Separating Children from Their Families Isn’t a New Tragedy, It’s Part and Parcel of American History

This is a history that black and indigenous people known particularly well. For over 250 years, black children were regularly and systematically separated from their mothers under slavery in order to be sold off to distant plantations. Anyone who has read a slave narrative is familiar with this history. In perhaps the most well known of these, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, this reality is narrated with heartbreaking realism. Douglass recounts:

“My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant--before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child's affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.”

Douglass’ story was not unique. In fact, the practice of separating slave children from their mothers was so common that Harvard Sociologist Orlando Patterson later coined a term for it in his book Slavery and Social Death. He calls this process natal alienation and explains the fundamental role it played in slavery by converting the slave into a “socially dead person.” He explains, “[a]lienated from all ‘rights’ or claims of birth, he ceased to belong in his own right to any legitimate social order. All slaves experienced, at the very least, a secular excommunication.”

What Patterson’s words reveal is that the process of separating slave children from their mothers was not merely a product of immorality or dehumanization, but rather a calculated measure to ensure the slave’s isolation and social destabilization. These practices made it easier for slaves to be bought and sold as things rather than people. People have families and communities. Things have no social relations.

When we consider the words of Douglass and Patterson, the images of crying children at the border take on a new meaning. This is not only a tragedy brought on by contemporary political practices, but also the embrace of historically white supremacist practices.

This would not be the first time since the Emancipation Proclamation that these practices have been used. Throughout the early twentieth century, long after the end of plantation slavery, indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in white, Christian families. Often with the support of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, these families were paid by the government to take in and assimilate indigenous children. This assimilation was often based on white American cultural and religious values. By the time the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act was passed, 25-35 percent of all indigenous children in the U.S. had been taken from their families.

A cursory glance at history reveals that separating BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) children from their families has been a part of American cultural and legal practice for centuries. Today, I fear what the futures of these missing children might be. If history is any indicator, at best they have been forcibly integrated into families that are not their own. Perhaps these families will love and care for them. Perhaps not. A darker possibility is that the thousands of children who “disappeared” from U.S. custody were targeted for human trafficking. Whatever their fate, none of these options represent the safety these immigrants were searching for.

As I write this, President Trump has announced an executive order that will cease the separation of immigrant families. I worry that such proclamations will be the end of our discussions of immigration policy and the systemic destruction of BIPOC families. Regardless of how the current administration proceeds two things remain true. One, hundreds of thousands of people have already been hurt by these policies. Two, separating families is not a new practice and it is unlikely to disappear with the signing of an executive order. The question now is, rather than ignore these historical realities, how are we going to change them?