...[T]o be a negro in [the US] and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.
James Baldwin
She couldn't remember much, but Baby Suggs did remember how that first-born baby loved "'the burned bottom of bread'". She remembering to Sethe, her daughter-in-law. Up north now. Sethe, after a harrowing escape that included giving birth to a baby daughter.
Baby Suggs bore eight children. We assume some were, if not all, eventually sold to slaveholders on other plantations. But she remember that first-born baby and the burned bottom of bread.
It's Sethe's turn. Remembering how Buglar and Howard both ran off, she begins to describe a "'pretty place'" among the "'the most beautiful sycamores in the world.'" "'Wonderful" trees are in this 'pretty place'". Not the boys! Yes, boys are hanging there, but remember them, face them. No. "'Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.'"
I find it interesting that someone like J. D. Vance, arguing against the existence of "cat ladies,"... Childless... cat ladies to be specific, would have little to no information about the history of American terror conducted against children. The reader is probably thinking about the present state in which children in the US go to bed hungry.
Children in the US are losing the freedom to know the history of resistance and resilience. If those like J. D. Vance have their way, US children will come to accept the dictates of a dictator. Even marching in lockstep, participating in the stamping out of democracy.
We are responsible for what happens to our collective future!
Scholar Laura Briggs considered the images of women like Baby Suggs and Sethe, represented in Toni Morrison's Beloved. In Taking Children: The History of American Terror, Briggs's study examines the violence surrounding not just the separation of black children from their families, but that violence inflicted on indigenous, as a result of "civilizing," or rather ethnic-cleansing theories, and immigrant children, as a result of white fear of being "replaced" by an invasion of racially inferior beings.
And, as Trump and his ilk remind us, these fearful white Americans aren't necessarily referring to immigrant children from Norway!
It is nothing short of a history of terror. What are we to make of a memory in which a mother can't seem to remember only one of her stolen children and the other can only remember the trees, where those children might have swung from. Where they might have encountered the cruelty, and the injustice of a violent system based on an ideology of white supremacy-- what are we to make of that?
What are we to make of children "civilized" in schools set aside for them by people who thought nothing of them of human beings? Children just wanting to be. To be among their family and friends. Village. Or think of children suddenly in the homes of strangers! Either way, as Briggs writes, these children were forced to forget their languages, customs, traditions. Cruelest of all, these children were taught to forget their parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Forget that they were ever indigenous people-- the original caretakers of a land strangers will call home.
If we consider the administrations of Bush II, Obama, and Trump, we already are in a world similar to Winston's in which we have drilled into our heads that the problem with America is the problem of immigrants at the border. Yet, our education system and media rarely if ever is allowed to present the facts to the American people regarding the decades in which the CIA sponsored horror shows, pogroms, in other words to control and to clone compliance among the citizens in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, as part of policies, allowing megacorporations to rape the land. With a supply cheap labor, mind you! Child labor, in some cases.
Exceptional Americans certainly don't engage in barbarity! They don't ever separate children from their parents.
When, as Briggs writes, Bush II denied separating children from parents, he seemed to forget that some Americans were watching. "'That's not the way America operates. We're a decent, compassionate country.' America is a country that believes in families, he claimed, and treats people with dignity."
Echoing Bush II is Trump: "'This is America. We don't do that.'"
This is America and we do this!
America has done this since before it fought a revolution to be free of tyranny. This was America, and this is still America, doing what cries out for a state of rage from her citizens.
Certain people can never be honest with themselves. Too much is on the line to wait. It's been hundreds of years and a thousand backhanded slaps in the face every day. They continue through the generations to speak dishonestly.
So, on the evening news, we kept watching. We kept seeing the images and the videos. We kept hearing the babies screaming and the mothers moaning. We kept seeing protesters carrying posters of "children crying in shelters as Border Patrol officers laughed".
And the naysayers still claimed this isn't America! It's the rapists sending their children. It's those criminals crossing to invade American homes.
Yet the photos showed "crying mothers and babies torn from their arms". The public debate on asylum seekers brought Briggs to this particular history of terror in the US.
"As an historian, I found the deliberate attempt to sow confusion and failure of most people to be able to fill in the blanks or correct the misinformation in the public conversation extraordinarily frustrating-- and surprising." Briggs explains. What we are experiencing, Briggs argues, is a "failure of remembrance of taking children as part of the arsenal of state terrorism against unruly or rebellious communities".
