Families Ripped Apart
Subscribe to Lemonada Premium for Bonus Content
Description
Los Angeles County is home to the largest foster care system in the country, and it’s run in partnership with the police and local Sheriff’s department. So what happens when a system that’s meant to protect our children intersects with law enforcement and ends up criminalizing them instead? How do we get to the root of the system’s domino effect in Black, Brown and Indigenous communities? This week, we’re joined by two women, La Mikia Castillo and Yahniie Bridges, who share their personal experience with the foster care system and how ending police partnerships can help to reimagine child safety.
Keep up with Julián on twitter @JulianCastro and Instagram @JulianCastroTX.
Resources from the episode:
- Read up on the BLMLA #ReimagineChildSafety campaign petition here
- Follow BLMLA on Twitter
- Missed our first episode on foster care and transition-age youth? Listen to it here
Click this link for a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this show and all Lemonada shows.
To follow along with a transcript and/or take notes for friends and family, go to https://lemonadamedia.com/show/our-america shortly after the air date.
Stay up to date with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia.
Transcript
SPEAKERS
Yahniie, Franco Vega, La Mikia, Julian Castro
Yahniie 00:01
If foster children are not able to raise a child, then that speaks volumes more about the foster care system, then it speaks to the person. I think the common goal for all of us is to make sure that children are safe to make sure that our communities are safe. But the way that it’s executed right now, is by attacking black and brown communities.
La Mikia
When Jani talks about the systems that have impacted her and the interconnection between those systems, policing is a part of that probation is a part of that, the child welfare system, all of them, interconnect and intersect with one another.
Julian Castro
La Mikia Castillo and Yahniie Bridges met while organizing to end police involvement in the foster care system in Los Angeles County. Home to the largest foster care system in the country. The system is run by the Department of Children and Family Services, or DCFS, indirect partnership with the LAPD and the city Sheriff’s Department. We first heard about how problematic this partnership can be back in December, from our guests Franco Vega and Amber Baker of the Right Way Foundation.
Franco Vega
“We train our youth when they become parents, if they run into any law enforcement don’t talk about the foster care system. Because once a cop knows or law enforcement knows that our kids have been in the foster care system that brings up a red flag or where they came from a bad environment. So let’s really pay attention to them. You know, and we’ve heard it thrown up in court. Well, this kid grew up in foster care system. We’re like, Well, you can’t use that against them. This is your system.”
Julian Castro
According to a recently launched campaign by Black Lives Matter LA, approximately 25% of DCFS referrals come from law enforcement. 40% of the young kids in the system are black, despite black youth accounting for less than 10% of children in Los Angeles County. And they are disproportionately at risk for entering California’s prisons later in life through the foster care to prison pipeline. This week, La Mika and Yahniie share their personal experiences with this partnership, and the vicious cycle of a system that primarily targets black, brown, and indigenous communities.
Julian Castro 02:21
This is OUR AMERICA. I’m your host, Julian Castro.
Julian Castro
La Mikia, you grew up with 10 siblings. Can you tell me what it was like to grow up in a family of 11?
La Mikia
Oh, yes, big families are the best. And I will just say that part of the reason I only have one child right now is because I grew up with 10 siblings, I love them to death. They were a handful. And I’m the oldest I didn’t just grow up with 10 siblings or in the household of 11. I’m the oldest of them. Wow, you
Julian Castro
Wow, you are the oldest, you are the one in charge.
La Mikia
I was the one in charge in sometimes I feel like I still am. But of course they will tell you that that’s not true. So yes, growing up in a big family was a lot of fun. It still is a lot of fun. And again, of course it has it’s challenges too, people don’t expect especially living in a city like la that you would have so many children living in one household. And again, our family was not, it wasn’t just my immediate family. I never grew up with only my immediate family.
Julian Castro
And how did growing up in such a big family influence the trajectory of your career and your concern for foster care?
