Terri Sewell

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lashed out at Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.) on Thursday when confronted with past remarks he had made about “re-parenting” Black children.

During Kennedy’s testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, Sewell said the secretary had “made a number of outlandish and frankly disturbing comments.”

“In a 2024 podcast interview, you suggested that Black children on ADHD medication should be re-parented. Have you ever re-parented or parented a Black child?” Sewell asked.

Kennedy looked incredulous.

“I don’t even know what that phrase means, and I doubt that I said it. I’m not going to answer something that I didn’t say,” he said. Sewell agreed that she “doesn’t know what it means, either.”

The two then began talking over one another, voices rising. Sewell told Kennedy he “absolutely said that.” He responded that he’d “like to hear the recording.”

“You’re just making stuff up!” Kennedy said.

Their fiery exchange unfolded as one of Sewell’s aides held up a large posterboard quoting Kennedy’s remarks from a June 2024 interview on the 19Keys online show.

“Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence,” Kennedy said during that 2024 interview. “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 cellphones, no screens. You’ll actually have to talk to people.”

Kennedy’s remarks came during a discussion about his plan to open “healing farms,” a sprawling new system of tax-payer funded rehabilitation centers where people experiencing addiction would be sent to recover.

Kennedy, who has often spoken about his recovery from drug abuse and addiction, later expanded on the idea during his 2024 presidential campaign.

“I’m going to bring a new industry to [rural] America, where addicts can help each other recover from their addictions,” Kennedy said in a campaign video about addiction released in June 2024. “We’re going to build hundreds of healing farms where American kids can reconnect with America’s soil.”

During Thursday’s hearing, as Kennedy continually denied proposing “re-parenting,” Sewell referenced his past remarks about family separation and rehabilitation farms.

“For Black families of the United States, the issue of family separation is not new. Our nation has a long and painful history of separating Black children from their families,” Sewell said, referencing slavery and Jim Crow-era policing.

“And yet you are suggesting that the federal government should take Black children away from their families and re-parent them and send them off to some wellness farm instead of providing them with evidence-based medical treatment,” she continued.

According to the American Bar Association, half of all Black children in the U.S. will face a child welfare investigation before turning 18 — nearly double the rate for white children. Nearly 10% will be removed from their parents and placed in foster care, twice the rate of white children.

“Even today, Black children are removed from their homes at higher rates than white children,“ Sewell said as her time came to an end. ”Not because of their greater harm, but because of longstanding bias and built-in institutionalism. For you to suggest that Black families are not capable of raising their own children is deeply offensive.”

“I never suggested that,” Kennedy said.