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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Here is an example of this type of thinking:

A pilot project aimed at lowering the rate of medical professionals who overreport Black, Latino and Indigenous families to the child welfare system is launching in Michigan, the American Bar Association announced.

"Sometimes children are not safe, and that is when child protection needs to step in — when children aren't safe. It is equally important to remember that removing children from their parents is a last resort because of the trauma associated with being removed from one's family," said Dr. Ann Stacks, director of the Infant Mental Health Program at the Merrill Palmer Skillman Institute at Wayne State University and part of Michigan's Stop Overreporting Our People (STOP) initiative. "It is so important to make sure that children aren't being unnecessarily investigated or removed."

My understanding of the issue is that children of all families are overreported to family services, and the lawyer group STOP recognizes that the process is the punishment ; getting investigated by the government is stressful, getting your kids taken away by the government is a nightmare.

Charitably, one can imagine that they are trying to ride the DEI wave to reduce the absolute number of families unfairly targeted by nosy teachers, neighbors, medical workers, etc. Perhaps they are hoping that whatever findings they come up with while trying to reduce the comparative overreporting of 'Black, Latino and Indigenous families' can then be generalized to everybody... Or they simply don't care about the non-'Black, Latino and Indigenous families' that are also suffering through this system.

Another way to resolve the problem of 'overreporting our people' would be to start reporting non-'Black, Latino and Indigenous families' more often to equalize the rates between groups... That would definitely not be a good outcome imo.