La Mikia
I think growing up in a big family really showed me how important it is for people to be in community where you’re supported. I guess, because my grandmother was a foster mother, I grew up for myself being raised by my grandmother for part of my life, which meant that I was technically a foster child, but not in the foster care system formerly, and the only reason I wasn’t in the system is because she stepped in to help raise us. And my grandmother made a decision very early on. And she articulated this to us very clearly that no child should ever have to bounce around from home to home because they didn’t have the right supports in place.
La Mikia 04:10
And so when she became a foster mother, she made a decision that she would never have a child go into multiple foster care placements, that if a child was not going to be reunified with their birth parents that she would adopt that child if that was the only option for them to have stability. And so that really instilled in me the value of creating again a stable strong support network for individuals that family is beyond just the people who share you know, blood with you, if you will, right, like family is blood but family is also individuals who you bring into your household, you adopt into your family, because they need additional support.
La Mikia
And that is how I got connected to Yahniie through basically helping foster youth and birth parents and foster parents, anybody who has connections to the child welfare system, to feel empowered to be able to lift their voices for change to this very, I wouldn’t call it a broken system. I think the system was working the way it was designed, but to lift their voices to say that this system is very flawed, and it’s unjust and is racist. And we need to change that.
Julian Castro
Wonderful. And Yahniie, talk to me about your experience with the foster care system.
Yahniie
So I was raised by a single parent who was also a former foster youth, my mother, she was 18 when she had me, I was her fourth child. At the time, we were living with my aunt. And there was an incident that took place with my aunt’s daughter, and her. And because we were in the same household, and my mom, not only was a former foster youth, but she had a history with the system, although nothing ever happened to me. They took me away as well. From my recollection, I had a good childhood, prior to foster care, like I didn’t have a father in the household. But I was safe, I felt safe. I felt loved. I was fed, I was taken care of.
Yahniie 06:05
And when I was taken, it was incredibly traumatic to me, my mom was not even able to articulate what was going on at the time to prepare me for what was going to happen. And I’m not sure that she was even ready for what was going to happen. But I went through the system and I went through about nine different placements in like three- or four-years’ time, I went through nine different placements. And they kept moving me because I was not behaving. But for me, I just wanted to go home, I just wanted to go home, I was being abused, I was putting a lot of different situations that no child should ever have to go through.
Yahniie
And then eventually, they had nowhere else to place me. So they put me in a mental institution for children when I was about seven or eight years old. I stayed in there for about eight months. When I was inside of that facility, there was a childhood friend of my father and my father was in prison. I never met him, but I do look just like him. And his name is Clinton and my name is […]. So and people knew when they saw me that I was his daughter. And so they reached out to him some kind of way in prison. And then he made some phone calls, and got my grandmother to get custody of me. I stayed there for about five years, and then moved back with my mom in Los Angeles.
Yahniie
And she terminated my child welfare case, after about a year of living with her. I was still dealing with some remnants of like, just what had happened to me, because I never really processed that there were no tools for me at the time. And I got in a fight in high school, and ended up on probation at 14, spent from 14 to 17, inside of juvenile hall. And then at 17 probation terminated and I was homeless at the time and pregnant, and I had nowhere else to go. So I called DCFS. To see if I can get back into the system to be housed or something, get some type of support. And they told me that the only reason why they accepted me was because I was pregnant at the time.
Yahniie
And because of my system involvement from four years old, they brought up things from my mental health history, to my juvenile justice history. And I didn’t really I was kind of oblivious, honestly to what was going on. I just knew I was trying to survive as a as a teenager, and as somebody who’s going to be a mother and responsible for a little human. And their system is and or was built on punishing girls by taking their children. Because once they look at your file, they say oh, well, everybody you’ve been in foster care several times your family has a long history with foster care, like you guys are not equipped to take care of a child.
Julian Castro 08:36
You know, I’ve heard that, that to people who have gone through the foster care system, and oftentimes faced the criminal justice system, which too oftentimes one leads into the other. Folks say that these assumptions are made these bad assumptions about the ability of somebody who has been in foster care youth to be able to raise a child. Talk to me about those assumptions. And what do people get wrong? What is the system get wrong about foster care youth?
