• Celebrity
    • OTE – Screen Kings
    • Daniel Kaluuya Digital Cover
    • Digital Cover Method Man
    • Digital Cover Zazie
    • Celebrity News
    • ‘Yes, Girl!’ Podcast
    • Entertainment
    • Black Celeb Couples
    • Celebrity Moms
    • Red Carpet
    • If Not For My Girls
  • Fashion
    • ESSENCE Fashion House 2022
    • Fashion News
    • Street Style
    • Accessories
    • Fashion Week
  • Beauty
    • Best In Black Beauty 2023
    • ESSENCE Hair Awards 2022
    • AVEENO Skin Health Startup Accelerator
    • Beauty News
    • Skin
    • Makeup
    • Nails
    • Girls United: Beautiful Possibilities
  • Hair
    • Hair News
    • Natural
    • Relaxed
    • Transitioning
    • Weave
    • 4C
  • Love
    • Love & Sex News
    • The Solve Podcast
    • Weddings
    • Parenting
    • Relationships
  • Lifestyle
    • Black History Month
    • ESSENCE Gift Guide 2022
    • ESSENCE + smartwater Live Well Challenge
    • Build Your Legacy 2022
    • Dream & Plan with Confidence Prudential
    • AMEX Platinum Travel
    • Homecoming Season 2022
    • Lifestyle News
    • Health & Wellness
    • ESSENCE Eats
    • Money & Career
    • Entrepreneurship
    • Travel
    • Food & Drink
    • Black Travel Guide
  • News
    • Paint The Polls Black
    • Sponsors Recognition Page 2022
    • Latest News
    • Raise Your Voice
    • Culture
    • Politics
  • Video
  • Festival
    • 2023 ESSENCE Festival Of Culture
    • 2022 Fest Videos
  • Events
    • 2023 Wellness House
    • 2023 Black Women In Hollywood
    • 2023 HOLLYWOOD HOUSE
    • 2023 ESSENCE Film Festival
    • 2022 Girls United Summit
    • 2022 ESSENCE Fashion House
    • 2022 Homecoming Season
    • She Got Now
    • Dear Black Men
    • I Am Speaking
    • Power Tools
  • Studios
  • Girls United

WHERE BLACK CULTURE, COMMUNITY AND CONSCIOUSNESS MEET

Sign up for ESSENCE Newsletters the keep the Black women at the forefront of conversation.

Your email is required.
Your email is in invalid format.
Confirm email is required.
Email did not match.
Select the newsletters you'd like to receive:
Please select at least one option.
By clicking Subscribe Now, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Skip to content
SUBSCRIBE
  • MAGAZINE
  • NEWSLETTER
  • Celebrity
    • OTE – Screen Kings
    • Daniel Kaluuya Digital Cover
    • Digital Cover Method Man
    • Digital Cover Zazie
    • Celebrity News
    • ‘Yes, Girl!’ Podcast
    • Entertainment
      • Paint The Polls Black
    • Black Celeb Couples
    • Celebrity Moms
    • Red Carpet
    • If Not For My Girls
  • Fashion
    • ESSENCE Fashion House 2022
    • Fashion News
    • Street Style
    • Accessories
    • Fashion Week
  • Beauty
    • Best In Black Beauty 2023
    • ESSENCE Hair Awards 2022
    • AVEENO Skin Health Startup Accelerator
    • Beauty News
    • Skin
    • Makeup
    • Nails
    • Girls United: Beautiful Possibilities
  • Hair
    • Hair News
    • Natural
    • Relaxed
    • Transitioning
    • Weave
    • 4C
  • Love
    • Love & Sex News
    • The Solve Podcast
    • Weddings
    • Parenting
    • Relationships
  • Lifestyle
    • Black History Month
    • ESSENCE Gift Guide 2022
    • ESSENCE + smartwater Live Well Challenge
    • Build Your Legacy 2022
    • Dream & Plan with Confidence Prudential
    • AMEX Platinum Travel
    • Homecoming Season 2022
    • Lifestyle News
    • Health & Wellness
    • ESSENCE Eats
    • Money & Career
    • Entrepreneurship
    • Travel
    • Food & Drink
    • Black Travel Guide
  • News
    • Paint The Polls Black
    • Sponsors Recognition Page 2022
    • Latest News
    • Raise Your Voice
    • Culture
    • Politics
  • Video
  • Festival
    • 2023 ESSENCE Festival Of Culture
    • 2022 Fest Videos
  • Events
    • 2023 Wellness House
    • 2023 Black Women In Hollywood
    • 2023 HOLLYWOOD HOUSE
    • 2023 ESSENCE Film Festival
    • 2022 Girls United Summit
    • 2022 ESSENCE Fashion House
    • 2022 Homecoming Season
    • She Got Now
    • Dear Black Men
    • I Am Speaking
    • Power Tools
  • Studios
  • Girls United
Home · News

#SayHerName This Foster Care Awareness Month: Ma’Khia Bryant

May is Foster Care Awareness Month. As adoption is often cited as the replacement for abortion rights, Dr. Johnson explains how the strained foster care system is unstable and unsafe for Black youths.
#SayHerName This Foster Care Awareness Month: Ma’Khia Bryant
By Royel M. Johnson, PhD · Updated May 31, 2022

On Tuesday, April 20th at approximately 5:30 pm, I, like many of you, waited with bated breath as the jury rendered a guilty verdict for Derrick Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.

