A recent New Yorker cover by artist R. Kikuo Johnson doesn't lie: wealthy white American women often pay other non-white women to look after their children.
And these women, often mothers, send the money they earn back home to the Caribbean, the Philippines and Latin America to support the children they rarely see.
What “lessons” can we draw from the brutal murders of these two children? The Krim family's nightmarish ordeal is not the result of a “systematic” event, but a unique, irreducible horror.
Any young professional living in a left-leaning city like New York or Los Angeles (i.e., your typical New Yorker reader) knows this awkward, and somehow embarrassing, reality all too well.
The status quo is the status quo, and there's not much we can do about it if we want to maintain reliable, affordable child care services.
Blanca's Choice
We have lived with this contradiction. Ten years ago, the Economic Distress Reporting Project “Who will look after the wet nurse's children?”It offers a glimpse into Manhattan caregiver life, perfectly matched by Johnson's illustrations.
Author Alisa Quart focuses on the struggles of Blanca, an immigrant from Paraguay who grew up in extreme poverty and often went hungry as a child, and began working at age 8. Despite this, she earned a nursing degree and got a job that paid enough to support herself and her mother.
But when her son Guido was born, she realized she needed to leave her family behind to pursue opportunities in America for her son.
Quarto deftly depicts the cruel irony of this sacrifice: she points out the obvious maternal pride Blanca feels for the two-year-old “baby with stubby little legs” in her care, almost the same age she was when she left Guido a decade earlier.
It's moving, but also a little condescending: Quart clearly assumes that his subject's suffering is inevitable, and in his rush to secure his reader's agreement, he neglects to mention the choices Blanca might have made in the matter. Though Blanca's grueling seven-day work week supports a stable but precarious middle-class life for her son, Quart portrays her as a helpless victim rather than a rational economic activist.
If so, who is to blame? Certainly not the Paraguayan leadership. Blanca repeatedly told Quarto, “There is no middle class where I come from.” [class].”
Instead, the responsibility to fix the problem lies with America. After all, it is the American people who are demanding all the child care.
And what about the specific Americans who employ Blanca? Quarto doesn't accuse them of exploiting Blanca, but he also refuses to acknowledge that they gave her an opportunity. These parents are never heard in Quarto's article, just as they are never seen on the cover of The New Yorker.
People of “YT”
Our culture is so pervasive with an obsession with “white supremacy” and “white privilege” that it’s easy to fill in the blanks. 1 X accounts replied To the New Yorker post:
Women of color are caring for YouTubers' kids, supporting their families, and trying to send their own kids to college. I imagine their moms are at a yoga class somewhere and their dads are “on the road” with their assistants/mistresses.
Lately, my patience with this kind of rhetoric has worn thin as more and more people are beginning to realize that those who cry white privilege are invariably displaying their own harmful ego, a sense of non-white privilege.
White privilege is just as damaging to social cohesion as racism. It poisons conversations about crime, immigration, and education.
And sometimes it added deadly tension to already strained relationships between mothers and foreign-born caregivers.
An unspeakable crime
Yoselyn Ortega had a similar history to Blanca's before she slit the throat of 2-year-old Leo Crim and stabbed his 6-year-old sister, Lulu, more than 20 times.
One of seven children born to a Dominican grocery store owner and his wife, Ortega began working in her father's store at age 7. As an adult, she immigrated to the United States, like most of her siblings, and, like Blanca, she left behind a son to whom she sent money.
But Ortega also differed from Blanca in an important way: She had struggled with depression since her teenage years and struggled as an adult to find her place in her adopted home.
She bounced around from apartment to apartment in New York, staying with family and friends, and working a variety of factory jobs, so in 2010, when Kevin and Marina Krim offered Ortega, then 49, a job caring for their two children (Marina was pregnant with her third), it promised the financial stability she desperately needed.
By all accounts, Ortega was a loving caregiver and trusted employee, and the Krims did their best to treat him well: When Ortega's teenage son, Jesús Frias, moved to New York and enrolled in an expensive private school, the Krims offered him extra cleaning work to ease the financial burden.
They also paid for Ortega's two trips back to the Dominican Republic to deal with family emergencies and provided part-time jobs for Frias and Ortega's sister, Daisy.
But by the fall of 2012, Ortega began to change and became sullen and resentful.
On the evening of October 25, Marina Krim returned to her Upper West Side apartment with her 3-year-old daughter, Nessie, who was having a swimming lesson a few blocks away. Ortega, who had Leo and Lulu with him, had not shown up with them to Lulu's ballet class earlier that day.
