When Violence Wears a White Coat and a Suit: From Experiments on Black Babies to Child Removal

In the United States, violence against Black children has often been dressed up as progress. For centuries, doctors in white coats conducted horrific experiments on Black bodies drilling holes into infants’ skulls, cutting into enslaved women without anesthesia, infecting children with diseases, and feeding them radioactive food.

These acts were not hidden in the shadows. They were published in journals, funded by government agencies, and celebrated as scientific advancement. Statues were even erected to honor some of the men who committed these atrocities.

That history matters because the same violence continues today.

Only now it wears a suit and carries the title of "child welfare."

In the 1800s, J. Marion Sims, celebrated as the “father of modern gynecology,” cut into the bodies of enslaved Black women without anesthesia. Society called it science. Later, cities erected monuments in his name.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study tracked hundreds of Black men, watching them suffer and die untreated, all while claiming to advance medicine. That was research.

For decades, Black women were sterilized without their consent in government hospitals and prisons justified as public health.

The abuse was not limited to adults.

At Willowbrook State School in New York, children with developmental disabilities were intentionally infected with hepatitis.

At orphanages and state institutions like the Fernald School, children,  many of them poor and Black, were fed radioactive oatmeal.

These were not fringe practices.

Doctors published in respected journals.

Universities hosted the experiments.

Government agencies provided the funding.

Professional language, official sanction, and polished presentations transformed cruelty into “progress.”

Extreme violence was professionalized and accepted.

The Violence of Child Removal

That same dynamic is alive today in child welfare.

Child removal is one of the most violent acts a child can experience. And I say that as someone who has done it. Parents may understand that, as a representative of the state, I have the authority to take their child and may not cause physical harm. But the child doesn’t know that. To them, I am a stranger suddenly standing in their living room, telling them they must leave everything they know.

I see the confusion spread across their faces as they ask: Where am I going? Will my mom come too? When can I come back? Often, I have no answers. Sometimes, I don’t even know yet which foster home they will be placed in. What I do know is that in that moment, their world is collapsing. They are forced into a car with a stranger, carried away from the only safety they’ve ever known, their cries echoing in silence.

It is pure violence.

The overwhelming majority of children enter foster care because of “neglect” which most often means their parents lacked financial resources.

There is nothing more cruel than removing a child because their parents are experiencing poverty,  then paying strangers to care for that same child.

Parents are offered services.

Strangers are given cash.

That is not protection.

That is hypocrisy, and it is violent.

And the violence doesn’t end there. Once in the system, children often go for weeks without seeing their parents or siblings, even when court orders say they should. Imagine the trauma of being torn away from your family, then left to wonder when, or if,  you will see them again. Most of us as adults would find that unbearable.

I invite you to picture it. Someone knocks on your door right now. You are taken to an unknown location by a stranger. You don’t know where you’re going, how long you’ll be gone, or if you’ll ever come home.

That is not safety.

That is not protection.

That is violence.

Polite on the surface, but brutal to the core.

Violent Politeness

A colleague of mine once coined the phrase violent politeness, and it captures child welfare perfectly. When I first heard it, my mind immediately went to this system. We sit in rooms filled with PowerPoints, pie charts, and polished reports. We nod as “data” and “best practices” are presented. We clap when agencies highlight their successes. Yet beneath that careful language lies the reality of forced separation, coerced compliance, and lifelong trauma.

Professionalism becomes a mask for brutality.

And the violence doesn’t stop with the initial removal. Parents are forced to comply with mandated services, whether or not those services are actually helpful. Families who ask for support are met instead with coercion and surveillance.

Entire professions earn their living off assessments, referrals, and treatment plans designed to satisfy the system rather than serve families.

What many parents don’t realize is that the system itself is built on layers of subjectivity. Once their child is removed, parents are thrust into a maze of professionals, evaluators, therapists, case managers, supervisors, guardians ad litem, attorneys each one rendering opinions, judgments, and recommendations about whether they are making progress and whether they deserve to get their children back.

None of these people are neutral.

Every decision is filtered through personal biases  cultural, racial, even unresolved personal trauma.

The same set of facts can look entirely different depending on who is sitting across the table. And the truth is, these professionals are paid by the system. That creates a built-in incentive to give the system what it wants, even if it harms the very families they claim to help.

And even when standardized tools are used, they are far from neutral. Most of these assessments were not normed on Black families. Which means Black parents are judged against the standard of whiteness, their culture and lived realities erased in the process.

What gets labeled as “objective” is in fact a biased yardstick.

One that sets Black families up to fail.

Entire industries exist alongside child welfare to feed this machinery.

Psychologists conduct evaluations.

Therapists administer parenting assessments.

Clinicians write up mental health reports.

These professionals may present themselves as objective, but their livelihoods are tied to the system’s demands.

Careers are built on producing evaluations, psychologicals, and treatment plans that keep cases moving.

Year after year, people earn a living by diagnosing, recommending, and judging families often without ever providing the concrete resources those families actually need.

The system sustains them, and they sustain the system. It is a closed loop, one where families are placed under a microscope, and professionals make money off of their pain.

The Legacy Lives On

This is the art of violent politeness: making state-sanctioned violence look respectable. And until we strip away that mask, we will never confront the truth.

What we call child welfare is not protection, but violence against families.

If this country could once call medical experiments on Black bodies “science,” it should not surprise us that it now calls family separation “child welfare.”

The pattern is not new.

Under slavery, Black families were torn apart for profit.

That same logic carried into mass incarceration, foster care, and adoption.

And just as the so-called science of the past dismissed Black humanity, today’s child welfare system still measures Black parents against the standard of whiteness.

What is presented as neutral, objective, and evidence-based is in fact a biased continuation of the same legacy: using science, policy, and professionalism to justify violence against Black families.

Black bodies have always been treated as commodities in this country.

The names change, the justifications evolve,

but the violence remains the same

unless we confront it for what it is and refuse to let history keep repeating itself.