Note from the publisher.

Last February a friend told me that black and brown folks in New York got a small break from the racist vagaries of the child welfare system right after September 11, since there weren't enough police officers to deal with the fall out and child removal at the same time. She expected that scrutiny and removals would rise again as already poor families of color suffered the subsequent economic downturn and social service cuts. In this issue, Dorothy Roberts, Marisa Castuera, and Akiba Solomon draw a straight line leading from institutional attitudes about money, color, and sex to the destruction of black and Latino childhoods. The disproportionate number of children of color in the child welfare system is clearly related to the shrinking safety net, expanding prisons and detention centers, and the privatization of key public functions. For some families, then, child welfare is another form of detention, closely related to more traditional forms of imprisonment. Discrimination in child removal criminalizes pove rty-stricken parents of color, just as so-called homeland security measures criminalize immigrants of a certain stripe. In her story about the role that Lehman Brothers plays in building new INS detention centers, Karen Carrillo explores a different result of September 11, new possibilities for profit in a paranoid country. Interestingly, Lehman Brothers also financed Cornell Industries, a company that runs group homes and juvenile detention facilities, the places in which so many children of color will live on their way to adult prisons.

The child welfare analysis in this issue kicks off a ColorLines series on race and reproduction, in which we will explore the politics of reproductive health, genetic testing, and transracial adoption, among other things. Look for those stories in future issues.