It looks like racism just took two more young black lives — but this is left-wing racism, pushing child-welfare workers not to remove children from dangerous homes on the grounds that the system finds “too many” black parents who pose a threat to their kids.
Saturday night, 11-month-old Octavius Canada and his brother DeShawn Fleming, 3, were found dead in their apartment at a Bronx homeless shelter. Their mother, Dimone Fleming, confessed to stabbing them to death, believing they were possessed by demons.
Like so many similar tragedies, sources informed The Post that the Administration for Children’s Services probed Fleming shortly after DeShawn’s birth. It’s unclear how the case got resolved, or what followup ACS did.
Last week, The New York Times highlighted an unreleased survey of ACS workers (just a few dozen, out of thousands) who described their agency as a “predatory system subjecting black parents to a different level of scrutiny” than white families; the story gave similar voice to advocates charging the same. This charge has plainly influenced ACS to, in fact, hold off from intervening simply because dangerous-seeming parents are black.
But it’s black children who pay the price. Deep in its report, the Times also noted that its own “analysis of 83 child homicides from 2016 to 2022 found that Black children in the city were killed in cases where family members were charged at about seven times the rate for white and Asian children and three times the rate for Hispanic children.”
That’s a clear sign that black parents are being held to a lower standard, because of politics. Under City Council pressure, ACS has tried to decrease family-court involvement and foster-care placements because of the “racism” complaints.
It may be the greatest tragedy of modern progressivism that it keeps harming the very people it imagines it’s helping.
