Indeed, in the 1850s, in a failed bid to protect slavery from reformers, Southern states actually began to ban separating infants from their mothers. “I never again heard the voice of my poor mother.” Abolitionists, Black and white, wrote about scenes from plantations and auction blocks, and these sentimental stories became one of the most effective tools abolitionists had. “My poor mother, when she saw me leaving her for the last time, ran after me, took me down from the horse, clasped me in her arms, and wept loudly and bitterly over me,” Charles Ball wrote of the day his mother was sold away from him. Over and over, they told dramatic stories of weeping mothers and children torn apart. And so they relied on stories and images to change hearts and minds. Many of slavery’s opponents, including all women and most Black freedmen, were not even allowed to vote. These images were staples of abolitionist literature because, as slavery’s opponents had no access to the levers of power from the courts to the legislatures to the White House (until Lincoln’s election), through which they might end slavery. Newberry Library, Digital Collections for the Classroom From Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1882). Consider how similar this image, below, which abolitionists used to make the case for ending racial slavery, is to those we’ve seen on the nightly news and newspapers’ front pages in the last year. In fact, this unburied legacy is part of what made the whole thing so emotional. In the national crisis of child separation, both opponents and supporters of family separation were working off of nineteenth-century scripts. This isn’t even the first time that images of children taken from their parents have inflamed U.S. White ethno-nationalism isn’t new to the U.S. From Andrew Jackson’s effort to drive Native peoples out of lands settled by Europe’s descendants to his vice president, John Calhoun’s, insistence that slavery was integral to the institutions of the United States, the belief that this is a white nation is firmly rooted here. As others have noted, there are plenty of precedents in the United States for this policy that are more relevant to this moment. Stephen Miller, the spokesperson for the alt-right in the administration, was apparently the architect of the ‘zero tolerance’ policy.īut critics didn’t have to go to Europe and the Nazis for examples. To immigrant advocates, white nationalism seemed to motivate both. child separation policy that put children in converted prisons and tent cities. Just as the president had refused to condemn white supremacists in Charlottesville for the murder of Heather Heyer, now critics saw echoes of Nazism in the U.S. They want to take and separate these families as a matter of deterrence and as a sort of theater of cruelty.”įor many commentators-left, liberal, even some Republicans like Wilson-this was a dumpster fire of a “transformation” in our national racial politics. They don’t believe in the asylum process. They’re not happy about immigration of any kind. “ core supporters want anybody who’s darker than a latte deported. Republican Party operative and CNN contributor Rick Wilson said: The family separations became a spectacle, and some in Trump’s political base actively cheered. and international law, they found terror and chaos in the U.S. Rather than the orderly process demanded by U.S. Most migrants were refugees seeking asylum. In May and June of 2018, the world watched as Donald Trump’s administration separated immigrant children from their parents.
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