Yahniie
First of all, this system definitely needs to be abolished. If foster children are not able to raise a child, and that speaks volumes more about the foster care system, then it speaks to the person in my opinion, if people are not able to really be supportive for a child to be there and they don’t have the tools necessary, then how do we make sure that people have the tools? I think the common goal for all of us is to make sure that children are safe to make sure that our communities are safe. But the way that it’s executed right now is by attacking black and brown communities.
La Mikia
When Yahniie talks about the system That have impacted her and the interconnection between those systems policing is a part of that, probation is a part of that, the child welfare system, all of them, interconnect and intersect with one another. Full disclosure right I’m an organizer with Black Lives Matter. We are also Abolitionist. So I don’t believe we need police. And I definitely don’t believe that we need police to intervene in family matters, because they’re not equipped to do that. In the situation where the police came to Yahniie’s home, I mean, Yahniie, if you I think that that story is one where you see how racism is so present, how these systems are set up, not just to fail or to harm people who’ve been through the foster care system.
La Mikia 10:38
But really black and brown people like Yahniie said, right? Someone called the police because they saw Yahniie playing with her daughter on a balcony, right? And they heard her daughter screaming, but it was a game. They would go on the balcony. And then she would say, you know, I’m lock the door and let me in. And then she says, what’s the password? And so a neighbor heard that and instead of checking to see, hey, is everything okay? Because I hear at the time, right, a nine-year-old on the balcony asking to be let in. And I don’t understand, like, I just want to make sure that the child is safe.
La Mikia
They didn’t understand that there was a game being played. And when they call the police, the police show up in full force. They see that this is a black mother and they literally physically attack her. Now I happen to have video footage of a lot of this because I was there I was present and I saw it.
Yahniie
Law enforcement literally came into my home, created a criminal case, so they can arrest me. And they took my child because they arrested me because I was not able to care for her. I had my daughter called La Mikia at the time of my arrest, and her and her husband came out and thankfully to them, they were able to care Naima. So I didn’t have to worry about Naima being abused or mistreated in a system or being lost in it.
La Mikia
When I Naima called me, she didn’t say I’m afraid that my mom is going to hurt me. What she said was, I’m afraid that the police are going to hurt my mom. This was right before Christmas that this happened. Yahniie and Naima were preparing to go and take gifts to foster children. Like that literally was what they were doing, right? They were preparing to they were getting ready and playing a game as they were going to go volunteer to give gifts to foster youth. And so to have that be criminalized, right? And to have the police literally fabricate the story, and I mean, fabricate the story to the extent that they never actually filed the charges, they only did so much.
Yahniie 12:31
But I was arrested still, I was arrested and my child was taken away for those false charges.
La Mikia
She’s arrested and is paraded out in front of all of her neighbors, right? And when there were two adults, myself and my husband, who were very capable of taking this nine-year-old girl, while the cops figured out what they were going to do with her mom, they denied us, they refused.
Yahniie
In fact, they listed you as a safety threat.
La Mikia
They did.
Julian Castro
How’s that?
La Mikia
Exactly. So I mean, we kind of laugh about it now. But it’s just really it’s shocking to see how, like how racist the system is and how much they are, like to the lengths to which individuals are willing to go to uphold the system or to harm people and to penalize people. Again, my husband and I were there were videotaping. And I and I asked him to please, we just want to talk to the child, she’s afraid they wouldn’t let us talk to the child I, though, you know, my work with Black Lives Matter. And through some of my advocacy work I called people, I called elected officials, I called lawyers, I called Black Lives Matter leadership in LA, I called everybody I could write like, that’s what you do when you’ve been able to build a network like you, you use it for your family.
La Mikia
And so I called everybody I could and the cops did not take well to that. But the reason why I started calling people is because I know how the system works. And I know that if I didn’t make those calls, her daughter would have ended up in a shelter. Mind you, we had about a dozen people at the police station, sitting there saying advocating and saying we know the mother, we have many all of us here willing to take this child so that she doesn’t have to go into foster care. We don’t understand why the mother has been arrested. That was not explained.
