Race and Child Welfare Policy: State-Level Variations in Disproportionality

African American children are represented among those housed in foster care at more than twice the rate of their overall representation
in the US population. This racial disproportionality is well known among child welfare researchers, who have been attempting to explain the phenomenon. Are African American families
under more surveillance than white families because of involvement with TANF and other government aid programs, resulting
in higher rates of foster care placements? Are investigators more likely to pursue allegations of abuse within African American
families? Are African American children more likely to suffer from maltreatment? My research makes a unique contribution by
investigating state-level variations in child welfare policy outcomes. Following the innovative work of Soss et al. (American
Journal of Political Science 52(3):536–553, 2008) who find that states with larger African American populations have more stringent welfare regimes, it would be reasonable
to expect that states with larger African American populations would have more aggressive child protection policies, resulting
in higher numbers of children being housed in state protective custody. This work exposes a strikingly different pattern:
States with larger African American populations are distinctly less likely to take children into protective custody. In addition,
states with larger African American populations have dramatically lower levels of racial disproportionality among their children
in foster care. States with larger white majorities place more children in foster care and place disproportionately higher
percentages of African American children in foster care.