A personal look at the US foster care system

CHICAGO (NewsNation Now) — The U.S. foster care system oversees the placement of more than 400,000 children, moving them from homes where it’s dangerous or potentially deadly.

Situations like neglect and abuse drive states to place youth in temporary homes or “foster homes.”

It’s meant to keep the kids safe and hopefully allow the parents time to get the help they need.

But some say we need to drastically overhaul our foster care system, arguing it’s racist and takes Black and Brown children out of their homes disproportionately more often than white children.

To best understand our country’s foster care services, we talked with someone who’s lived it: former foster care child Sean Hudson.

We asked Hudson about his Alabama upbringing and whether he thinks foster care is a racist system in the U.S.

“The race question in its relationship to the foster care system is more complex and it’s more insidious than I can figure out,” he said. “I’m more concerned about the erasure of our cultures going into the foster care system.  So, I think about me as a Black man and a Black gay man in the foster care system, I was denied certain services because of those different intersections of my identity.”

Sean cobbled together 10 scholarships and worked three jobs to get through his undergraduate time at the University of Alabama.

While going to school in Tuscaloosa, he served on the student judiciary board and the Alabama youth advisory council and he earned multiple leadership and academic distinctions, including the Distinguished Scholar Award.

Watch the full conversation in the player above.

BOTH SIDES

At NewsNation, we bring different sides of an issue to you our viewer, so you can decide what you think.

In the player above, we hear from two foster care experts with diverging opinions on whether the United States foster care program as we know it, is in fact, a racist system or not.