A lot of people are talking lately about how badly police treat minorities, particularly black people. I want to share some thoughts from my late friend Roy A. Childs, Jr. Roy, for those of you who don’t know, was an important figure in the libertarian movement from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Tragically, he died in May 1992 at age 43. He became famous while still a teen as a result of his writing the famous “Open Letter to Ayn Rand.” Here are the opening lines:
The purpose of this letter is to convert you to free market anarchism. As far as I can determine, no one has ever pointed out to you in detail the errors in your political philosophy. That is my intention here.
Yes, Ayn Rand so loved to be told about her errors, especially by a 20-year old. (By the way, years later Roy told me that he wrote that letter the night his wife left him.)
In about the mid-1970s, Roy was a little down on his luck and a friend of his hired him to be the manager of a slummy apartment building in New York City. A number of the tenants were on welfare and a number were black. There was a large overlap between those two groups.
In the letter I wrote for his memorial service, I talked about how that experience changed Roy for the better. A lot of us libertarians, especially guys, in our early to mid-20s, didn’t have a whole lot of empathy. I don’t know what Roy’s “empathy level” going in was, but I do know that he had a lot at the end of the experience.
We would talk on the phone every month or so (phone calls were very expensive) and I would hear of his experiences. He was the guy who was called at 2 a.m. to unplug a toilet that had backed up. You might think that this made him resentful. You would be wrong. When I heard Roy talk about the tenants, he never used this verb to describe his feelings for them but the verb I would use was “love.”
As he got to know them, he did one of the many things that Roy did well: asked them questions and paid attention to the answers.
He went in with the assumption that they would hate policemen because police treated minorities in New York so badly. That was an assumption a lot of us libertarians carried at the time.
Wrong. It wasn’t that they hated cops; it was that they judged cops. They were empiricists. They liked cops when the cops protected them from thieves and gangs. And they disliked cops when the cops got nasty.
But there was one group, Roy told me, that virtually all of them hated: social workers. Social workers interfered in their lives and had real power over them.
By the way, here’s a great tribute to Roy.
READER COMMENTS
Kurt Schuler
Jun 7 2020 at 5:29pm
Thank you for the reminiscence of Roy. Youngsters (as he would say), if you are interested in Roy, there is a good volume of his essays called Liberty Against Power. See also this Web page.
David Henderson
Jun 7 2020 at 8:21pm
Thanks, Kurt. Good links.
David Henderson
Jun 7 2020 at 8:23pm
You write:
Given that I didn’t take a position on social workers but the people who commented on them were poor black people, don’t you mean “what the **** is wrong with those poor black people?
Nodnarb the Nasty
Jun 7 2020 at 10:27pm
Great links, Kurt, thanks.
Roy had a wife at age 20?! Damn, American social mores really have changed…
Mark Bahner
Jun 8 2020 at 12:19am
I know a social worker pretty well. I (thankfully!) don’t know the gory (sometimes literally) details, but a school social worker might be called in because a (shockingly) young child threatened to do away with himself/herself, or a classmate. There often might be parental abuse or neglect involved. (And why would abuse/neglect be involved? Likely because the parent(s) involved in abuse/neglect were themselves abused. And probably their parents before them.)
So how in the world does the social worker come up with a “win” in that situation?
I don’t doubt that abusive/neglectful parents hate when social workers come in and try to help the abusive/neglectful parents’ poor kids. Just as I don’t doubt that people who assault other people hate when people arrest them and eventually throw them in prison. But that doesn’t mean that the people who are hated are the people behaving badly.
Jon Murphy
Jun 8 2020 at 9:45am
That assumes, incorrectly, that social workers only go after the “bad” parents. But things are not so black and white. The power of the social worker is very arbitrary and often itself abusive.
Are there times that a child should be taken away from the parent? Of course. But that is not the only time a social worker gets involved. They can force lifestyle changes onto a parent with little-to-no oversight. They often misunderstand situations and what children are trying to say.
It doesn’t surprise me in the least that they are so hated.
Mark Bahner
Jun 8 2020 at 4:39pm
That’s what you inferred from what I wrote. You inferred incorrectly. Nowhere did I write that social workers only go after “bad” parents. And in fact I wrote:
The whole point of that parenthetical was that parents often simply behave towards their kids the way their parents (and their parents’ parents before them) behaved.
