HOW THE STORY IS TOLD: Part 3- The child welfare that can be realized through our imaginations and life’s work

Transcript:

Cassie Gillespie (00:02):

If you’ve made it this far into our series, How The Story is Told Vermont’s VI-E conference. Congrats and thank you . And you’re in for a real treat today. And of course if you haven’t listened to part one or part two, feel free to go back and get yourself up to speed. For those of you who did listen but need a smidge of a reminder in part one we talked about child welfare in general and the unique and specific factors that led up to this particular conference. In part two, we brought you the stories, reactions and experiences of conference attendees, panelists and presenters. And if you’re like us, you’ve been moved by listening to these voices and wondering where do we go from here? The shared experience of needing to make change in systems that are complicated and cumbersome is so visceral for so many people right now. So starting from that place, we’re bringing you one last talk to close this series. Our speaker is Dr. Brenda Solomon, and if you’ve been through the UVM Social Work program, then you know Brenda Solomon, But if you don’t know Brenda suffice it to say that she is a cornerstone of the UVM Social Work department and has shepherded untold social workers through their education and into practice. We’ve also shared her bio along with notes and references in the show notes of this page. Anyway, Brenda was the closing speaker at the conference and her talk brought down the house. It’s future focused and includes a little hope. So we decided to share the full talk with you. The original audio is not very good quality, so after a couple of seconds you’ll hear us transition into a clean version that Brenda was kind enough to come record with us in the studio. So here is Dr. Brenda Solomon giving her talk titled The Child Welfare That Can Be Realized Through Our Imaginations and Life’s Work.

Conference Speaker 1 (01:56):

So welcome to Brenda Solomon. Good morning.

Dr. Brenda Solomon (02:04):