La Mikia 14:13
We feel like this is an injustice. What do we need to do to get this child right now? The social worker spent about six or seven hours before we actually she finally came and said to us, you can’t take this child, we’re gonna keep her. And when I asked why she said, well, you’ve been listed as a safety threat in the report. You can get her from the Department of Children and Family Services, which is the department that deals with child welfare here in Los Angeles County.
Julian Castro
Did they say that you had made any threatening comments or done anything threatening to them, what was there they just put your name on there as a safety threat?
Yahniie
The officer literally pushed La Mikia. As she was recording she asked them about a warrant, that is when they came with the charges.
La Mikia
And they didn’t have anything in the report that there was no threat, right? And I explained to the social worker, I have video, but we recorded the entire situation, you can hear me talking to the folks that I called asking for support. And we also did this live because we know, right? Our experience is that we live in a country where black people are killed consistently by police, right? And so we need to make sure we have evidence. And then again, I was pushed by an officer, that’s all on video. And yet they listed us as a safety threat. So at 1:30 or so in the morning, they told us, we had to leave the police station because it was close. And that the child would be going into foster care. And we felt defeated.
La Mikia
And then about four in the morning, so three hours later, the social worker calls me and says, great news, we’re gonna bring her to your home. And she said, the reason why I was not allowed to give you the child initially was because in the report, the police said you were a safety threat. When I further, you know, explored this to see what they meant by that. They said that you were indignant, and you didn’t listen to authority. And that’s why you weren’t able to get the child. Just so you know, though, in the future, if you have any interactions with police, you say Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. Right, as if we live in a fascist country, right?
La Mikia 16:11
Like she’s acknowledging that this is an authoritarian system in which we are supposed to just been down to the authority of the police. And if you ask any questions, then somehow you become a threat. And so you have this angry black woman thing that was going on, that was definitely one of the biases there that I’m an angry black woman, my husband is a threat because he has a video camera on. And all of a sudden, that makes us incapable of, you know, being able to care for somebody else, we’re all of a sudden a threat to the safety of this child. They’re breaking down the safety net that this child has. Yahniie is a single mother. It’s just her and her daughter.
La Mikia
It’s a pattern that happens over and over again and this speaks back to Yahniie is experienced with her mother going through the foster care system, right? And having multiple children taken away, and then having to hide her fourth child to make sure that her child didn’t get taken away, because the system says she’s not fit to be a mother, because she’s a black woman, because she has gone through the system, because she’s had multiple children.
La Mikia
Part of the reason why Black Lives Matter is really committed to making sure that we eliminate the partnerships between law enforcement and the child welfare system as a first step toward completely reimagining child safety. Because the child welfare system pretends it puts up this facade that is here to protect children. But when you look at the data, that’s not what’s happening.
Yahniie
They’re really here to punish parents.
La Mikia
Right.
Julian Castro
Yeah, this summer after the murder of George Floyd. For many people, it was an awakening, about the depth of systemic racism in our country. And for a lot of folks, that focus was on everyday policing, what happens in the interaction between police and especially black men and women, but what you’re describing in the foster care system and child welfare system more generally, is something that is larger than that, that is connected to policing and the criminal justice system, you know, inextricably, but most people don’t think about when they think of systemic racism and the problems with it, they don’t think about this system. What do we need to change in this foster care system to root out that systemic racism? What changes would you like to see?
Yahniie 18:21
I know, one of my issues, again, so there was the side La Mikia was on. La Mikia and […] were on where they heard officers say that they were punishing us for and these are the ways that they’re going to punish us because we didn’t respond the way that they felt like we should. And on the flip side, when I was inside, as they were processing me, they kept telling me, we’re gonna take your kid, I had a criminal case and a child welfare case. The criminal case was washed out easily because there was no criminal case. But the child welfare case, what they don’t tell parents are their rights. And so they interview you, they ask you questions, they trip you up on questions.
