"That child is in trauma...and he is not the only one."
January 24, 2019 7:20 PM   Subscribe

The sad, strange life and death of Devonte Hart: the crying black boy who famously hugged a cop. [Warning, child harm and abuse.] He was the black boy who hugged a white cop at a protest of the shooting death of Michael Brown. The famous photo, dubbed “the Hug Heard ‘Round the World,” also known as the “Ferguson Hug,” captured our ailing nation’s attention. Not just in America, but globally, his crying face pressed against a policeman’s chest suggested a spontaneous moment of healing. posted by triggerfinger (22 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
his crying face pressed against a policeman’s chest suggested a spontaneous moment of healing

Not to me. Even at the time, his affect seemed wrong, almost like he was scared. I was weirded out by the people so eager to seize on that image as some kind of symbol of reconciliation. Us white people, always with the preemptive reconciliation that skips over the awkward parts of justice.

This poor kid's story breaks my heart.
posted by praemunire at 7:35 PM on January 24, 2019 [50 favorites]


Please note this is a story involving child abuse, adoption abuse and child murders. Also suicides, but they are domestic violence murder-suicides. This was a huge transracial adoption story for a while where the race and gender over the lgbt issues were used by the women to deflect attention - just such a horrific mess.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:47 PM on January 24, 2019 [20 favorites]


I grit my teeth and read the article, it's a reasonable summation of what happened.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:55 PM on January 24, 2019


The Broken Harts podcast also examines the family in-depth. Holy heck, it's so hard to listen to :/
posted by Calzephyr at 7:57 PM on January 24, 2019 [3 favorites]


A content warning might be a good idea here.
posted by k8t at 8:04 PM on January 24, 2019 [4 favorites]


The first article is a little old. A foot belonging to Hannah Hart was found recently, but there hasn't been any sign of Devonte :(
posted by Calzephyr at 8:12 PM on January 24, 2019


Mod note: Added a note up top, carry on.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:38 PM on January 24, 2019 [3 favorites]


The horror of the events in the article speaks for itself, and I can't even write or share my deep anguish at this story. The only comment I can bear to make here is a question about a relatively small detail. The writer stated:

As reported in the San Antonio Express-News, according to the Texas state comptroller, Jen Hart received $1,897 in her latest monthly allotment on March 2. In total, the state of Texas paid the Harts roughly $277,000 between 2009 and 2018. The money is called adoption subsidies. Essentially, the Harts were the legal parents of their children, but Texas paid them to take care of the kids, like they were still in foster care. This is, presumably, to ensure the kids are properly cared for.

My wife and I have been in the early stages of researching adoption (not sure if it can ever happen with both of our health problems) and the briefing we attended (in Washington state) said that foster care payments cease after adoption in most cases, unless there is a specific negotiated payment plan made by the state to cover ongoing severe medical or behavioral treatment expenses. The above quote makes it seem like that is not the case in Texas or some other states. Can anyone offer some clarification?
posted by seasparrow at 9:34 PM on January 24, 2019 [1 favorite]


Adoption subsidies are given to children who fall into a category deemed harder to place, which I think is defined by each state. In most states these are things like being older, being an ethnic minority, being part of a group of siblings to be adopted together, or having health or behavior issues. Details for Washington.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 9:46 PM on January 24, 2019 [8 favorites]


Ah man. I had not read the follow-up about the Benadryl.

This was premeditated. My god. I can't.
posted by offalark at 10:42 PM on January 24, 2019 [1 favorite]


his crying face pressed against a policeman’s chest suggested a spontaneous moment of healing.

I can't read the article because I'd like to sleep tonight, but this idea right here is the perfect encapsulation of how we tend to use black pain for white people's catharsis. The victim absolving the perpetrator and as long as we get our emotional high we don't look too closely at the reality behind the gesture.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:00 AM on January 25, 2019 [18 favorites]


I hadn't heard the story of why Devonte and his siblings weren't placed with an extended family member before. Admittedly, there are some details missing at the Texas end of the story--we don't know what the mother did, specifically, to cause the loss of custody, and we can all think of things that would make any unsupervised visitation truly dangerous, but it's really painful to compare the infinite chances given to these white women with the zero tolerance practiced by the state against the kids' relatives, who seem genuinely to have wanted to keep them.
posted by praemunire at 12:01 AM on January 25, 2019 [28 favorites]


This story was completely new to me, and was horrifying, especially the facebook photos. The main article was strident about who to blame: the racist system that would use any excuse to take black children from their families and pay white strangers to care for them, four states' child protective services for inadequate protection, and everyone who is more baffled than outraged.

I think the first blame is pretty solid: paying people to take kids, yet giving nothing to their families but strict judgment seems blatantly unfair. If the goal is making sure the children are properly cared for, you should pay their guardians to care for them. It shouldn't matter if they were family or not, just if they fulfill their duty to care for the children. Nobody is getting rich off of this, but this seems harsh and broken.

