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.