In 2005, faced with data showing that black and Native American families were overrepresented in Texas’ child welfare system, lawmakers ordered Child Protective Services (CPS) to study whether staff treated any racial or ethnic groups more harshly than others. The analysis ultimately showed that the department was more likely to remove children from black parents than from white parents and was less likely to offer services to black and Native American families, all else being equal. “The only difference was race,” says Joyce James, a former CPS official who helped lead the effort to lower the disparities.
James’ work would eventually become the Center for Elimination of Disproportionality and Disparities, which officials created and appointed her to lead in 2010. The office, which James says was revolutionary for the time, then expanded to studying and solving racial inequities across the state’s health agencies and was renamed the Office of Minority Health Statistics and Engagement. Texas has many disparities to interrogate: Black and Hispanic communities have higher rates of chronic illnesses like diabetes and hypertension and far higher uninsured rates than their white counterparts. In 2017, while Democrats were pushing for changes after new data showed that black women die of pregnancy-related causes at far higher rates, the Texas Legislature quietly defunded the office during a budget crunch.
Now some lawmakers want to revive it, calling the COVID-19 pandemic a wake-up call for governments to address structural racism. Early data shows the virus has carved an especially devastating course through the black community, which is disproportionately represented in confirmed cases and deaths in cities across Texas and the country. Yet the state’s overall tracking of racial disparities in the pandemic is scattershot and incomplete.
