America, Know Thyself

Though We Would like to Believe Otherwise, This Is Who We Are

Between April 19 and May 31, 2018, one-thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-five children were taken away from their families by U.S. Border Patrol. Most of these children were placed in juvenile immigration shelters while their parents were labeled criminals, charged with a federal misdemeanor immigration violation, and sent to jail. All because they were seeking a better life in America, the land of opportunity. 

The story gained national attention as we read articles and watched news reports of children crying themselves to sleep. We learned about Marco Antonio Muñoz, an immigrant from Honduras who took his own life after the U.S. Border Patrol forcibly ripped his child from his arms. Then we saw the juvenile facilities where children slept in cages with little more than mylar blankets for comfort.  

Following public outcry, this past week, the Trump administration curtailed the practice of separating children from their families. The zero-tolerance immigration policy is still in place, but it is unclear how the administration will implement it going forward. 

“We are better than this!”

Since learning about the impact the zero-tolerance immigration policy was having on families, I have had countless conversations with friends and family members emphatically claiming that this is not who we are. 

Every single person who has expressed that sentiment is white.

And I get it. It’s easier to believe that we are the exceptional country we learned we were in grade school. It’s easier to believe that these last few weeks were an aberration. It’s easier to believe that we truly embrace and live by the values espoused by our forefathers in the Declaration of Independence:   

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

People of color know better. 

It’s time for us to acknowledge the truth of who we are. It’s time to recognize that the story of American exceptionalism is nothing more than propaganda. It’s time for us to wake up from the Dream and join the struggle. In the words of Ta Nehisi Coates, it is time for each of us to become “a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.” We must reconcile ourselves to the truth before we can move forward. Each of us must acknowledge, understand, and accept these moments of truth as part of our heritage:

​1. American Slavery: 1776 to 1863

Think back to your American history class in high school. What did you learn about slavery? A few years ago, students in Texas learned about immigration patterns and how the slave trade brought millions of “workers” from Africa to the American South. In my high school, we also focused on the slave trade. We knew it was an economic system, and we understood the importance of sugar and molasses. But we knew nothing of the day-to-day lives of enslaved peoples.

The stories of children born into slavery were mostly absent, and there is still very little research or academic discourse about children born into slavery. Is it any wonder we never learned to see enslaved people as individuals or internalized the horrors of the slave auctions that routinely tore families apart? Instead, we justified our actions by quoting Romans 13, the same passage in the Bible that Attorney General Jeff Sessions used to justify the zero-tolerance immigration policy and the practice of separating children from their families. 

2. Native American Boarding Schools: 1879 to 1975

In 1879, General Richard Henry Pratt established the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first federally-funded off-reservation boarding school for Native Americans. Once in school, the children were forced to cut their hair, forbidden to speak their language, and required to convert to Christianity and abandon their Native American culture and traditions. Harsh military discipline, including corporal punishment, was unleashed against any student who failed to comply with the assimilation program. 

Carlisle became the model for 26 Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools and hundreds of private boarding schools sponsored by religious organizations. According to an 1886 report, Native American children needed to be completely isolated from their “savage antecedents” before they can be “satisfactorily educated.” On the heels of this report, thousands of Native American children were forcibly removed from their families and tribes and sent to boarding schools far from home.

The first official criticism of the Native American boarding schools came in 1928, when the Brookings Institution submitted The Meriam Report, officially titled The Problem of Indian Administration, to the Secretary of the Interior. One of the many recommendations was that young children attend community schools close to home, instead of boarding schools far from the reservation. Despite The Meriam Report, attendance at Native American boarding schools continued to grow. In 1973, Native American boarding school enrollment was 60,000. Those numbers declined sharply upon passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, which emphasized the decentralization of students from boarding schools to community schools.   

3. Mexican Repatriation: 1929 to 1936

At the height of the Great Depression, California and Texas authorities initiated mass deportation of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, scapegoats for the economic downturn. As many as 1.8 million people, most of whom were American citizens, were forcibly removed from the United States and relocated to Mexico. In some cases, families hid their children with relatives to keep them from being sent to a foreign country they had never visited. 

If you’ve never heard of the Mexican Repatriation, you’re not alone. Until recently, most American textbooks ignored it. Chicano Studies programs address the Mexican Repatriation, but it is not something I recall learning when I studied American history in college. I first learned about it on NPR when Terry Gross interviewed Francisco Balderrama, co-author of Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation In The 1930s, on Fresh Air.

These are just three examples where we forcibly separated innocent children from their parents. In each case, the families targeted for this inhumane treatment were people of color. A more in-depth piece would include a discussion of poverty and our criminal justice system, both of which disproportionately impact people of color. Systemic racism takes many forms. But if we can acknowledge this truth, if we can look at our past without averting our eyes, we might be able to come together and build a more just and equitable society for all of us.