Yahniie
They had me sign over my rights. While I was in jail thinking, they told me that Naima would not be able to come back home, and that she was absolutely going into foster care. And so they had me sign a piece of paper that says she can go with the Castillo’s. When I signed this piece of paper, I came home, my dad bailed me out. They said, well, you cannot come home because of this piece of paper, you said that you didn’t want your child at home, you wanted the Castillo’s to take care of your baby. So part of it is them not being forthcoming, and creating barriers that are unnecessary. That’s part of it, but ultimately, like, they just doesn’t need to be as massive of a system as it is. It doesn’t make sense. There’s the mass incarceration system, and then there’s the child welfare system, which is just as problematic.
La Mikia
And I think to add to that, the system does not focus on prevention, right? When you think back to Jani story and her experience, she sought support from the Department of Children and Family Services thinking if as a 17 year, as a pregnant woman, young woman who’s coming out of the probation system, I need support, where can I go to get that support? The Department of Children and Family Services, right? That you would think that, that it even just in the name that that suggests that they would want to support you to, to make sure you have the resources and the skills you need to be the best parent possible. Instead of receiving that type of support, and preventing, actively working to prevent her and her child from being separated.
La Mikia 20:26
It started already this domino effect of Okay, so we look at your history you went into foster care at age four years old, you’ve been in probation, you’ve received mental health services, you’re not capable of being a parent. So we’re gonna take your child too. And then and so you have this vicious cycle, right? Of generation after generation after generation of black indigenous and Latino families, especially poor families as well poor white families being placed in the foster care system. And I think the way that we address that is we get at the root of what these issues are, right? We need to look at the roots of why is it that Jani was in foster care at age four?
La Mikia
What was her mother struggling with when you see that there have been multiple generations of children in foster care, like Jani said, that suggests that something’s wrong with the system. I think that people believe that there’s something wrong with the individuals, right? They start to pathologize these behaviors and criminalize them, rather than saying, hmm, if the foster care system becomes the parent, right, it’s called In Loco Parentis, which means you are the parent, the state is the parent of the child, then that parent at the state as the parent needs to be raising that child better than they would have been raised in their own household before we took them. which is
Yahniie
Which is never the case.
La Mikia
If that’s not the case, then what are we doing wrong as the parent, right? As a state as the parent.
La Mikia
Some of the things that we’ve been talking about in Black Lives Matter is one, we need to address issues of poverty, right? A lot of times, the reason why children go into foster care is because their parents don’t have resources, parents are working two and three jobs to make ends meet, and especially right now in a pandemic, and in this quarantine, and they get punished for that, right? You’re a mother with three children, your children are at home at midnight, because you have a graveyard shift, your oldest child is 11, which is you know, you can’t leave an 11-year-old at home by themselves. But you don’t have the means to provide childcare for them for your graveyard shift in security or whatever.
La Mikia 22:30
You know, whatever your job is, as a waitress at a 24-hour restaurant, your neighbor calls and says they’re concerned about your children being left at home. That is when the child welfare system should come in and say, the reason why you’re leaving your children at home, it’s not because you don’t care, it’s actually because you love your kids, you’re trying to pay the rent, you’re trying to provide them with food, you’re trying to provide them with resources. The reason you’re leaving them at home by themselves is because you don’t have the support. So let’s instead of taking your children away..
Yahniie
Paying somebody else to take care of them.
La Mikia
And paying someone else to take care of them right through the foster care system. Let’s provide you with the supports you need. Let’s find you a living wage job. Let’s get you help you find a job that’s going to you know, be during normal business hours, if you will, and not at graveyard so you don’t have to leave your kid let’s find Child Welfare at midnight, who can find that except for family members, right? I don’t know of any daycare center that’s open at midnight. But if you’re a mother, a single mother who’s working low wage job, or now as we call them, essential workers.