Good morning. So I’ll start by thanking the the Mock Child Welfare Training Partnership. You’ve given us this opportunity to hold up distinctly, gather around and attach ourselves to, in some way child welfare, in order to examine it. I realized after reading what I wrote… The reading that, I wrote for this talk, that I largely take the position of a child welfare worker, whatever other role or position I’ve held, I don’t think I have ever stopped thinking about myself as a child welfare worker that said, I’m talking to you here today by mistake, not just because it’s morning, I was never meant to be a child welfare worker or social worker. I never wanted to do any of it. Yet it is the case that I made a career out of my time in child welfare and it is why I am talking with you today and remains a position and role I feel most connected to, but it was all by mistake. Secondly, I would like to address child welfare directly. I think for decades now you’ve been manipulated and worked to the favor of people and practices that were not meant to have their way with you at all. Rather, as I understand it, your intention was to try to correct some of the harsh and dehumanizing effects of a system of haves and have nots, especially as they came to bear on disenfranchised mothers and children. I am sure the thrust of it all was not perfect, but you were scripted as part of the New deal and the public safety net and not to capture the poor and the suffering up to a perceived no good. Of course, we all have wondered if an institution can operate more or less separate from the gears of institutions to which it is attached to correct the effects of those institutions, especially as child welfare is largely carried out by a profession of mostly women at the lower rungs among the professions on behalf of those most disregarded and harmed by how we put together a functioning productive society. But perhaps for that very reason, you have been the most threatening of institutions. You are one formed and run by those with less social power to assist those with close to no social power. The workings of that institution, you could say would be the most likely to talk back to the way things work. So it may follow that you have been viewed as socially necessary but only to be contained, regulated, policed, monitored, surveilled, stymied. It seems looking at where we are from where you child welfare began, the plan has been twisted into something else altogether. I guess in part I became a child welfare worker and social worker because I saw how badly things were going in your name and I didn’t like it. I still hope for something other than what was made of you. I see you are different from the difference that was made of you to the possibilities for the transformation you had imagined at the start. For the purposes of this talk, I have been looking back to consider what is in our future down the road on the horizon or next if you will indulge me. I have a little story about how I got together with child welfare. Despite myself, I was the first to go to college in my family when I got there. Generally speaking, I didn’t want to leave. I like to say it is my institution of choice, the university, I did not want to go back to my hometown and find a work. I think I understood something about the way things work and wanted to look into that, write about it, talk about it. I did not want work in which I was involved in the way things work. I grew up on the other side of the tracks, which puts you far away from everything else. Some of us were better off than others. We were white and my dad had a blue-collar job and my mom stayed at home so we were considered better off in my neighborhood. School was a space that in some ways replicated the haves and have-nots and the social hierarchy and the categories of social difference, but it was also a space in which people like me could thrive. I could succeed there to the degree I was set to fail outside of there and my emerging queerness seemed to actually work for me in the academy. I wasn’t focused on relationships as far as anyone could tell and that worked for me as well. I didn’t wanna leave, but I was afraid that going on to grad school would create too much of a divide between my parents and me, like the train tracks that separated us from others. So I applied, got accepted and then just didn’t go to graduate school. There was a head-start in town with a job opening. I started the new school year there. If you have a keen interest in the construction of social difference, headstart has a lot to offer. There is much to say about my time there as short as it was, but I am just going to tell you about one thing, one event. Part of my job was to see families in their homes do home visits and on the occasion of one scheduled visit when I knocked on the door, no one answered. So I knocked again and again. I could hear what sounded like kids likely the two small children who lived there running around and laughing. So I knocked again this time. One of the kids appeared in the window next to the door. They seemed very wound up enthusiastic. They had some stuff on their face like creams and lipsticks. Then there were two faces in the window laughing and carrying on. They seemed to be having the time of their lives smearing whatever was on their faces now on the windows. As I tried to talk to them, they didn’t say if their mother was home, but it sure didn’t look that way. I knocked harder on the door, asked a neighbor, started looking around the building and waited talking to the kids through the window, but no one came. Eventually I called back to the school. I knew the mom had a mom that was very involved in the family. I called to see if someone would call the grandmother. Instead, the director got on the phone and asked some questions. It was later explained to me that she did what she had to do, what was required by law in these circumstances. I mean I understood there was this law, but I also understood that there were a lot of laws governing the actions of the families who came to Head-start and that we were trying to help the families navigate the rather tenuous circumstances of their lives. In any case, when the child welfare workers showed up, they asked the kids to open the door. The workers very quietly walked in, left a note in an envelope on a chair and more or less scooped up the kids and some clothes and left one worker who I would later share a desk with said, you’ve never seen anything like this, have you? I could barely respond. I was shaking. I was horrified. I was embarrassed that I was shaking and horrified. It takes a lot for me to be thrown by something I thought back then, but I was indeed thrown. It is strange how you can trace your life’s work back to one discreet moment in time when you were 22 and in a job you had to take because you weren’t doing what you were meant to do and being there was a big mistake. I sat in my car for I don’t know how long after the kids left with the workers wondering about what had just happened. How could two people just walk in there and do what they did? How could they be so comfortable with something I felt physically ill about? I felt so foolish that I didn’t understand what seemed utterly unambiguous, if not crystal clear to everyone else that this