Marina walked into the dark apartment and toward the sliver of light streaming in through the bathroom door, calling her children's names.
There she witnessed unspeakable horror: the bloody and brutally murdered bodies of Leo and Lucia in the bathtub, with the nurse sitting on the floor next to them, still holding the knife she had used to kill them. As Nessie began to scream, Ortega made eye contact with Klim and began slashing her own wrists and stabbing herself in the neck.
A conspiracy of deception
At trial, the defense argued that Ortega was mentally ill, citing testimony from friends and family that he suffered from hallucinations of a demonic “black man.”
Ortega later complained to a defense psychiatrist that he had a mental illness, but in the immediate aftermath of the crime he seemed to suggest a more mundane motive. To air her dissatisfaction “I had to do everything and take care of the kids,” she said of the Krim family with their alphabet board.
The attack appears to have been planned: Ortega had collected various documents and family memorabilia and left them that morning in the apartment he shared with his sister.
Prosecutors also questioned why no one close to Ortega tried to inform her employer about this horrific behavior. Moreover, no one mentioned these hallucinations until months after the murder. When asked why she never mentioned Ortega's strange behavior during her initial police interview, neighbor Jennifer Reynoso responded, “I didn't want to get involved in any of this. I was pregnant and I had my own problems.”
It was a similar plot of deception that linked Ortega and the Krim family in the first place.
Ortega's sister, Cecilia, who looked after Lucia Krim's preschool children, approached Marina Krim, who was then well into her third pregnancy, and asked if she was looking for a babysitter. She recommended Yoselyn.
When Krim asked Yoselyn who she'd met, she named two women, both of whom were her nieces. One of them, Yakelyn Severino, had emailed Krim an impassioned letter detailing how Ortega had cared for her infant son for two years. When asked how she knew Yoselyn, Severino said she'd been introduced to her by another nanny.
But it was all a lie. Ortega had no experience raising a child. In fact, family members say the responsibility of caring for Frias after years of being away took a huge emotional toll on her. Severino didn't have any children at the time. She used her husband's name for their “son.”
No regrets
Marina Krim did not spare Ortega's supporters. statement she said at her former nanny's sentencing hearing in May 2018.
What little dignity the defendant's family had after the murder was destroyed. In the last 5.5 years, the defendant has not shown the slightest bit of remorse. Not a single member of her family has contacted my family to say “we are sorry.” Communication between people has never been easier, yet we have heard nothing from this family. No letters, no emails, nothing. Not a single person has said “we are sorry.”
Ortega was sentenced to life in prison without parole, and she and the witnesses who supported her were forgotten.
The Crimms had two more children. Charitable Foundations In honor of Leo and Lulu.
What “lessons” can we draw from the murder of these two children? The Krim family's nightmarish ordeal is not the result of a “systematic” event, but a unique, irreducible horror.
And yet the New Yorker cover, with all the derisive comments about “white mothers” that it provoked, could not help but remind us of poor Marina Krim, who made the terrible mistake of entrusting her children to the wrong strangers.
She seemed keenly aware that nannies had children too, and tried to be as empathetic and helpful as she could – and perhaps even simply offering them a job would have helped them.
A mother's sacrifice
The young man in cap and gown on the cover of The New Yorker justified his mother's sacrifice. So did Jesús Frías. At the time of his trial, he too was on the brink of adulthood, graduating from college and applying to medical school. During his testimony, he exuded the confidence of a young man with a bright future, smiling at the jury and seeming to relish the spotlight. He was working on a PhD in biology and had recently begun work as a postdoctoral researcher studying a cure for muscular dystrophy.
He described his mother's crime as ” “accident.” But in this callousness it is difficult not to see a trace of the contemptuous, derisive resentment directed at any attempt today to assert that American citizenship is a privilege that must be earned.
What do they owe us when we clearly have more than they do? Why should they believe that our amazement at “culture” and “shared values” is merely a cynical excuse to assume a superior position to themselves?
Such thinking makes sense, given that many Americans themselves think of citizenship as membership in a kind of economic opportunity zone for self-proclaimed global citizens.
These days, America is more of a vast collection of resources than an ideal, so who are the original exploiters to complain about being squeezed a little in return?
That's fair. But it leaves us with a more troubling question: Can America, and all that it has to offer, survive when its people no longer think of themselves as American? We may have an answer to that question sooner than we expect.