La Mikia
You’re an essential worker during this pandemic and you have to leave your kids at home, then you should not have your children taken away. So I think addressing some of those root issues when we see that they’re, you know, children are traumatized. Figure out what the trauma is and address the trauma rather than saying you can’t be in this household with your family because your family has traumatized you. The trauma is often coming from, it’s coming from the system.
Yahniie
It’s coming from the system. My daughter now still is dealing with therapy. And when she talks to the officers and the child welfare court said I traumatize her. However, when she talks to her therapist, when she talks to people, she will say she was traumatized by the police coming in and abusing me. So that was what her experience look like it wasn’t coming from the home, you know.
Julian Castro 24:17
Y’all have spoken about reimagining child safety, making sure that parents who are struggling and who don’t have the resources for childcare, have those resources, making sure there’s a support system there. Instead of using police, using social workers or others who can actually provide the supports that people need to be able to ensure the best environment for their children. Housing opportunity that oftentimes families lack, better educational opportunity, better income, is that reimagining child safety?
Yahniie
I would imagine for me it is. However, there are so many red flags that come up in what you’re saying. Because these titles, social workers, you know, resources, and all of these things, I think about case management, but even then, it’s almost like the way that people are trained, is not to really treat the situation or the circumstances, it’s to make a person fit into a box that they want them to fit into. So even a social worker, I don’t, most people don’t trust social workers, because it’s always, when you tell them the truth, they flip it and change a story and make it fit whatever they want it to fit. And that ends up harming the community. So the community does not trust those folks.
Yahniie
So if it comes to a place where we can have conversations and be authentic about whatever is going on, and I know that this is something that I can be authentic, La Mikia about whatever is happening with me, or Daniel, and I can be very authentic and vulnerable in those situations. And they’re going to look at the entire picture and see, okay, what ways can we support them? What do you feel like you need and handle the situation in that way, which I feel like is with love. And I think that ultimately, things need to be handled as if we’re working with the people that we love.
La Mikia 26:20
Yeah, I would agree with that. And I do feel like reimagining child safety looks like addressing some of these issues, that systemic racism, white supremacy have perpetuated for generations, right? When I think about children being taken away from their parents, I think about this not being something that started now, right? But we know that it’s happening in the Black Community through the child welfare system, we know what’s happening with immigrant families at the border, we know that this has been happening with indigenous families for multiple generations, right, Native American children were literally stolen from their parents, stolen from their families.
La Mikia
And you know, America said you were not capable of raising your own children. And so we’re going to take them from you, and we’re going to raise them ourselves. And that’s why we have federal legislation. Now that says, we can’t do that with Native American children, you can’t just take a Native American child and put them in a foster care system, it has to go through the tribe. And then you know that Black children have been literally ripped apart from families, since the time we had, you know, Africans enslaved in this country. So this has been something that’s why I say that this is not new, and that this system was set up to be racist from the beginning.
La Mikia
And the child welfare system, to me, is very much connected to that history of black people or property in this country. We’ve been named as Chattel. We have been told that we cannot take care of our children, though we have raised other people’s children for many, many generations in this country, right?
Yahniie
I love when she says that.
La Mikia
Because it’s true. I mean, literally, we are capable of taking care of other people’s children, and then somehow not capable of taking care of our own children when it benefits the system. And so I think that in order to address those things, we really have to go back to the roots and say, what is it that has led us to this place where black and brown people are living in poverty, black and brown communities don’t have access to resources for housing, and education and all those things. And when we can address those things, wholly from the roots, then I think we will have a system that thrives and you won’t see as many children in the child welfare are in foster care.
La Mikia 28:19
And other thing I think, is that this is also tied to people’s individual biases that are rooted in systemic racism and institutional racism, right? Because we’ve internalized so many of us have internalized these biases. And I think that we have to take on some of that individual responsibility. But I really think that it’s more of the system. And if we can get these things fix that you will see, far fewer children ended up in the foster care system, far fewer parents who end up incarcerated, also, many of society’s ills, I think would be addressed if we would just get at the root of systemic racism and white supremacy in this country and grab it up and say, we’re pulling it out, and we’re gonna just plant something new because these systems, they’re not for us.
