[News] Separating Migrant Families Is Barbaric. It’s Also What the US Has Been Doing to People of Color for Hundreds of Years

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://theintercept.com/2018/06/20/family-separation-immigration-history-slavery-mass-incarceration/ 



  Separating Migrant Families Is Barbaric. It’s Also What the U.S. Has
  Been Doing to People of Color for Hundreds of Years.

Shaun King - June 20, 2018
------------------------------------------------------------------------

*_Like most of_*** you reading this, I am deeply appalled at what I see 
happening right now in the United States — immigrant children being 
snatched away from their parents and sent to separate detention centers, 
often locked in cages with strangers, with no real idea of when they’ll 
ever be reunited with their families. It’s an abomination.

But I often see two troubling responses to this crisis that show just 
how aloof and asleep millions of Americans are right now.

The first is a statement that goes something like this: This is not the 
America I know and love. The second is a question, rooted in the same 
ignorance, that goes something like this: How could this ever happen in 
the United States?

What’s happening right now in our country is, without question, a human 
rights catastrophe. Yet every deeply entrenched mechanism used in these 
policies and the spirit fueling this catastrophe are as American as 
Facebook and Disneyland.

Let me break it down. At least five troubling factors are at play here. 
All five were fully and completely present before this current crisis 
ever began. They set the tone and created the culture in which something 
so heinous could ever take place.

First, this has happened here before. In fact, it has happened millions 
of times across the years in this country. Africans forced into slavery 
in this country were routinely separated from their children — not only 
in being transported to the Americas, but then repeatedly at the auction 
block. <https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123608207> 
Not thousands, but millions — of mothers and fathers, husbands and 
wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters — were all forcefully 
separated from each other. And this was no brief period of this nation’s 
history, but a feature of the institution of slavery that existed in the 
United States for nearly 250 years.

Not only were enslaved African children routinely separated from their 
families, but so too were Native Americans in this country. From the 
late 1800s all the way until the 1970s, children were routinely taken 
from Native American homes by force and sent to barbaric “Indian schools 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/05/31/barbaric-americas-cruel-history-of-separating-children-from-their-parents/?utm_term=.63bdf4f82d09>,” 
where their hair was cut and their names and culture stripped away. Many 
of them never saw their families again.

What might be most shocking, though, is the way the U.S. — today, in the 
present — separates so many families whose stories go unremarked upon. 
I’m talking about the crisis of mass incarceration in America, of which 
the crackdown on immigrants is but one horrific piece.

Right now, as you read this, hundreds of thousands 
<https://www.thenation.com/article/america-is-waking-up-to-the-injustice-of-cash-bail/> 
of adults and children, disproportionately black and Latino, are in 
jails all over this country – not because they’ve been convicted of a 
crime, but because they cannot afford cash bail 
<https://theintercept.com/2018/06/09/paul-manafort-bail-inequality/>. 
Many of them will languish in jail not for days or weeks, but for months 
and years without ever being convicted of a crime. In fact, about 65 
percent <https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018.html> of people in 
local jails in this country on any given day have not been convicted of 
a crime. They are in jail simply because they cannot afford bail. They, 
too, are separated from their families.

*_You’d have a_* hard time finding an extended period of American 
history where children and parents of color weren’t forcefully separated 
from one another by the white power structure in this country. It’s 
woefully and painfully normal. And it’s because it’s so normal that it 
is so easy for it to happen again and again in this country. This nation 
has mastered separating parents and children. Pretending otherwise is to 
offer a revisionist history.

It should come as no surprise, then, that so many on the right — those 
who would bristle at acknowledging, let alone apologizing for, this 
history — are embracing a policy of forced family separation.

On Monday night, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham said 
<https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/1009053138756784128>, with a smug 
smile, that the immigrant children being held in detention centers are 
“essentially in summer camp.” This, in spite of the reality that the 
leading doctors and medical groups across the country have said that 
forcefully separating children from their parents in detention centers 
causes “irreparable harm 
<https://www.npr.org/2018/06/15/620254326/doctors-warn-about-dangers-of-child-separations>” 
to the children. This, in spite of the gut-wrenching audio obtained 
byProPublica 
<https://www.propublica.org/article/children-separated-from-parents-border-patrol-cbp-trump-immigration-policy> 
of detained children sobbing and wailing for their parents while they 
are mocked by guards.

Nearly 60 percent 
<https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/18/politics/immigration-trump-approval/index.html> 
of Republicans approve the practice of separating immigrant children 
from their parents at the border. And it’s not hard to understand why.

For years now, Donald Trump has dehumanized border-crossing Latinos 
every chance he gets — routinely calling them animals, murderers, and 
rapists. He reduced entire nations of color to being “shithole 
countries.” On Monday, he reiterated this, saying 
<http://time.com/5314957/family-separation-policy-trump-rhetoric/> immigrants 
were coming from “the most dangerous places in the world.”

This essential step — of reducing immigrants to a subhuman status — must 
not be overlooked. It happened throughout the transatlantic slave trade. 
It happened throughout the genocide of Native Americans. It happened 
throughout the Holocaust. It happened throughout the Rwandan genocide. 
It happens today with victims of police brutality.