just had to happen. I was told sometime later that within the hour the mother of the children returned home, found the letter, went directly to social services, demanded her children, did not back down, was summarily arrested, handcuffed to an office chair and rolled down the hall and off to jail. That experience should have sent me right back to school. Instead, I took the civil service test, went for the job interview and became a child protective caseworker for the next seven and a half years. That family was immediately put on my caseload. I think because I grew up so close or at least close enough to the young black woman who was the mother of the children scooped up by the child protective workers and had been handcuffed to an office chair that I understood something about life from her point of view and thinking and feeling that close to her. I was either going to have to run away and run as fast as I could or jump in with all my might and I wanted to turn and run. Believe me, perhaps it was a way to do sociology on the street. I don’t know, but it was as if I was drawn to it with some purpose and intensity. Like I said, I had no intentions of being a caseworker or a social worker, but there I was at 22 smack dab in the middle of where what I had figured out about the world came slamming down all at once with a force that threw me back and took my breath away and perhaps because I felt some privilege among some neighbors growing up, I think I felt I had an obligation to at least try to do the work in a way that really got at what the hell was going on and try to change how people were treated that I knew from my life and not my life’s work. At least I was not going to be caught off guard again and not do my part. I was well past, horrified and well on my way to self-righteous indignation. I was 22, call it naive, bold and fierce. I was a little bit of a problem in my own right, maybe simply I just needed to try to correct the harm I had Unwittingly caused the young woman on my caseload at Head-start who was just about my age and had children before she got to have much of anything else and because she had children would not have much of anything else, she and I, we were caught up together where my dreams were postponed and deferred and her dreams were extinguished. I could correct my derailment and one day go back to graduate school, but her options for a good life, for the life she imagined for herself if she dared had been retracted, stamped, null and void and her dismissal from a good life could be executed with no problem or fuss at all. Taking the life force out of poor woman disproportionately black and brown women, it is accomplished regularly without looking their way or lifting a finger. It’s a cruelty that has no real acknowledgement other than to attribute her poor circumstances to her poor choices, which of course makes it even more hideous, makes you want to turn away her choices, her limited choices, her poor choices, poor choices for the poor, no choices at all and yet we blame her. And now with some states claiming rights to even more of her choices, some of her most intimate choices, the right to choose what to do after she may or may not have had any choice. I don’t know how we can keep narrowing her choices and her right to choose and go on pretending without looking one way or the other that it is in total and completely because of her choices, her fault that it is all about her. My dissertation was about welfare to work. The illusion of difference was the name of the dissertation, the illusion of difference reconstituting women on welfare into the working poor. I guess I should say. I wrote this in the late nineties. It was about the exploitation of caring work of women’s labor in the home and how that exploitation was replicated in the marketplace. There was this way that we created a sense of women at work and women on welfare that set them very much apart so that they wouldn’t form coalitions and fight back together as they should. The same problematic of us and them operates to keep us from joining forces with our clients and making what should be the obvious claims about our collective mistreatment, about our work and our choices. Anyway, the illusion of difference. I’ve always been interested in how we use the same and the different in child welfare, welfare and in everyday life. I’ve been fascinated with those terms and how they create groups and categories and say who you are in total edit out the complexity of our intertwined lives and make us into one thing or another without anything in between. They corral us into believing all kinds of things about who we are and who we are not and who we are with and against and what each of us should want for ourselves largely to emulate the ideals of the same. That is those with the most power and privilege. These concepts of the different and the same have us all at work trying to be like the same or those who have the most resources and privilege. For instance, consider the lawn in the living room In American culture, I have often said that a weekend obsession with one’s lawn takes up all kinds of energy that could go into fighting for one’s rights to make more money or to demand to have only one job to make a living wage and so much more to be concerned with your lawn is to participate in the illusion that you are someone without a care about other more serious things like your wellbeing. To be concerned about your lawn is to have conspicuous leisure time and signal and upper class interest in aesthetics to be concerned about your lawn or aesthetics is a way to say you are not encumbered and otherwise overwhelmed by concerns of daily living at all and don’t we all wish for that or to live in that illusion. Thanks to Wayfair, we are all given the opportunity to participate in revisioning our living rooms in a way that once only belonged to the upper class and thanks to Oprah, we can buy books to assist with home and self-improvement that we may only exhibit in our living rooms because we actually have no time to read those books. And thanks to Martha Stewart, we can all cook like Martha Stewart and believe that miracle grow is a boutique potting soil or as she likes to call it dirt and in between revisioning your living room and attending to your lawn do you ever think where are the nukes kept? Have you ever considered how much one nuke cost? Not to mention the loss of life it could affect and what else we could be doing with the money with just one or two nukes? What about finance reform? Does anyone think we should have finance reform so that you have a limited pool of money to run an election campaign without having to be beholden to special interests? And so that ton of money could go to services for families and children and politicians could take an interest in legislation to support policies that do whatever it takes to make and keep children and families whole to do a child welfare that actually could help children and families. Don’t you think there is a moral and ethical mandate there? What could we do with a few less nukes and fewer dollars going to distorted ads about people running for public office? Can you imagine what we could do with that money given what we have talked about and you have been presenting about these three days