Shortly after the verdict was read, I was inundated with news of the murder of 16-year-old, Ma’Khia Bryant, just twenty minutes earlier. Ma’Khia, a young Black girl in foster care, was murdered by a Columbus City Police Officer, Nicholas Reardon, who used deadly force to neutralize a physical altercation between her and two adult women. 

This unfortunate situation hit home for me for several reasons. As a scholar, I’ve been studying the educational experiences and life outcomes of Black youth in foster care for years and am all too familiar with the considerable challenges they face. I also lived in Columbus, Ohio and collaborated with Franklin County Children Services—the agency responsible for the care of Ma’Khia and her sister. Suffice it to say, I was intimately familiar with the local context of this situation.

As the investigation for this case began to unfold, there was one thing that stood out to me. That is, before the call for police on the day of Ma’Khia’s murder, there had been several 911 calls in the past three years from that same home. One of those calls occurred 23 days prior from Ma’Khia’s younger sister who communicated to the dispatcher repeatedly: “I want to leave this foster home.”

How is it that a system that is designed to protect vulnerable youth, allow them to stay in an obviously unstable and unsafe situation for so long that it ultimately results in the death of Ma’Khia?

The foster care system failed Ma’Khia and her sister. And what I have learned from my research, advocacy, and community engagement over the years is that this is not uncommon. Though touted as a protective intervention, our nation’s child welfare system plays an active role in restricting the life chances of young people, especially Black youth.

Black youth, like Ma’Khia and her sister, account for 23% of those placed in the foster care system—nearly double their proportion in the national child population. In comparison, white youth represent 44% of the foster care population and 50% of the nation’s child population. Black girls in particular constitute 23% of all girls in foster care, though only 15% of the general population.

Black youth also spend a longer time in foster care and are less likely to be adopted than white youth. Time spent in foster care is positively associated with increased risk of trauma and abuse, as evidenced in Ma’Khia’s story who spent about two years in the system.

For Black girls, who are criminalized and adultified already, experience in foster care only exacerbates their precarity. That conversations following Ma’Khia’s death shifted to focus on her own culpability is not surprising. Institutional systems are rarely, if ever, held accountable for the death dealing of Black girls and women. There has still been no justice for Breonna Taylor.

The foster care system is not an independent actor though. Its intersections with our nation’s education and criminal punishment systems, as I’ve argued elsewhere, exacerbate precarity for Black youth, rendering them disposable like Ma’Khia was. Black girls in particular are positioned in a matrix of oppression that literally conspires in their murdering—spiritually, psychologically, educationally and, physically.

You might remember a disturbing, viral video in 2015 of a white school resource officer, Ben Fields, brutally slamming a 16-year old Black girl, Shakara, to the ground at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina. Fields was called to the classroom because Shakara reportedly refused to follow instructions from her teacher. The veteran officer is documented telling Shakara, “Either you’re coming with me or I’ll make you.” Shortly after, he is observed violently assaulting—dragging her across the classroom as her peers watched.

The viral video helped to amplify nationally, documented concerns about the presence of police in public schools and its role in the production of the school-prison nexus.

One overlooked fact in media reports about Shakara’s story, however, is that like Ma’Khia, she was a foster youth.

Black girls in foster care are not safe nor protected in our nation’s child welfare, criminal punishment or carceral systems. It is why “intersectionality” progenitor, Kimberlé Crenshaw, founded the #SayHerName campaign in 2014—to bring awareness to the names and stories of Black girls and women who are rendered invisible by oppressive and multiply mariginalizing systems.

This Foster Care Awareness Month, let us not forgot Ma’Khia. May we #SayHerName and the dozens of others whose names we will never know. Let us not absolve the foster care system and its collaborating institutions from their complicity in the disgard, dehumanization, and demise of Black girls and their families. And may we all work within our spheres of influence to imagine and enact a new world where we support Black families and communities, defunding oppressive systems that seek to harm them.

Royel M. Johnson, PhD is Associate Professor of Education and Social Work at the University of Southern California (USC), where he is also affiliated with the USC Race and Equity Center and Pullias Center for Higher Education.

TOPICS:  Foster Care Awareness Month Ma’Khia Bryant
COMPANY INFORMATION
  • Our Company
  • Customer Service
  • Essence Ventures
  • Change Your Address
  • Contact Us
  • Job Opportunities
  • Internships
  • Media Kit
  • tag
SUBSCRIBE
  • Newsletters
  • Give a Gift of ESSENCE
  • Magazine Tablet Edition
FOLLOW US
MORE ON ESSENCE
  • Home
  • Love
  • Celebrity
  • Beauty
  • Hair
  • Fashion
  • ESSENCE festival

ESSENCE.com is part of ESSENCE Communications, Inc.

Essence may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.

©2023 ESSENCE Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Essence.com Advertising Terms

Get The ESSENCE Newsletter and
Special Offers delivered to your inbox

By clicking Sign Up, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Get The ESSENCE Magazine
by subscribing below
subscribe now