Amanda Wallace Once Worked for Child Protective Services. Now She Wants to Abolish It.

This article was written by David A. Love in Contraband Camp.

“Protesting against injustices done to Black people often means not speaking in polite language or striving for respectability. Like those who used ”fighting words” to push for the abolition of slavery—an institution that subjugated Black people and separated families—today’s modern-day abolitionists use rhetoric and actions to galvanize people and provide moral clarity against present-day forms of oppression.

In Durham, N.C., Amanda Wallace is fighting the child welfare system, which abolitionists call the family policing system—a system that removes children from their families and places them in state custody and foster care, which disproportionately impacts Black, Indigenous and Latine children and parents. Activists such as Wallace—an insider-turned-abolitionist who hopes to end that system—call it a family policing system because they say it is racially oppressive and rooted in enslavement. She and others believe that, rather than supporting families and caring about children, the system punishes, regulates and surveils them—most often separating children not for abuse or violence but for poverty and lack of resources.”