at this conference, so we all want to be like those who don’t have to worry about what we have to worry about. And when we are doing that rounding up our weeds and trying out our sofas, we are joining the ranks of the same all of us in one big happy illusion, yay, that I am concerned about my living room in my own unique way is to participate in the illusion that we are being part of something that is vital and real and not fabricated to keep us busy and otherwise occupied and distracted and in the pursuit of some aesthetic that equates with some kind of validation of the self and quite obviously represents our happiness. And in this illusion, if you are not doing stuff that supports the illusion, then you are a problem in your own right all by yourself. You stick out like a sore thumb and must have something wrong with you. This sometimes happens to one of us just when we try to talk about unpleasant things like nukes and finance reform and for sure it happens with the people we work with all the time. Those living the illusion are altogether the good and the right and those who question it or refuse or can’t participate adequately are the misguided, the troubled, and the troubling that need help and correction. But percolating just below the surface is a lingering question about one’s happiness. I mean, if having an even bladed lawn and a matchy-matchy living room should bring you true happiness, something is not quite right. I say that is why there is good Vermont beer. Beer was made to soothe the masses at the end of a workday before there were policies governing work and while now there are policies that limit the ills of the workplace, it is not to the extent that has done away with the need for a beer or a gummy or whatever. My point, we are brought into the illusion to be soothed and comforted. Attending to lawns and living rooms is a much more socially accepted way to soothe oneself. Being soothed and comforted allows us to be more docile, more easily tolerated and manipulated by ideas that best serve those who most benefit from the way things work in the first place. Those who actually rely on our striving for their better lives or the good life they presumably have, but herein lies the rub. This is hard to account for properly, so please just go with me here if you haven’t been doing that already. All along there are times when things break wide open, the illusion does not hold and you see some aspect of things as they truly are and you can’t turn away like it happened that day for me as a head start worker who didn’t go to graduate school and didn’t want to return to my working class roots and didn’t want to call the state central registry. When things break wide open in that moment we see and sense our humanity that we are all the same. Not because we are working our lawns or reading Oprah’s books or cooking Martha Stewart, but because we are humans longing for love and connection and a sense of belonging and therein lies the cause of social unrest. It is tied to those times that we see we have been lured by the superficiality of our everyday lives and duped into believing that we are different from those who have the least and just like those who have the most, when really none of us are all that and are very much just human. When there is a break in the illusion, we see in the rawest of ways that after all, indeed we are all the same but arranged by social categories that separate us from our common humanity. Whenever the illusion is lifted, there is at once something beautiful and experiencing our common humanity, but as vivid is the way things work to separate us from one another. And when that awareness comes crashing in, it sets you back and takes your breath away and you are left to wonder just about everything you’ve thought was real up to that point. It is at moments that this happens collectively that we break into the streets for Me Too to say we will not remain silent and we demand our daughters safe passage and we demand our daughters to be engaged as people, as the smart complicated people they are. We break onto Wall Street as the 98% who are sick and tired of doing the labor that earns us a steady disregard and affords the 2% of righteous arrogance, superiority and prestige and indignation over the mess we made of Wall Street. We break onto the streets as finally we just cannot turn away from the image of a line of police officers on their knees in broad daylight in front of an audience, slowly forcing the life out of a black man in a long line of black men calling to their mothers with their final breath. That outrage transcended social categories and it once set in motion, an all encompassing break from illusion, an indignation that set Me Too the 98% and Black Lives matter into a massive moment of us. There are moments when we each and all are party to or subject to something that we just can’t turn away from and must do. The only thing we can do. There are times that this happens altogether and creates the possibility for a lasting social opening, a shift in context to form something else. These are not some random great ideas and implementations that you all have been talking about these three days at this conference. You together and your work constitute a collective break from illusion, a movement. If we can take money from a nuke or two and from a campaign finance and some other places, hell, I think some contributions from Roundup Miracle Grow and Wayfair would be appropriate, some real money together. We can do something that gets us back to where we’ve once belonged but have never been. Dear child welfare. I never wanted to be a child welfare worker or a social worker all those years ago, but I would join in all over again to be here today with you all at this pivotal moment. What courage I would’ve had all those years back as a Head start worker if I had known you and known you are all in it as you are as I stand before you some 40 years later. I take courage from you and your work today. I do think if child welfare could respond today, say one thing, speak in one voice, child welfare would say it wants what it imagined for itself. Its best possible self, the child welfare that can be realized through what its senses is already in your imaginations and life’s work so that next time or sometime real soon, when someone like me walks up to a podium at a round table or begins to speak, they begin by saying, I wanted nothing more than to become a child welfare worker. Because child welfare is where dreams deferred and dreams extinguished are held with reverence, are met with humanity, and where we each and all are able to get to where we’ve belonged and have never been with a full array of choices on our way to our better selves together. Here’s to that vision and voice that emergent us. Thank you.

Cassie Gillespie (23:36):

The Social work lens is produced by the University of Vermont’s Child Welfare Training Partnership and the state of Vermont. Our theme music is composed and performed by local band Brick Drop, and our sound production and engineering has been brought to you by Egan Media Productions. We’d also like to give a special thank you to our in-house administrative production assistant Emma Baird. For the social work lens, I’m Cassie Gillespie and we’ll see you next time.