We have a race problem in child welfare in America. For one thing, people are looking for structural racism where it isn’t. And it’s making children who are already suffering worse off, while traumatizing good people willing to foster and adopt who just happen to be white. As Naomi Schaefer Riley writes in her critically important book No Way to Treat a Child, “child-welfare agencies and family courts . . . have been co-opted by a radical and, in many ways, nonsensical ideology. In deciding how to treat children who are being abused or severely neglected, they consider factors that are completely unrelated to and often at odds with a child’s best interests. The most obvious of these is skin color.”

In many cases, despite substantiated reports of child abuse and neglect, black, Hispanic, or Native American children in dangerous situations will be left in the home of their biological parent or parents. The rationale is that these families have already suffered from a racist system, and that to sever family ties would be an additional in­justice. Once a nonwhite child is in foster care, authorities do not want to place him with a white family, even though there are more white families available to foster. This bias exists despite the fact that we don’t have good reason to think there are any more development and adjustment problems for black children who wind up in white families than for black children who are placed with black families.

Riley’s book is a call to face the reality that children are being victimized by radical cultural trends and bureaucratic incompetence. As she explains, the best of intentions are often at work, but they are not enough to secure a child’s best interests: “Children who are in danger in this country are treated instrumentally to promote the rehabilitation of their parents, the social welfare of their communities, and social justice for their racial and ethnic groups. Their most precious developmental years are lost in bureaucratic and judicial red tape.” She asks readers to consider our near-universal dread of the IRS and the DMV, for the cookie-cutter approach they take to individuals. Now imagine if that were your everyday reality. This is what children and the families willing to welcome them into their lives are dealing with — and it is one reason that new foster parents typically don’t last long in the system.

Riley’s book shines a light on a subject that seems to get headlines only when something grave has happened. But these are human lives; every child who is not in a healthy, permanent family is a child in crisis.

It’s also in everyone’s best interest that we prioritize child welfare. There are children in this country who never find a permanent home and eventually age out of foster care because there are not enough families willing to take non-babies. These young adults are then out on their own, with no family to call on for the simplest of advice, never mind material help. Nearly 70 percent of the women who have aged out of foster care wind up on public assistance. “They are more likely to be homeless, to be unemployed, and to be involved with drugs,” writes Riley. Or arrested. She cites a California report that found that 14 percent of those incarcerated in the state had spent time in foster care. Another report found that the costs nationally of “letting a single year’s cohort age out of foster care without a permanent family were nearly $8 billion.”

No Way to Treat a Child isn’t all bad news, though. Riley’s chapter on faith-based efforts to rally around children is both encouraging and challenging. If you get into fostering and adopt­ing, community is essential. “Four out of five people who foster have pointed to the support of their faith communities and churches as the reason for their success.” Of course, faith communities are also considered public menaces by people who care more about ideology than actual children’s lives. Before June’s Fulton v. Philadelphia decision at the Supreme Court, the wildly successful Catholic Social Services was locked out of foster and adoption work in Philadelphia because it was targeted by activists for adhering to Catholic teaching on same-sex marriage in its work. With so few foster parents in the first place, faith-based agencies with records of success are a most valu­able commodity for children and their forever families.

Riley’s laser-like focus on the state of child welfare in America has made her a leading expert on what’s wrong and what works. She writes about in­novative initiatives, many coming out of Evangelical communities. One such initiative, Project 1.27, is a bridge organization that connects churches with state and local agencies for the purpose of recruiting and training foster families. (The name comes from James 1:27: “Religion that God our father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress.”)

Riley captures, with compassion and clarity, the brutality of addiction in the life of a child, and she includes a caution. Children aren’t regularly removed from their biological families for minor reasons or because of government overreach. She gives a snapshot of one couple with five children in their Biloxi home (one biological, three adopted, one foster), who have cared for 29 foster children over ten years: “These are not children who were removed because their parents lived in trailers or fed their babies sugary drinks or didn’t use car seats properly. They weren’t removed because their parents couldn’t afford warm clothes or heating or pest control. They were children who were born with multiple drugs in their system to parents who were incapable of caring for them.” Sara Baker Pendleton, a stay-at-home mother, regularly spends time in a NICU, holding babies who were born with drugs in their system. Getting these children away from parents who won’t or can’t quit using is a life-or-death priority that is all too often not being taken seriously enough, out of compassion for the parent. Laws recently passed in Arizona and Georgia expedite severing parental rights within a year in these cases.

No Way to Treat a Child is a handbook for reform. We need a more transparent system that can attract quality social workers, and we need “to overhaul our family court system, getting a higher level of professional into family law.” Riley also issues a challenge: What if “more ordinary, middle-class Americans of all faiths and no faith” stepped up to foster? “It is easy to throw up our hands and stay away from these systems and the people they serve. But the more that we stay away, the worse the systems get.”

It doesn’t take a village to raise a child; it takes a forever family that places the needs of that child above those of the adults. There are some 440,000 chil­dren in the foster-care system. This is a human-rights issue. They need permanent homes, not the instability of foster care. What are you and I going to do with that knowledge?