I struggled for a long time with how to write this
earlier post to this blog, about the big differences – but also the big
similarities – between what Trump is doing to children at the U.S. -Mexico
border and what the American child welfare system does every day.
The differences:
Almost everyone in U.S. child protective services means well and some of the
children they take really need to be taken.
The similarities:
Targeting poor people and people of color, targeting children of domestic
violence victims, doping up children on potent, sometimes dangerous psychiatric
drugs, lack of due process.
And, most important, the simple fact that, for a young child,
what one professor of pediatrics called the “catastrophic” impact of separation
is just as great no matter why the child was taken away. Yes, there is a big
difference between misguided zeal and a policy of pure evil. But for the children, the consequences are
the same. They shed the same sorts of
tears for the same sorts of reasons.
Perhaps I still wouldn’t have published the post had I not
seen people trying to draw sharp, and false, distinctions – as in this
op-ed for The New York Times
written by Jeanine Cummins, a former foster parent.
There is much that is good in her commentary. She writes
with great empathy about the enormous trauma experienced by foster children
placed in her care. Her description of
that anguish is remarkably similar to what a foster parent for children taken
at the border said
happened to the children in her care.
But then comes the part where Cummins writes about how upset
her own 7-year-old daughter became when she saw how much the foster children in
her home were traumatized. She writes:
My older daughter
began having nightmares that “the people” would take her away from us and give
her to another family. She was inconsolable. “If it could happen to them,” she
asked with the cleareyed logic of a 7-year-old, “why can’t it happen to us?”
I tried telling her
that it happens only to parents who don’t, or can’t, take care of their
children. It happens only when parents aren’t doing what they’re supposed to
do.
Now, Cummins writes, Trump has proven this isn’t true:
I told my kids this
kind of separation happens only to children whose parents don’t do the right
thing. But now it’s happening to people who are behaving exactly as good
parents should. … Now I understand that it’s not always merit-based, who gets
to keep their kids and who doesn’t. It can be arbitrary — a matter of unlucky
geography — even in 2018, even in the United States of America.
My daughter was right
to be afraid.
The problem with that, Ms. Cummins, is that “this kind of
separation” has always happened to “people
who are behaving exactly as good parents should…” And it’s not just a matter of geography. It’s
much more a matter of race and class.
Cummins’ daughter was too young for the honest answer to her
concern. But were Ms. Cummins to answer
honestly, she’d have to say something like this:
Don’t worry, dear. We’re white and we’re middle-class. They
almost never take children from parents like us.
