June 7, 2018
In the news yesterday we learned that border arrests have exceeded 50,000 for the third month in a row (Source: “Illegal crossings remain high,” by Nick Miroff, The Washington Post, 6/6/18). This is three times the number from a year ago. In addition, the ranks of immigrant children being held in custody has swelled to 20,000, increasing by 20% in the last month alone, an undoubted consequence of Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy (ibid).
We have seen the footage of U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley being blocked from entering the former Walmart with blacked out windows that has been re-purposed as a detention center for immigrant children. When Senator Merkley persisted in seeking entrance, the government officials at the Brownsville, Texas facility called the police. Senator Merkley said that he saw children in another facility in McAllen, Texas being held in cages (Source: “Senator Jeff Merkley denied entry into one migrant detention facility, claims he saw kids caged in another,” by Emily Tillet, CBSNews.com, 6/4/18).
In the face of the uproar over an official U.S. policy that is tantamount to torture, committed racist and diminutive martinet, Jeff Sessions, forcefully defended the policy, rejecting the contention that parents have a “moral right” to stay with their children, (Source: “Sessions defends separating children and undocumented parents at border,” by Luke Barr, ABCNews.com, 6/6/18).
Many Americans across the political spectrum, rightly horrified by the flagrant cruelty being meted out in our name, cry plaintively that “this is not who we are.” An unflinching look at our history reveals the delusion behind that aspirational truism.
During the more than 200 years of chattel slavery in this country, it was routine practice to separate black children from their parents, selling one or the other off to distant plantations, with no thought to the consequences. Slave narratives are rife with heart wrenching tales of black women being beaten for trying to hold on to their children who were in the process of being sold away from them into unknown horrors (Source: ‘Barbaric’: America’s cruel history of separating children from their parents,” by DeNeen L. Brown, The Washington Post, 5/31/18). Those who think that America’s practice of cruelly ripping children from their families ended with the Emancipation Proclamation need look no further than the notorious Indian boarding schools – U.S. government or church run institutions that snatched Indigenous children from their families to be “re-educated” away from their Native identity. Children in these schools had their long hair shorn and were given English names. Students were punished for speaking their own languages, prohibited from practicing their indigenous traditions and forcibly indoctrinated into Christianity. These practices persisted at institutions as late as 1970 (Source: “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many,” by Charla Bear, NPR.org 5/12/08).
The fact is that the practice of separating Black, Brown and Indigenous children from their families has a long, ignominious history in this country. Not only is this who we are, it is who we have always been. The question is, “Who do we want to become?”