In other words, it's a form of punishment. One of the cruelest. And for the most part, Americans can turn away if the parents are labeled "criminal" or "illegal". Alien! What could be more aligned with "aliens" than the policies that have been America's foundational policy toward indigenous, Africans, Haitians, and Central Americans since the European settlers crossed the Atlantic?
In Latin America, children were taken from their parents in order "to ensure that the very young who might have been touched by their parents' leftist ideals" wouldn't harbor any ill feelings toward the perpetrators of this crime. The perpetrators were often brutal, anti-democracy regimes supported by the CIA. Yet, these pogroms have branded the parents "criminals".
As Briggs writes, "the criminalization of families of color, and the widespread taking of their children into foster care for petty or imagined crimes, provided the template for taking children at the border". The war on drugs unites the narratives of terrorized children in Central America and of urban drug crime among blacks and Latinx. Cocaine was transported to the US and sold to poverty-stricken communities. Journalists have documented evidence that the US supported Reagan's Contra and "those who worked with them were engaged in moving Colombian cocaine to Florida and California".
An interesting point she makes points to how DACA is "a fig leaf to hide the immigrant child detention centers". We must ask the question, what goes on behind the closed doors of these detention centers? Rapes and beatings, writes Briggs, along with the theft of items belonging to immigrants and the "placing" of "citizen" children in foster care-- maybe that's what's happening? Our taxes are going toward the abuse of children at the border!
How did we get from the "urban" removal of families of color to high-priced, gentrified housing for the very wealthy?
There are Americans who don't want to read anything or hear anything except that America is exceptional. Innocent. A terror-free zone. But there was the genocide of indigenous people. There was the removal of indigenous children against the will of parents rebelling against the genocide. Parents resisting the genocide of their people were punished. And in the cruelest way-- by having their children taken from them.
The boarding school where these children were sent wasn't intended to educate the children, Briggs writes: On the contrary, these schools were intended to produce "useful" weapons to persuade indigenous people to end their warring over "violated treaties". In other words, Briggs argues that these children were separated from parents and "taken" as "hostages for tribal good behavior".
The separation of children from families was an enterprise in which capitalism allowed for white Americans to profit. All weren't slaveholders, ship builders, or merchants, or auction traders. Some were, however, hunters, folks who learned to pursue human beings in some out of the way and hostile of environments. These hunters of human beings were successful at their jobs! They managed to make their quota, capturing African men, women, and children, as if these human beings were free of beating hearts.
Imagine the noisy marketplaces. The confused women and their children clinging to their legs. Look at the prospective hunters, gathered as if at an employment center.
The Catholic Church served, in part, as a center for what Briggs calls "the children of silence". These were the children rounded up, kidnapped, by the Church during the military dictatorship in Chile. Such an endeavor allowed "elevated" the status of the Catholic Church in the eyes of the dictatorship. Tyranny dresses like robed priests and bishops; yet there were priests, nuns, and bishops in a state of rage. There they remained, suffering the same fate as protesters. Many were murdered "at such high rates that a bishop ordered all of them [priests and nuns and lay catechists] out of the state of Quiche".
There's no doubt that the response to outraged protesters in the US was to bring about the separation of children from parents-- incarcerated for protesting.
As Briggs explains, similar to Nixon's War on Drugs, were the incarceration of blacks, indigenous, and Latinx citizens led to more separation of children, protesters committed to changing "how we understand sexuality and the meaning of family," of who could raise children, and how to rethink the "racialized and gendered divisions of labor in unpaid work," were also subjected to incarceration. That is, another form of separating children from their parents.
An outrage! I agree with Briggs that the idea of "fetal protection" is hypocritical, at best. As I write this, there's a woman or two or more bleeding while attempting to cross into a state where she is able to receive medical care as a result of a pregnancy. It's not the women like me who opted not to become mothers of humans creating the miserable world for our fellow human beings, J. D. Vance!
How did we get here? We've been here! Running forward through "underground" pathways one minute, and in the next, marching lockstep in iron boots!
Outrage is a motivator, and, if we aren't to all turn into monsters, it must be directed toward organized protest against the madness.
And change !
The cabal of the heartless should be left to wither on their vines!
In the meantime, our work moves us forward toward a full of embrace of freedom, equity, democracy. Towards better selves and the elimination of old-world classifications.
I n her article, "Pointing Fingers", Jacqueline Rose writes, so long "as human subjects do not question the cruelty and injustice of their social arrangements we aren't free. And democracy remains an experiment rather than a reality for all."
"We are all responsible for the ills of the world."
And we are! Who else can we depend upon to bring about the change we yearn for?
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