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The US foster care system has over 435,000 kids, with a rising number due to the opioid epidemic. Many speculate that areas with higher overdose rates see a rise in kids taken into care. The response from child welfare workers, academics, and media has been to blame the system for traumatizing kids by removing them from families and communities, citing centuries of racism, classism, and xenophobia. However, James Dwyer's book "Liberal Child Welfare Policy and Its Destruction of Black Lives" argues that this approach is misguided and that the focus should be on saving children from antisocial behavior of poor black adults, rather than waiting for anti-poverty programs to take effect. Dwyer cites statistics such as infant mortality rates among blacks being twice as high as among whites, and one-fifth of black children becoming victims of substantiated maltreatment. He argues that neglect, not abuse, is more closely correlated with child fatalities and that parents in unsafe neighborhoods often demonstrate mental instability, making it potentially dangerous to leave kids in their care. Dwyer's book is not about all black children, but about those at the very bottom, who are "irremediably damaged" in the first few years of life due to laws and policies promoted by liberals.