WASHINGTON—The issue of forced removal of Black children from their homes exploded last week during congressional testimony, where Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was questioned about his 2024 remarks that Black children being treated with mental health medications should be taken away from their parents and placed in new homes.
In the 2024 podcast, Kennedy falsely claimed that “every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, AARIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence.” He said the best way to deal with many of the problems of Black children is to “re-parent” them into a “community where they will have no access to technology.”
Rep. Terri Sewell, Democrat of Alabama, was the first to challenge Kennedy at the hearing. “There is a lot to unpack” in his comments, Sewell said. Kennedy denied making the remarks despite videos showing he had indeed made them.
The racism in Kennedy’s remarks goes beyond his implication that Black parents are somehow incapable of raising their children. Sewell pointed out that the separation of Black children from their parents has a long history in the United States, one whose purpose was to strengthen institutions and policies that had nothing to do with making life better for Black children.
Sewell explained that there is a “long and painful history of separating Black children from their families during centuries of enslavement of Black people and the Jim Crow era,” all of which had nothing to do with helping Black families.
Perhaps even more outrageous than his suggestions for “reparenting,“ Kennedy, in the podcast, specifically advocated sending Black children to “camps” such as one he knew about in Italy, where children with alleged behavioral problems are sent to have their “problems” resolved. It could be seen as a pattern with the top people in the Trump administration that when people have “problems,” whether they be immigrants or Black children, the thing to do is ship them off to “camps.”
The specific Italian program to which Kennedy referred in the 2024 interview was the topic of a Netflix documentary, which alleged that people in the program were held in shackles and even imprisoned in cages.
“Kids will live where they get reparented and live in a community with no cell phones, no screens, you’ll actually have to talk to people,” Kennedy said in that now-infamous interview.
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