A New Day For Parental Rights in New Jersey?

I spent the day at the New Jersey Supreme Court on Wednesday, May 2nd. The Court heard arguments in deciding three cases effecting the rights of mainly low-income parents. The first case involved the right of a litigant to effective assistance of counsel and whether the sixth amendment and the due process clauses apply to civil proceedings in which a parent is represented by an attorney. Outside of capital cases or life imprisonment there is no other liberty so ingrained as to the right to raise your child and the question so sacrosanct that an ineffective assistance claim is self-evident. Only because the vast majority of these parents represented by mainly the public defender are both poor (93-97%) and persons of color would this be a question. The number that are persons of color varies, but is roughly the same of persons of color in the prison population in New Jersey - a whopping 81%, one of the highest in the nation. This question seems highly likely to go in our favor.

The other two cases are vastly important as well (placing blame on one parent for the actions of another and allowing lax procedures and hearsay in DYFS cases) and it seems the New Jersey Supreme Court is sending a message to DYFS that terminating the parental rights of parents may not be so easy in the future. This is our hope anyway. We will see very soon. But, make no mistake these cases involve the rights of citizens in our state that affect predominantly, the make-up of the black family. Once upon a time Native Americans in 1978 passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) that changed the way Anglo mainstream society decided how they broke up Indian families. Is a black child welfare act needed? While ICWA is not perfect, at the very least it ensures Native Americans decide who raises their children when abuse and neglect occurs.

When we combine the statistics above with prisons in New Jersey (63% black), unemployment for black men (some stats at 30%), the infant mortality rates, the poverty of our inner cities, etc. there is a need for us as a society to address these problems once and for all and realize that it is not just the Imus' and O'Reilly's of the world who are the racists. It is all of us who are complicit and do not speak out against the injustices raged on in our cities and mainly against black families and persons of color.