In an episode of the “High Level Conversations” podcast that premiered on June 30, 2024, then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told host 19Keys (also known as Jibrial Muhammad), “Every Black kid is now, just as a standard, put on Adderall, [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors], benzos, which are known to induce violence.” Kennedy, who later ended his campaign, endorsed President Donald Trump and later became his health and human services secretary, went on to reveal a dystopian vision: “And those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented, to live in a community where there’ll be no cell phones, no screens, you’ll actually have to talk to people.”
And those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented.
robert f. kennedy jr. in 2024 speaking about black children prescribed aderrall
Appropriately, Kennedy’s threat of reparenting Black children on “wellness farms” was met last week with intense pushback when he testified multiple times on Capitol Hill last week. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md.; Sen. Rafael Warnock, D-Ga.; and Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., all expressed outrage. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who’s considered likely to run for president in 2028, also demanded answers from Kennedy regarding his horribly racist remark.
Initially, Kennedy vehemently denied making it. But on Wednesday, he offered a non-apologetic apology.
“I would have to see, hear that recording,” Kennedy told Alsobrooks after she quoted his remark to him. “I have no memory of saying anything like that.”
“If I said it, I apologize but I’d have to see the transcript,” he added.
As public health professionals, we demand that apology, even if Kennedy manages to avoid looking at the transcript. His words were offensive and inexcusable.
Kennedy misrepresented studies that have made some connections between violent behaviors and varied psychiatric medications in children. New-age antipsychotic medications, in fact, are shown to reduce aggression, not induce aggression. And Black children are often underdiagnosed, if not misdiagnosed. Sewell, to her credit, used her time questioning Kennedy to call out a truth far more nefarious: the long history of the government separating families of color. To be clear, we are not talking about separations that were the collateral damage of other policies, but explicit policies of separation.
From slavery to Indian boarding school to immigration enforcement policies to even mass incarceration and the rules governing child protective service agencies, removing children from their families — if not also their culture, language and history — is what America does. Kennedy’s remark about Black children being reparented, then, was not pulled out of thin air. It was his expressed desire to repeat some of the worst of this country’s history.
The period of enslavement in the United States, during which half of all children were ripped from their families, begets a still-visible pattern for the removal of Black children from parental care. Indeed, half of all children held in juvenile facilities before or after criminal trial are Black, while half of all Black children will have an investigation opened by child protective services. As a result, Black children are removed from their homes at a disproportionate rate relative to their peers. The idea, then, to reparent an untold number of Black children may sound like an isolated and strange suggestion from a political candidate-turned-government public health official, but our various branches of government have been removing Black children from their families.
But not just Black children. At this point we are more likely to think of Latino families when we think of children being separated from their parents. In 2018, the Trump administration made it a felony to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, and, in a cruel effort to discourage Central American migrants from traveling north, the administration separated hundreds of parents from their children. Because no investment was made in tracking the families, many of those parents have yet to be reunited with their children. And while family separation as a border enforcement policy was halted that summer due to public pressure, mass deportation efforts across the country have continued to remove parents from their homes, forcing some children into the same child protective services system that have separated so many Black families.
There’s more history, still. Church- and state-run boarding schools resulted in the removal of more than 100,000 Indigenous children from their families between the late 19th and early 20th century. This reparenting attempt to force Indigenous youth to adopt the morals and character of a “superior” culture resulted in a host of negative psychological-, cognitive- and health-related outcomes. The horrors of those schools have been made evident in the unidentified remains that have been unearthed during recent land excavations. The inability of so many Indigenous children to make it out alive, and the schools’ pattern of prohibiting cultural expression, has resulted in intergenerational trauma within Indigenous communities.
Life in the home, with parents, siblings, cousins and larger community, is where children learn the language of their culture. And, perhaps most pertinent to the current discussion, it is where they learn about the power structures that have oppressed their people and learn how to do something about them.
Children of color deserve to live in homes where these traditions live on, in communities where they are seen and in a country where their existence is not perceived as a threat. They should be in the capable hands of parents and families who are not written off as negligent for following a pediatrician’s advice. As public health research has shown time and time again, individuals are best able to thrive when they are allowed to be with their families — families that are healthy, happy and whole.
These children don’t need to be reparented. They already have exactly the parents they need.
Riana Elyse Anderson, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical and community psychologist, associate professor at Columbia University's School of Social Work and affiliate with Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. She is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in Partnership with National Black Child Development Institute.
William Lopez, Ph.D., is a clinical associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. He is the author of “Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance,” and “Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid.” Lopez is a regular media contributor to public discussions on deportation, diversity and Latino culture. He is on the boards of Health in Partnership and The Latino Newsletter.