Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza, dir. Know How. New York: First Run Features, 2014. 106 min. DVD. $24.95.

Reviewed by Sarah Stinard-Kiel (Temple University)
Published on H-Citizenship (October, 2015)
Commissioned by Sean H. Wang (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Syracuse University)

The power of the film Know How lies in its narrative force and complexity. Most often the stories we hear about foster care are told in statistics: how many children fail to find permanent placement, how many foster children fail to graduate from high school, how deeply racial disproportionality runs in foster care. We may also hear the extreme examples held up by politicians and system reformers: the children who died at home because protective services failed to remove them, or, conversely, the children who died in foster care because of neglectful foster parents who were just in it for the pay check. These are the stories that drive public imagination and, in turn, policy around child welfare. Unfortunately, rarely do we get to hear about the daily lives of young people affected by the child welfare system. We do not get the everyday details that demonstrate that there is no single story about foster care and child welfare systems, but instead a complicated assemblage of institutional practices, structural inequalities, and personal struggles that shape the lives of young people in these systems. Know How reminds us that if we want to understand and improve foster care and related services, we have to do the hard work of listening to the voices of the young people most affected by them.

Know How is a hip-hop musical film that was written and performed by young people involved in the New York state foster care system. It follows five teenagers—Megan, Austin, Eva, Marie, and Addie—although we also get to know their friends, relatives, love interests, and case workers. Each of the characters came into foster care via different paths and they all have diverse sets of experiences and challenges once in the system. For instance, both Addie and Marie are placed in the system following the death of a primary caregiver, but while Addie lives with an uncaring Aunt, Marie is placed in a group home she’s eager to get away from. On the other hand, Austin is living on the street, seemingly not involved in foster care at all, leaving the viewer to assume that his lifestyle is the result of the system having so grievously failed to give him stability and a viable alternative. These stories speak to how foster care cannot be represented as a singular practice or experience; so much of what happens to them in the child welfare system depends on a complex interplay of what is available at the time and the young person’s unique personal history: Do they have relatives to go to? Are there foster homes available that meet their needs? Do they get along with their foster parents?

The stories I found most compelling, however, were Megan’s and Eva’s because they forcefully challenge the viewer to question our assumptions about what it means for child welfare to operate in “the best interest of the child.” Megan’s narrative is compelling partly because her story exemplifies Child Protective Service’s (CPS) and foster care’s raison d’être. She and her sister live with an abusive mother, and Megan is being sexually assaulted by an adult male in the household. This is the kind of removal we applaud child welfare for, that justifies its existence, even as an imperfect system. Yet the promise of the sisters living together in a new foster home, a promise made by CPS officers during the sisters’ distressing removal from their home, remains elusive through most of the film. Instead of going with her sister to a foster placement, Megan is remanded to a residential treatment facility because she has been identified as “troubled” and in need of further observation. Although it is not said explicitly, the narrative makes it clear that the system and its arbiters—those responsible for Megan’s release and placement—see many of the children in their care as so fundamentally unstable that they require institutional intervention and treatment before they are fit to take their place in a “proper” family. Indeed, the psychologist at the treatment center seems less concerned with Megan’s quality of life in the center, where she is harassed by other girls and separated from her sister, than with checking off the institutional requirements that would legitimize her release in the eyes of the bureaucracy. While many children in foster care are in need of psychological attention and care, this film aptly points out that institutionalizing kids and labeling them as “troubled” or “traumatized” is not necessarily a solution. It can often work to reaffirm young people’s own negative feelings about themselves, negative feelings that another character, Addie, bluntly summarizes when describing herself: “I’m broken, neglected, discarded. I don’t belong to anyone. I can’t run away from it. I can’t hide it. I’m just a ward of the state.” We must wonder how often it is the system and institutions themselves, rather than the children’s familial background, that leave them feeling so helpless.

Eva’s story, like Megan’s, elicits the question, “When and to what extent is institutional involvement really necessary?” In Eva’s case, CPS officers arrive at her home, where she lives with her sister Desi and their father, because of complaints from the neighbors. However, everything in the home appears be “normal,” setting off no red flags of abuse or neglect. Moreoever, Eva is a star student, applying to prestigious colleges and diligently taking care of her younger sister by cooking and keeping the house in order. CPS is not easily convinced though, and they pry into the girls’ lives, trying to get them to admit to neglect or wrongdoing on the part of their father. One CPS officer snoops around the kitchen checking for expired or rotting food only to find a clean kitchen and a fairly well stocked fridge. Ultimately, CPS does discover crack and crack paraphernalia in the father’s room leading to the prompt removal of the daughters. The father is distraught, yelling that CPS has no right to take away his daughters. It is hard for the viewer not to partially side with him, despite his obvious drug use, because we are witnessing the breakup of a fairly functional family in which neither the father nor the daughters want the removal and separation.