Whenever a people group suffers unspeakable horrors and oppression, the 
people in power first reduce and dehumanize them — making it such that 
the conscience of the people in power is fully at ease during the 
oppression. This is how Ingraham could compare the detention centers to 
“summer camps”: She has convinced herself that the United States is 
doing these subhuman children a favor.

At the root of the current human rights crisis at American borders is 
white supremacy and bigotry. Trump does not have a problem with 
immigrants. His mother was an immigrant from Scotland. His grandparents 
were all immigrants. His first wife, Ivana, was an immigrant from what 
is now the Czech Republic; Trump’s children with her — Donald Jr., 
Ivanka, and Eric — have an immigrant parent. Trump’s third wife, 
Melania, is an immigrant from Slovenia. She just became a citizen in 
2006. His son with her, Barron, has an immigrant parent. So no, Trump 
doesn’t hate immigrants. But he does seem to hate immigrants of color. 
And this distinction is essential.

Melania Trump’s parents are benefactors of what Trump and the right call 
“chain migration.” They are in the United States legally because of 
their relationship to her. Trump and conservatives rail against this 
policy — but his parents and grandparents and in-laws all benefited from 
it. If the right wing hated immigrants, Trump would probably be among 
the least-liked public figures in the country. But many of those on the 
right — like everyone here but Native Americans — are all descendants of 
immigrants themselves. Their problem is not with immigrants; it’s with 
immigrants of color, be they from Mexico or the Americas or any of the 
nations listed in Trump’s Muslim ban.

White supremacy and bigotry drive so many American policies. 
Trump’s senior policy adviser Stephen Miller has shown bigoted 
tendencies 
<http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/king-stephen-miller-latest-liar-bigot-team-trump-article-1.2971639> 
since high school. And now he is said to be the chief author of both the 
Muslim ban and the new policy 
<https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/18/trump-aides-plan-fresh-immigration-crackdowns-before-midterms-652246> 
of separating immigrant children from their parents. We are living in 
the age where hate crimes are on the rise 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-hatecrime-fbi/u-s-hate-crimes-rise-for-second-straight-year-fbi-idUSKBN1DD2BA> 
in the United States. White supremacists are running for office inrecord 
numbers 
<https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/white-nationalists-are-running-for-office-in-record-numbers-1245616707632>.

*_There are two_* more essential factors are at play in what we see 
happening at our border right now. We need to talk about these things to 
really understand what’s going on, to see how we got to this point.

The first is the reality that the United States is the incarceration 
nation. No nation in the entire world incarcerates more people than we 
do. We routinely have somewhere around 2.3 million people in jail and 
prison on any given day, and at least 10.6 million 
<https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018.html> are put into jails 
and prisons every year. The United States has criminalized poverty, 
forcing people into jail if they cannot afford to pay the most basic 
fees, whether traffic tickets, court fines, or cash bail. The United 
States has criminalized drug addiction, sending millions of people to 
jail and prison over the generations for simple drug possession. This 
nation has criminalized mental illness. Two million people with a mental 
illness are jailed 
<https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Public-Policy/Jailing-People-with-Mental-Illness> in 
this nation each year.

It was only a matter of time until people seeking asylum at America’s 
borders were also criminalized and warehoused. It’s what this nation 
does. Instead of solving our most difficult problems, we increase police 
forces, build more jails and prisons, including tent cities if 
necessary, and arrest people — especially people of color.

Lastly — and this is key — what we see happening right now at America’s 
borders has everything to do with profiteering and the privatization of 
America’s jails and prisons. It’s a huge multibillion-dollar industry 
<https://theintercept.com/2016/11/28/private-prisons-were-thriving-even-before-trump-was-elected/>. 
Our nation has publicly traded companies whose business it is to profit 
off of mass incarceration — and there is a profit margin on building and 
running emergency holding facilities and tent cities like we see being 
formed right now to detain immigrant children and families. Not only are 
these places being staffed and secured, but the food, the cleaning 
crews, and the supplies all have an exorbitant cost.

The same conservatives who campaign on cutting costs and reducing 
deficits then have no problem at all spending multiple billions of 
dollars on mass incarceration. Executives from the private prison 
industry have seen their profits explode 
<https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/trump%E2%80%99s-first-year-has-been-private-prison-industry-best> under 
Trump and he has beenrewarded handsomely 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/with-business-booming-under-trump-private-prison-giant-gathers-at-presidents-resort/2017/10/25/b281d32c-adee-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.791ce2dcc122> 
with six-figure donations from their executives. In this country, when 
you see evil, you can almost always follow the money trail.

What’s happening right now is awful. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts. It 
didn’t come out of nowhere, though. It came right from the American 
playbook. This nation has routinely mistreated and abused people of 
color for hundreds of years — and has willfully separated millions of 
families, sometimes permanently, for sport and profit, on this soil. 
Speak out against it. Organize against it. But just know that what you 
are seeing has deep roots.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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