or not to separate a child from their parents without information that could hint at family members’ racial identity and demographics, including names and neighborhood. The idea is to strip away information that could trigger social workers’ biases, leaving them to focus solely on the facts of the case.
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