Julian Castro
Right now, in our country, we’re going through this moment of change of new possibilities. Where do you all find hope?
Yahniie
I find hope at home. I find hope at home to be honest, it’s just it’s been so long, like we just recently had our first black president. We just recently got our first like, Vice President, everything else has been consistently Caucasian, since the inception of this country since the hijacking of this land. And honestly, I know that when I say I find hope at home, of course, with my community, on a community level with the people that are my tribe.
Yahniie
But also the things that we change locally, the policies that we affect that we impact locally, in the community and in the state. I just want to see this country’s leadership really reflect what this country looks like. I don’t know what they’re gonna do. I know a lot of presidents and a lot of campaigns; they say what they will do and then things change. So for me, it’s really hope is at home.
La Mikia 30:04
Yeah, I would say the same thing I, I’ve been really energized by so much of what we’ve been able to accomplish here in LA, we introduced a ballot measure at LA County called Measure J. And we bypass all of our typical processes of getting on the ballot and Measure J is effectively defunding police and bringing resources to the community. So 10%, of the of LA County budget, which is a lot of money, and a lot of that money is going to law enforcement rather than going to care for the community. And so you know, we meaning the community, Black Lives Matter organizers and allies and other community organizations banded together and said, we need something different. And we were able to get that passed.
La Mikia
So we’re getting 10% of the budget, reallocated from the sheriff’s department and actually invested in housing and mental health services and supports that get at the roots, I think, and I hope. I also have seen so much excitement at the state level here in California with some, you know, legislation going in the direction we want others, we still have work to do. But to see the community get behind, you know, formerly incarcerated people, which is something that has impacted me personally, and it’s so connected to the child welfare system, because a lot of children end up in foster care because their parents get incarcerated, right? And then that relationship is severed through that system. And people in California said, you know what? We have 50,000 people in our state who have been disenfranchised, right?
La Mikia
They have not been able to vote because of their criminal history. Why are we doing that. And so we voted to say we’re going to give those folks back their right to vote. And that gives me hope, that makes me excited. When I see with Black Lives Matter, organizing when I see organizations like Students Deserve, which are high school students who can’t even vote yet, but they’re organizing to get the vote out, they’re organizing to get police out of their school campuses. Those things energize me, those things get me excited, and they make me hopeful for the future, because I’m just like, Y’all are really doing it. Like I wish that, you know, I could go back. I’m not gonna say how many years but I wish I could go back so many years to be that age again, and had that kind of effect.
Julian Castro 32:11
Well, the fact that both of y’all are in the fight gives me hope. And, you know, I think for a lot of the listeners, it’ll be the first time that they hear the depth of the systemic racism in the system. And I’m glad because it’ll help, you know, open up some people’s eyes. Thank you so much for sharing your journey with me. And the work that you’re doing means a lot.
Yahniie
Thank you.
La Mikia
Sounds great. Thank you for your work.
Julian Castro
Together with their larger community. La Mikia and Yahniie are an example of how simply showing up for one another, to provide so much of the support necessary to overcome the shortcomings of a broken system. Advancements like Measure J are a step in the right direction to ensure the basic rights and empowerment of foster youth. But across the country, more emphasis needs to be placed on reassessing the authority given to police in situations they’re not properly trained to respect or maneuver. But what do you think? You can email us your thoughts at ouramerica@lemonada media.com. Next time, we speak with Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, about backing a more inclusive, sustainable economy through movements like The Fight For 15
CREDITS
OUR AMERICA is a Lemonada Original. This episode was produced by Matthew Simonson. Jackie Danziger is our supervising producer. Our associate producer is Giulia Hjort. Kegan Zema is our technical director. Music is by Hannis Brown. Executive producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs, Jessica Cordova Kramer and Julian Castro. Help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Follow us at @LemonadaMedia across all social platforms, or find me on Twitter at @JulianCastro or in Instagram at @JulianCastroTX
