“Families I work with tell me it’s like being on pins and needles every day of their life. It really impacts their mental health, their physical well-being, as well as their housing and job prospects. These families can’t mess up at all. It’s not a way to live.”

In previous episodes of the podcast, we've covered the history of family separation and family policing from the era of chattel slavery through the late 1900s. Now we're going to get into the current iteration of this system and how it functions to surveil, regulate and punish families, specifically Black and Indigenous families.

In this episode, Victoria’s written responses are voiced by our mutual friend Maya Pendleton.  

About Our Guests: 

Brianna Harvey is a scholar, practitioner, and researcher that engages in community-rooted inquiry. Through her work, she utilizes liberatory praxis that strives to combat the carceral conditions inflicted upon oppressed communities. Brianna received her PhD in Education from UCLA, and her MSW from USC. 

Victoria Copeland is a Black and Filipinx researcher, organizer, and spoonie, with training in social welfare and social policy. They are currently a Senior Policy Analyst at Upturn where their work focuses on the use of data and technology in the criminal legal and family policing systems. Their research is centralized around black study and surveillance studies, and is primarily done in collaboration with local abolitionist organizers. Victoria is dedicated to learning more about how we can sustain community power and care from the intersections between racial, economic, & disability justice movements.

Episode Notes: 

• Episode Transcript: upendmovement.org/episode1-4
• Support the work of upEND: upendmovement.org/donate 
• Continue learning with additional resources in our syllabus: upendmovement.org/syllabus
• Victoria Copeland and Brianna Harvey are authors in the essay collection Help is NOT on the Way. 
• Jaison mentions Katy ISD’s new policy to surveil transgender students in Houston. 
• Victoria mentions “A Complete Guide to The Family First Act” from The Imprint in addition to “Calculating the Souls of Black Folk” by J. Khadijah Abdurahman.
• Brianna cites what scholar Dr. Subini Annamma calls the “rhetoric of responsibility”. 
• Victoria is a co-author of chapters 1 and 4 in “Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System” by Alan Dettlaff.
• Read Victoria’s recent report “DCFS stands for Dividing and Conquering Families.”
  Brianna Harvey has an upcoming article with disability scholars, Subini Annamma, Brian Cabral, and Jamelia Morgan.