Many people are outraged by this president’s inhuman “zero-tolerance” policy, which is separating thousands of children from their parents.
Opponents of the policy consistently invoke American values of welcoming immigrants and our respect for the sanctity of the family. Again and again politicians, immigrants’ rights activists, and ordinary people say that not giving asylum to immigrants and separating children from their parents is not what this country is about.
While I agree that this policy is deplorable, the history of the United States is replete with separating children from their parents and with laws keeping certain groups of people out of the country.
The mythology of America’s open arms to immigrants is based on a very short period of time in the late 19th century when the country had an acute need for labor to work in the factories of the burgeoning industrial revolution. By the first decade of the 20th century, 16,000 immigrants, many from southern and eastern Europe, had immigrated to the U.S.
In addition, many African-Americans from the South, lured by the hope of jobs in the factories and the desire to escape Jim Crow laws that severely limited life their lives, migrated to Northern cities. The reaction of many whites was an anti-immigrant hysteria coupled with the virulent racism not unlike the reaction to the election of Barack Obama, which has been greatly increased since the election of a president who supports this view.
By 1924, Congress was able to pass an immigration act which imposed quotas on immigration to 2 or 3 percent of the ethnic makeup of the U.S. according to the 1890 census — before the great wave of immigration. The quotas for southern and eastern Europeans, then, were miniscule, while those for northern Europeans were large. Those quotas were not lifted until 1965, severely limiting immigration from these countries for decades.
Other groups were also kept out by specific laws. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which forbid entry to all Chinese laborers, is only one example of legislation to keep Asian immigrants from entering the U.S. legally.
Nor does U.S. history reflect respect for family relations. Despite all the lofty rhetoric about our morals, forcibly tearing children away from their parents was the norm under slavery. The slave traders who kidnapped Africans to sell in the U.S. had no concern for families and when Africans were on the auction block in the U.S., children were regularly sold away from their mothers.
While slaves did marry and a few were able to establish lasting relationships, the slave family had no legal standing. Some women under slavery were forced to give birth to children meant to be sold, as people in slavery were valuable commodities. Financial considerations or the whim of owners determined whether husbands and wives and parents and children could stay together.
Native American families, on the other hand, did have legal standing, but their children were also forcibly removed. For more than a century, the U.S. government tore children away from their parents and transported them to what were called Indian boarding “schools,” usually many miles away from where their families and communities lived.
By the 1880s, 6,200 Native American children attended 60 of these “schools” many of them without the consent or sometimes even the knowledge of their parents. In 1878, the “school” founded by Col. Richard Henry Pratt in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was run with the strict discipline of a military mentality. It provided the model for other “schools,” some run by the U.S. government and others by religious orders.
Pratt famously said that his aim was to “kill the Indian to save the man.” The names of children were changed from what their parents had given them to English names and they were forbidden to speak their languages even when they were not in classes. Native clothes were destroyed and they were issued uniforms or other European clothing and boys’ hair was cut.
Conversion to Christianity was also mandatory. As Pratt proclaimed, the aim to was wipe out any trace of their culture which, according to the United Nations convention on genocide, is a genocidal practice. Those who were able to reunite with their families, often after many years, were no longer able to communicate since they spoke only English.
To call these places “schools” is a stretch. While they were taught English and the rudiments of basic education, they usually spent half of their time being trained for manual work, the boys as farm laborers and the girls as maids.
Pratt also developed the “placing out” system in which children were leased out to work for white families where exploitation was common. What we know from both the scholarship and personal accounts is that the children were ill fed, ill housed, and physically and sexually abused.
I understand the strategy of appealing to the best in this country, to want the U.S. to live up to the Constitution, but we have to remember that the Constitution, while never mentioning slavery, condones it. The history and contemporary policies of this country are not justice and liberty for all, but a duality, usually with white supremacy at the center. Freedom and democracy for some, and slavery or genocide for others.
Voting rights for property owners but not for ordinary men continued until the 1830s under the presidency of Andrew Jackson. That very same Jackson was responsible for the passage of the Indian Removal Act and the infamous “Trail of Tears,” during which the U.S. Army was ordered to forcibly remove 16,000 Cherokee men, women and children from their lands in the Southeast and transport them to Oklahoma with no provision being made for their survival during the long trek west. Four thousand of them died.
The president of the common man, as Jackson is called, was also responsible for mass murder. We need to remember also that women had no voting rights until 1920 and only after 52 years of struggle.
European Americans who deny this history do so at our own peril. I understand the strategy to appeal to the best of who we are, but to deny the negative in our past is dangerous. Appeals to a mythical past keeps us from facing ourselves.
As James Baldwin reminded us again, until we face who we are as white Americans we will never know who we are as individuals or as a nation.
I believe this denial contributed greatly to the election of a president who feeds Americans more and more lies every day and flaunts even the pretense of democracy.
Arlene Avakian, of Northampton, was one of the founders of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has been a professor emeritus since 2011.