Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/22/separating-families-is-an-amer.html
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Yeah, all these people claiming “This is not America!”…this is precisely who we are and have always been. It’s only very recently that we’ve recognized this and many have seen a need to do better. Whether we ever elect leaders who will do better is yet to be seen…
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Yeah, it’s who we DON’T want to be.
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By almost any metric, we are doing better. But better is nowhere near enough (which may not even be a reachable goal in practice, though we can always get closer). I think the people claiming that are (to be charitable or to steelman the opposition) really feeling a change in the direction they see us moving, and acceleration in the other direction.
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We shouldn’t even have to be reminded of this. Not only is it true, but it wasn’t even that fucking long ago. By world history standards, the first Euro settlements in the western hemisphere were more or less yesterday. Speaking of, they came here to exploit resources, period, end of story. From the earliest Catholic “missions” (seeking mineral wealth) to the latter part of the fur trade, there was one goal: extract. To do that required rights to the land. To gain those rights required bypassing people, removing them, or, failing those, extermination. Further, it really helped if you had “cheap labor”, meaning, yes, slavery. During all of this, separation of families was a “natural” part of the wash.
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Yep.
Even it’s more “traditional” than ‘pie’ or ‘baseball’:
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Generational memory doesn’t last that long, but it’s probably dropped from white people’s minds because they’re the class that rules education, and they resist any mention of this kind of thing in education, and even promotes home schooling to avoid it.
They also don’t believe that any of these groups is 'Murican as them (including Native Americans), so there’s that, too.
That “Killers of the Flower Moon” book is a yet another reminder of what some white people have done/will do to those others they see as lesser beings, if they think they can get away with it: not only try to make them white or separate them from their families, but kill them if it makes the white people “feel better” in some way.
Horror nonfiction:
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By most of the metrics I see, you are doing much worse.
All wars separate children from parents. Often permanently, and by the millions.
There are a lot of orphans in Iraq.
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Not just an American tradition…
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Oh yeah, I heard about this not long ago. Thanks for the reminder.
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