No, we are not all in the same boat

 Judith is not the only Black woman I know who finally couldn't keep watching "A Handmaid's Tale" on TV. The reminders of their great-grandmothers' experiences, the notion that this all becomes a horror because it's happening to white women, the belief that this is speculative fiction instead of fact... it was all too much. The use of the red, hooded cloaks as a public trope made it more than just a show to stop watching. Protests against Trump's inauguration, against misogynist Supreme Court nominees, and finally against the Court's long-prepared blow against women's bodily autonomy in Dobbs v. Mississippi all featured demonstrators in those cloaks. The implication that this represents a frightening future instead of a horrifying past is a kind of color blindness that erases the historical memory of Black and Native women and presents white experience as universal instead of particular.

There are parallels all over the landscape of political issues in the US. Every time a white person responds to the latest horror with an indignant "This is not who we are!" Black people roll their eyes and say "This is who you always were." An attempted insurrection and coup at the US Capitol in 2021? A successful murderous insurrection and coup in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. Separating parents from their children at the border? The entire history of Native boarding schools and the present practices of child welfare agencies with Black families. Mass shootings of Mexican and Mexican Americans in El Paso and African Americans in Buffalo? Do I even need to say anything?

I was caught off guard by discussions of a post-apocalyptic novel by Rebecca Roanhorse. She made the point that Native people are already living in post-apocalyptic times, something that I had failed up until that moment to fully register. Similarly, Black, Native, and other colonized American peoples have already experienced fascism. Way back in 1946, when most people in the US were still freshly horrified by the full exposure of the extremes of the Nazi holocaust, WEB DuBois wrote in The World and Africa:

There was no Nazi atrocity - concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women and ghastly blasphemy of childhood - which the Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.

This is actually the meaning of the descriptor "racial capitalism." It isn't a "flavor" of capitalism, like mercantile or monopoly. It is essential to exploitation to target a group that the exploiter can dismiss as somehow lesser, somehow less deserving to be treated as kin or even as human. But the dirty secret is that whatever a capitalist tries against another color or nationality or religion will - sooner than later - be extended against people whose only real difference is less money.

White people often object to discussion of difference. They may say that it weakens unity. But imagine how hard it must be to find unity with people who refuse even to acknowledge your lived experience.

Child Welfare?

 Only a few pages into Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare by Dorothy Roberts I was so horrified by contemporary stories of stolen children that I had to set it down to gather my thoughts. Those thoughts turned to history and to the history of stealing children in the United States.

Richard and Chauncey Yellow
Robe with Henry Standing Bear
in 1883

The discovery of thousands of unmarked graves at government and church boarding schools for Indigenous children in the US and Canada has returned attention to the trauma of the survivors of those schools. (It has been noted that the use of the word "survivor" instead of "alumnus" reveals a lot.) Native children were taken from their parents, moved far away, and given new names, clothes, and haircuts at the boarding schools. They were beaten for speaking their own languages. But a feature that has received less attention is the "Outing System." 

In its original form the outing system sent students from Carlisle Indian School to spend the summer with local farmers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The idea was that they would lose all their progress in acculturation if they went home to their families for summer vacation, and that they would progress much more by being embedded in the lives of white families, for both relationship and the ethic of work.

It should be abundantly clear that this idea is genocidal in its conception, despite its

Richard and Chauncey Yellow
Robe with Henry Standing Bear
in 1884

philanthropic facade. Its intent is to wrest every vestige of indigeneity from the students: to isolate them from one another, to prolong the separation from their loved ones, to substitute new, white "families" for their own actual families, to enforce the English language, and to make white values seem unarguable. Carlisle's founder, Richard Henry Pratt was fond of saying that the goal of education was to "Kill the Indian; save the man.  

A moments thought should also suggest that extending this system through a large number of schools around the country would inevitably shift the emphasis from education and relationship to exploitation. Students at most schools were simply put to work in cotton and beet fields, orchards, railroad lines, and domestic service without any pretense of including them in anyone's family. In some schools, any local demand for labor put a stop to classroom work for the duration of whatever harvest came up. In others, few "students" were ever assigned to classrooms at all. Even General Pratt, the founder of Carlisle, turned against the outing system he had invented once he realized what it had devolved into.

Racial capitalism is forever finding ways to assert control over children, especially children it characterizes as "non-white", and to seize them for its own purposes. In the period immediately after the Civil War, white landowners accused freedpeople of being indigent - which was hard to argue since they were emancipated without property or back wages - and then stole their children and declared them "apprentices" on the grounds of parental neglect. The archives of the federal Freedmen's Bureau are absolutely filled with thousands of petitions by parents and other relatives to get their children back from illegal and unwanted so-called apprenticeships. Consider this appeal to General Lew Wallace in Maryland by Henrietta Clayton whose children were kidnapped by her onetime owner:

I went to my master after my children and he ordered me away; he told me if I did not go he was going to shoot me; he say before I shall have my children he will blow my brains out; he says I must not step my foot on his farm again. There is three boys with my sister's child; my tow boys and my sister's child, Perry, Henry, Tom. Mr. Jimmy Giles is my master, Eastern Shore Maryland.

Samuel Elbert in Baltimore petitioned for a child whose mother had been sold South ten years earlier. He, too, was threatened with death:

I worked for him at the time this child was born and for some time afterwards, and it is on this account that I am interested in the little girls, as she has no one to intercede for her. He said I could not take her unless I could prove that she is my child and that I was married to her mother. That I could not do as it was not so.