The other points I'm less sure on. Putting myself in the CPS worker's shoes, I can understand how a clear, serious, and well-documented issue like cocaine addiction could get a child taken away, while reports of underfed kids that doctors officially find as normal could be left as "unable to determine." The domestic violence charge should have been clear, but I don't know that Oregon or Washington knew about that.
posted by netowl at 12:04 AM on January 25, 2019 [2 favorites]


Those kids were just window dressing opportunities for a racist, dysfunctional couple. it is horrendous literal white knighting that they were able to adopt so many children so quickly and easily.
Home schooling, moving around, poor record sharing, childrens understandable reticence to inform on their care givers, all of this contributes to the difficulty that social workers and police face in evidencing the need to remove children, but the whiteness of the parents, and the feel good nature of their photos gives a clue to how easily these children were abandoned to their awful fate.
posted by RandomInconsistencies at 4:26 AM on January 25, 2019 [13 favorites]


Quite a different legal response to two white mothers who endanger their adopted children, one of whom gets convicted of assault, versus a black mother who gets caught by a caseworker as she spends time with her biological children during an unsupervised visit.

Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote: “Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.”
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:06 AM on January 25, 2019 [46 favorites]


From that same official report, “The Minnesota Child Welfare worker said the problem is ‘these women look normal.’”

Indeed
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 6:20 AM on January 25, 2019 [6 favorites]


This article reminds me of a Reuters investigation on the underground adoption child market [cw: child abuse, sexual abuse], another indicator of how adoption systems are more often than not less about the welfare of the (often non-white) children they peddle and more about fulfilling the desires of the (often white) parents who appear to think of the kids as akin to animals at a shelter.

A lot of strong work has come out of the adoptees community about the racism and colonialism that gets built into these transracial/transnational adoptions. It starts from the violent history of transracial/transnational adoptions (from indigenous children forcibly removed from their families to the literal buying of children from desperate parents) and continues into the present day with the ongoing damaging assumptions in adoption discourse. The adoptive parents are inherently virtuous saviors, the biological parents are either craven or impossibly backwards or both, the children are themselves Less-Thans deprived of love, in desperate need of behavioral and emotional education, and lucky to be taken in by a "better sort of person". When the children do not behave as grateful supplicants it is because there is something wrong with the child, and when there are problems in the household it is because of the child's Tragic Background And Emotional Issues, not because the parents are more invested in a narcissistic fantasy of delivering children from "the Savage Lands" (whether that's South Korea, Liberia, Detroit, or elsewhere) than they are in the business of providing a loving, supportive home that's sensitive to the specific needs of the adoptive child. It's completely fucked up and the result of this system is abused, alienated children.
posted by Anonymous at 6:24 AM on January 25, 2019


Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote: “Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.”

If Devonte and his bio-siblings had died in the custody of their mother or their aunt, even if it had been neglect rather than straight-up abuse and murder, there would have been a huge scandal in the city and state, with DFS coming in for withering criticism, weeks of negative newspaper coverage, etc.

It's not clear to me that anyone has ever been held accountable for what did happen to them.
posted by praemunire at 1:40 PM on January 25, 2019 [5 favorites]


I have clung to an unrealistic fantasy that Devonte escaped and is simply too scared of the system to come out of hiding.

yeah I know. I said, it's unrealistic.

sigh

posted by RedEmma at 4:58 PM on January 25, 2019


I am only halfway through the article, and I am struck by the fact that Texas took children away from their mother because she used cocaine and wouldn't even let her see them. Then Minnesota convicts a white woman with beating a kid, and not only does she keep the kids, she suffers no punishment at all. This is what's wrong with America in a nutshell.
posted by Miss Cellania at 3:02 AM on January 26, 2019 [6 favorites]


There is a pic of the kids that was widely shown after their murders where the kids are all smiling. Devontes hand is balled into a fist and he has a smile pasted on his face. His smile looked forced and desperate and that fist screamed STRESSED CHILD.

I am adopted and am active in several adoption groups-its so common for parents to be denied the return of their child(ren) for flimsy reasons and esp for hearings to be delayed so the foster parents can complete adoption. Once the adoption is finalized, further hearings are moot. Why are kids not returned to their parents or left in care of relatives? Because they’re a commodity. Of the adoption triad, only one side gains while the other two sides suffer losses. Let's not forget the racial overtones either-why do SWs, courts etc expect white adopters to be superior to black bio families? I won’t say transracial adoption should be forbidden but it should be very rare. Don’t let me get started on international adoption, I’ll get booted from the meta family before I get warmed up.

tldr
Culture matters
Heritage matters
Biology matters
KIDS MATTER

These children were failed so much more by the system than by their bio families.
posted by RichardHenryYarbo at 10:56 AM on January 26, 2019 [7 favorites]


There is a pic of the kids that was widely shown after their murders where the kids are all smiling. Devontes hand is balled into a fist and he has a smile pasted on his face. His smile looked forced and desperate and that fist screamed STRESSED CHILD.
Driver in California Plunge That Killed Family Was Drunk, Officials Say
posted by mistersquid at 5:42 PM on January 26, 2019


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