Largely because of Eva’s story, this film could be successfully used to elicit discussion around issues of rights and privacy and what kinds of families are entitled to them and what kinds of families are not. In America, the family is discursively read as the private sphere, the part of the social world that should, in theory, be free from governmental regulation and intervention. Yet what Know How so gracefully illustrates is that not all families are afforded that luxury. Can we not imagine that a family like Eva’s may exist in the affluent white suburbs in the form of a nuclear family? Perhaps both parents have substance abuse issues, say alcoholism or prescription drug abuse, and the children are left to mostly fend for themselves? While many people would want intervention to help the parents overcome their issues, this may be regarded less as a problem of public welfare, in which placement in foster care is necessary, and more as a personal problem to be dealt with among family and friends. However, in the case of a single-parent black family in the inner city, the use of illegal substances is regarded as a public health problem that requires state intervention and continued surveillance.

This film might also be useful for talking about young people’s rights as wards of the state. We see in both Megan’s and Eva’s cases teenagers who have broken no rules and committed no crimes being treated like prisoners. When Megan and her sister first arrive at the Administration of Child Services, New York’s child welfare agency, we see an intake process that is more friendly but very functionally similar to a detention center intake. Their personal belongings are confiscated and put in envelopes, and they are given drab gray sweat outfits. This is obviously not the most comforting place for young people who have just been removed from an abusive household. Similarly, Eva and Desi, while not institutionalized, are subjected to police-like interrogation tactics. They are questioned in separate rooms about their family, each other, and personal details of their lives. The CPS workers pry about personal relationships, drug use, and sexual activity. Although these young women have committed no crime themselves, they are subjected to strangers entering their house and demanding to know if they’re having sex. Through these stories, not only do we see the theme of rights and privacy emerging again, but also we see how the difference between protection and persecution for young people in child welfare is continuously being obscured.

The one downside to Know How is its lack of explicit engagement with race, structural racism, and racialized notions of the family. Perhaps in this narrative format, it would be awkward to try to be so overt about racial politics, but it is perhaps equally awkward that not once is race or racism even mentioned. The entire cast, except for a lawyer, a psychologist, and a CPS worker, is of color and predominantly African American. The film takes place in neighborhoods and schools that are overwhelming black and nonwhite. Perhaps race is never brought up because for people involved in the system, race and racial dynamics are so self-evident as to not even need mentioning. Certainly anyone who researches, works in, or has been involved in foster care deeply understands the problems of overrepresentation of children and families of color. The problem I have with Know How, though, is that it takes race for granted. While that might not be a problem for the cast or the makers of the film whose ultimate goal is to tell these all-too-often marginalized and invisible stories, I think it could be a problem in trying to engage students in a classroom or the general public around the film. I worry that race could easily be dismissed as a peripheral problem, and that the “real” problem lies in economic inequality or poorly run bureaucracies. Clearly all these children are economically disadvantaged, but we need a way to talk about how race overdetermines the neighborhoods, the schools, the institutions, and especially family legibility in the eyes of the state.

Despite having no clear entry point for engaging in discussions around race and specifically structural racism, Know How remains an important film for the ways in which it empowers and gives voice to young people. Although I can imagine this being a useful film in an array of classroom settings, from courses on social inequality to even more nuts and bolts classes for social work practitioners, I believe that the most would be gained from this film if it is taught as method and methodology. Know How is memorable, certainly for its stories, but perhaps more so for its form. Students and young researchers would learn from seeing how storytelling, music, and film are all powerful methods for presenting qualitative research. Because Know How was actually made with and by young people who had been in foster care, it is also an excellent means for discussing the possibilities of participatory research. The narrative’s complexity is what makes the film so compelling, and that complexity seems to be largely gained from how the perspectives of the young people are woven intimately throughout. In a research capacity, having participants write music, tell detailed stories, and even encourage visual methods from photography to film making blurs the line between researcher and researched. This film could beautifully illustrate that point to young scholars who are interested in more than just explanatory, positivistic research. More important perhaps, it also reminds all of us that young people, even the seemingly most marginalized, have the agency and ability to write and record their own stories in their own voices. By giving encouragement and credence to those voices we only have more knowledge and nuance to gain.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-citizenship.

Citation: Sarah Stinard-Kiel. Review of Escoriaza, Juan Carlos Pineiro, dir., Know How. H-Citizenship, H-Net Reviews. October, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44200

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.