I struggle to imagine that this white man who sold the mother away was genuinely concerned with the child's welfare, or with protecting her from Mr. Elbert. In fact, General Wallace's reports include an account of a white man, Mr. Sewell Hepburn, who indentured twelve Black children from a single family, insisting that it was "an act of humanity" because those children grew up with his and were their playmates. But in another letter to Wallace he complained that all the grown men he previously enslaved had enlisted in the US Army during the war. And he wrote:

I am left with no body to black my boots or catch a horse. I am now an old man, and in my younger days labored to raised these blacks. [lower case in the original.]

(For more like this, see Herbert Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom. These few examples come from pages 406 and 408.) 

This also got me thinking about Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, a story that has haunted me since I first read the book twenty-one years ago and through multiple re-readings. In 1904 an orphan train arrived in Clifton, Arizona carrying children from the New York Foundling Hospital along with three nuns to supervise them, members of the order Sisters of Charity. A couple of things in that sentence require unpacking. First, the word "orphan" is a misnomer by our standards, because most of those kids were the children of single moms. But grinding poverty was characterized as parental neglect (as it still is today!) and so they were taken from their families. Second, these were literal trains that took children wholesale from the city and placed them with families in the country. They had been started by the Children's Aid Society in the 1850's on the theory that the country was a much healthier place to raise children than the city, even if they weren't with kin. CAS founder Charles Edward Brace offered a rationale that is close to General Pratt's thinking: 

A child's place at the table of the farmer is always open; his food and cost to the family are of little accoun... The chances, too, of ill treatment in a new country, where children are petted and favored, and every man's affairs are known to all his neighbors, are far less than in an old. The very constitution, too, of an agricultural and democratic community favors the probability of a poor child's succeeding. When placed in a farmer's family, he grows up as one of their number... The peculiar temptations to which he has been subject - such, for instance, as stealing and vagrancy - are reduced to a minimum; his self-respect is raised, and the chances of success held out to a laborer in this country... soon raise him far above the class from which he sprang.

Third, the Children's Aid Society was a Protestant charity, but most of the "orphans" they were transporting and placing were Catholic. The Sisters of Charity founded the Foundling Hospital specifically to ensure that those children would receive a Catholic upbringing. The placements made from the Foundling's orphan trains, unlike those of the Children's Aid Society, were with Catholic families.

Clifton in 1903

Clifton, Arizona may have been far from any city (in 1904 Tucson - 175 miles away - was the closest place with a population near 10,000) but it wasn't "country" as we imagine that word. It was a copper mining and smelting camp. Moreover, it was widely known as a "Mexican camp," meaning that the majority of workers in town were Mexican or Mexican-American. Foremen and management were Anglo. And that is significant to the story. Because when the Sisters asked the local priest for Catholic families to adopt the children on the train, those Catholic families were Mexican. Within hours of those families welcoming the children to their homes, armed Anglo vigilantes were going door to door to prevent white children being raised by Mexicans.

The matter didn't end there. Perhaps the impoverished miners of Clifton had no ability to take racist vigilantes to court, but the Sisters of Charity did. The New York Foundling Hospital did. They were joined by the Ancient Order of Hibernians and by New York City Mayor George McClellan, Jr. But the Arizona court agreed with the vigilantes that Mexican homes were unsuitable and Mexican parents were unfit. The US Supreme Court agreed.

My odyssey today began with reading about a mom whose child was taken because she was deemed unfit. She was asked to demonstrate a year sober, a good attitude by way of taking and passing various classes in parenting, a job, and a home. She did all those things and the social workers said it was insufficient and refused to return her child. I was so unsettled by this that I had to put the book down. Did I go for a walk? Play with the dog? Find some rational way of strengthening myself to continue reading? I did not do any of those things. I chose to continue in the horror by looking at its history instead. Child welfare is just another apparatus of the colonial state, another police agency.

 

Jackson still has no water

Jackson, Mississippi is entering its third day without water. The city's water supply system has been failing for years, but the flooding Pearl River simply overwhelmed it. Jackson may be the capital of Mississippi, but white flight has made it a 79% Black city and the white supremacist legislature just doesn't give a shit about the people they pass every day commuting from elsewhere to their meetings in the capitol. Mayor Lumumba told them two years ago that the water system needed $40 million to make it functional. They allocated $3 million. By comparison, I managed a larger annual budget when I was principal of a 400-student high school. 

I started seeing the usual complaints yesterday, blaming this on the imagined generosity the US shows the world in contrast with its own people: so many billions for Ukraine, so many billions for Israel, so many billions for Taiwan, "Boil your water" for Mississippi. But what this view always obscures is the fact that our generosity abroad always encompasses weapons. It's not a gift to others; it's a gift to McDonnell-Douglass, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon, and the other profiteers of death in the half-trillion dollar a year US arms industry. We say that greedy people are thirsty. These death merchants are thirsty for blood. Desperate after the end of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they celebrate the horrors in Ukraine.

What is $40 million to upgrade Jackson's water system? The troubled F-35 fighter jet program looks to cost $1.7 trillion.  A single carrier-based F-35 is estimated to cost $337 million. We could fix almost nine Jacksons for the price of one fighter plane. And - again - don't be fooled into thinking this is about our defense. The F-35 program is corporate welfare. 

People like to pretend that WIC and housing subsidies support the people who receive them. In reality they allow employers to pay less than a living wage. So-called "welfare" is actually putting money into the treasuries of the corporations who underpay their workers. But they are happy to have you angry with those workers, even when you're one of them yourself.

In the same way, the big arms manufacturers are happy to have you believe that they are protecting you. They're happy to let you thing that we're supporting the lifestyles of people in other countries who are getting their weapons. You can blame anybody as long as their profits keep rolling in.

None of this helps the people of Jackson. I considered tweeting this morning that it is too bad for the people of Jackson that they need a new water system instead of an F-35. But what they really don't need is my snark. They need drinking water. And they need a representative state government to meet in their own city.