After I made my comments last night, I got to thinking about the song “Officer Krupke” from “West Side Story” (danger: contains politically incorrect lines ;-)):
It contains this gem:
Again, I’m not a social worker, but from my conversations with a (school) social worker, my one-word summary would be “wow.” From what I heard, it’s like being given a plate of spaghetti and being told to arrange all the strands in parallel straight lines in a few minutes. Or in fact, it’s more like being given 20 plates of spaghetti, and being told to untangle the strands in all of them, because no social worker has the luxury of trying to concentrate to help one one child…or even just a few children.
“Often” is how much? And what is your statement based on? How many studies have you performed or reviewed regarding the accuracy of social workers in assessing situations? Or understanding children?
How many hours have you spent observing or talking with social workers?
And what experience do have with trying to understand what children are trying to say?
I’ll give you an example from my own personal experience. Say you’re tutoring a child who is reading about three grade levels below where she/he is. You do this one hour each week during your lunchtime breaks from work. You ask the child what the problem is. The child says, “I need glasses.” You check with the people in the school and they assure you the child’s vision has been checked and is fine. You observe the child, during the laboriously slow reading, cocking her/his head and holding her/his head maybe six inches from the book. You ask the child why she/he does that and she/he once again says (with more than a little frustration in her/his voice): “I need glasses.”
What does the child mean?
Returning more to the subject at hand: I know more about school social workers –and not much about them–but what I can tell you from the little I know about school social workers: It’s typically not the parents who are requesting their services. (This can be contrasted to police, who might often be called by the people they are pledged to “protect and defend.”)
My guess is that Roy A. Childs Jr did very little talking to the children of the families those social workers called on. So when he (reputedly) said that “virtually all of them” hated social workers, there might be sampling bias involved.
Mark Z
Jun 8 2020 at 11:15pm
Though this doesn’t really relate to the justification of attitudes toward social workers of those under their supervision, I think the conclusion of that song, which comes after the ‘social worker’ part, if anything, presages Yochelson and Samenow’s work cautioning against the overuse of social explanations for criminality, and challenging the effectiveness of social intervention.
Lauren
Jun 9 2020 at 4:33am
Hi, Mark.
I don’t want to necessarily disagree with your main point, but I have to weigh in on the way you’ve used the lyrics to “Officer Krupke” from _West Side Story_. Those lyrics were used by the characters in the context of the musical as a form of “My dog ate my homework.”
It was comic relief in the context, similar, say, to the way the lyrics to “The Master of the House” from _Les Miserables_ are used in that musical. The West Side Story characters who leapt in during the song “Officer Krupke” were pleading with a police officer to refrain from arresting them. They were posing any kind of crazy idea, any play on the sympathies that they could think of to plead their case so as to not get arrested. “My daddy beats my mommy/My mommy clobbers me/My grandpa is a commie/My grandma pushes tea”–it was effective lyrically and humorous at the time because–in fact!–back then, and maybe even still now, if you say the right words to a police officer, you can play on his sympathies and maybe not get arrested or not get ticketed.
Nowadays, in the modern age, we might look back on those “Officer Krupke” lyrics, literally, and say, out of context, “Wow! How horrific was that?! There _are_ dads who did and do beat moms! There _are_ moms who did and do beat their children! It’s common and horrific.”
But, there has always been a pith of truth to humor. At the time in the 1950s, it was a humorous song, a moment of comic relief. Something everyone related to–Polish, Italian, Jewish, Hispanic, black, all the same. Officer Krupke was an ordinary human being just like you, and if he rousted you, you could just talk to him first. It was a common interaction, part of the culture. And you both related and knew that was a human interaction. No, the police were not the good guys! But the interesting portrayal from the 1950s play and song is how common it was and how easy it was to talk to the cop on the beat.
In summary, I think taking those humorously-intended “Officer Krupke” lyrics literally is not your best suit. Those lyrics do not support the central case you probably want to make. They may, of course, reflect matters that should have been taken more seriously than they were during the 1950s. But if serious discourse is your goal, there are probably more substantive studies or quotes from that time and since.
Harry Watson
Jun 8 2020 at 12:24pm
I lived in the Detroit “neighborhood” for 30 years and got to know quite a few residents and even informally adopted one as a teen. The police were ok. Child protective services was a nightmare staffed by Trunchbull clones.
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