“This is not America.” I keep seeing that over and over in reference to the Trump administration’s policy of forcibly removing children from their immigrating parents at the border. STOP SAYING THAT. It’s not true. This is what the underbelly of America has always looked like. Yes, it’s comforting to believe that this is just an anomaly and that America’s default is brave soldiers defending our freedom and kids setting up lemonade stands and summer baseball and autumn apple pie and happy families living in comfortable houses on tree-lined streets in cohesive communities from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam forever and ever amen. But that is a false image, stage makeup on a corpse. Hurting black and brown children who have done nothing wrong is not just America, it is peak America. It is literally what this country is built on.
When white Europeans began coming to this country to colonize it, it wasn’t just wild empty land waiting to be filled with people. It was already inhabited. In the late 15th century, there were about 140 million natives in the western hemisphere. Two centuries later, genocidal Europeans had wiped out 90 to 95 percent of them. When directly killing them became too politically unsavory, we forced them onto reservations and stole their children away to abusive boarding schools, indoctrinating them in white man ways. If we couldn’t kill the Indian (as they were then known), we would strip the Indian from him. Welcome to America.
During slavery, African-Americans were typically weaned by four months of age, forbidden education, and working by age three or four. By around 11 they were working the fields. No thought was given to keeping families together. Many slave mothers were sold away from their children or vice versa. Welcome to America.
In the 1940s, a time that people alive today can still remember, during World War II, American forces stripped the livelihoods of Japanese-American families and forcibly relocated them to internment camps where they lived in tar paper shacks with no plumbing or cooking facilities. About half of the 120,000 imprisoned this way were children. After they were released they had to rebuild their lives from nothing in a country that was openly hostile toward them. Welcome to America.
Don’t think that these are the only examples, either. I just don’t have the time or inclination to detail America’s centuries of abuse of families and children whose only crime was not being white. I gave examples that literally every American should be familiar with, enough to make it clear that yes, this IS America.
On the other hand, it is true that what is happening now is a Trump policy—and don’t let those lying liars tell you differently—that was not in place under Obama or any recent president. They didn’t just invent this shit, however. Yes, it was Deputy of White Supremacy Stephen Miller’s idea, but he didn’t have to think of it himself. All he had to do was look back on 300 years of American history for inspiration. And since a third of us are authoritarians and/or racists, he knew that he’d find plenty of support. White people will support literally any atrocity against people of color with the justification, “Well, they broke a rule,” conveniently ignoring that the punishments are way out of proportion to the crime, and that the “crime” is only a crime because the white ruling class says it is. YES, Trump is the worst president we have ever had, but he is enabled by his many supporters, who love every garbage thing he does.
So stop pretending our country isn’t mired in garbage. Stop saying “This isn’t America.” That’s the left’s version of “thoughts and prayers,” and it’s just as harmful. DON’T YOU DARE LOOK AWAY FROM THIS ATROCITY. This IS America. This is the worst of America, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better anytime soon unless we all do everything we can to stop it.
