The US Has a Long History of Separating Families...

Actually, the US has a long history of separating families...

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

The White Man's Burden as a concept existed in England and Europe long before US declared independence... but the white man's heritage was solidified and refined in the US... and as in Europe, it was chocolate-coated as a humanitarian mission to educate the barbarians... meaning non-white peoples of the world... The "hot Civil War" ended long ago... Though it may be argued that the police shootings in the US of unarmed African-Americans... and other is just a continuation of the hot civil war... But the Civil War has never ended...  The civil war for societal norms and mores have continued unabetted...  Racism is part of the cool civil war... Anti-Muslim hysteria is part of the cool civil war... Anti-immigrant bias and delirious agitation is part of the cool civil war... and the recent anti-immigrant policies in the US and Europe is the fruit of a racist tree... The Civil War never ended... Neither the hot nor the cold... The Evangelicals are nothing new...  their rhetoric and bias are not new... Check the better known books... The Scarlet Letter... Hester Prynne, a young, beautiful, and dignified woman, who conceived a child out of wedlock and receives the public punishment of having to always wear a scarlet "A" on her clothing. She refuses to reveal the father of her child, which could lighten her sentence. Her husband, the aptly-named Roger Chillingworth, who Hester thought had died in a shipwreck but was actually being held captive by Native Americans, arrives at the exact moment of her deepest public shaming and vows to get revenge. Her lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, remains safely unidentified, but is wracked with guilt. Though originally published in 1850, the story is set in seventeenth-century Massachusetts among Hawthorne's Puritan ancestors. In The Scarlet Letter, he created a story that highlighted both their weaknesses and their strengths. His knowledge of their beliefs and his admiration for their way of life was balanced by his concerns about their rigid and oppressive rules. The Crucible... The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692/93. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government ostracized people for being communists. Miller himself was questioned by the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended. The intolerance of the evangelicals compounded with the inherent political biases of both the conservatives and liberals... have shackled the US to racism and generated its unique culture of The White Man's Burden... Inherit The Wind... In a small Southern town, a school teacher, Bertram Cates, is about to stand trial. His offense: violating a state law by introducing to his students the concept that man descended from the lower life forms, a theory of the naturalist Charles Darwin. Cates is denounced by town leaders including the Rev. Jeremiah Brown. The town is excited because appearing for the prosecution will be Matthew Brady, a noted statesman and three-time presidential candidate. A staunch foe of evolution and a Biblical scholar, Brady will sit beside prosecuting attorney Tom Davenport, in the courtroom of Judge Coffey. The teacher's defense is to be handled by the equally well-known Henry Drummond, one of America's most controversial legal minds and a long-standing acquaintance and adversary of Brady. An influential newspaperman, E.K. Hornbeck of the Baltimore Herald, has persuaded Drummond to represent Cates, and ensured that his newspaper and a radio network will provide nationwide coverage of the case. Rev. Brown publicly rallies the townspeople against Cates and Drummond. The preacher's daughter Rachel is conflicted because she and Cates are engaged...............................and the rest... And if you have any courage left... read the essays of  Eldrige Cleaver... in Soul on Ice... The now-classic memoir that shocked, outraged, and ultimately changed the way America looked at the civil rights movement and the black experience. By turns shocking and lyrical, unblinking and raw, the searingly honest memoirs of Eldridge Cleaver are a testament to his unique place in American history. Cleaver writes in Soul on Ice, "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist, and that I have a Higher Uneducation." What Cleaver shows us, on the pages of this now classic autobiography, is how much he was a man... The African-American experience in the US is unique and their struggle for "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness..." exposes the bias of the ........... "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" the well-known phrase in the United States Declaration of Independence. The phrase gives three examples of the "unalienable rights" which the Declaration says have been given to all human beings by their Creator, and which governments are created to protect... The Creator created the African-Americans too... ********************************************** The current globalized immigration-refugee crisis in the US and Europe is the legacy of our Greco-Roman heritage and indoctrination... and also the Judeo-Christian culture... which is inherently racist and intolerant.   The Blog Editors

Many Americans across the US are angry with US Immigration Policies... for the government's "zero tolerance" immigration policy, which has sought to deter illegal entry by detaining and separating migrant families.

Critics say the policy, which was recently altered to address some concerns of separation, is not emblematic of who we are as a nation. Others say it runs counter to the America they know and love.

But history shows policies like this have been implemented time and time again since the nation began.

In fact, the US has a long history of separating children from their parents. Government policies forced apart the families of enslaved Africans, Native Americans and Mexican immigrants, and detained Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Splitting up slave families

Enslaved parents lived with the constant fear of being separated from their children.

Slave owners could split up families for any number of reasons -- including selling slaves to pay off debts, dividing families to create equal inheritance or as punishment.

"During slavery, there was a belief among slave owners that these families could be ripped apart and there was no need to think about how they ever might be brought back together," said Henry Fernandez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

The Misery of the plantations...

Likening the separation of black families to migrant families, Fernandez said: "What we're seeing here is a federal government which had no strategy to ever bring these families back together."

Native American boarding schools

In the 19th century, the US government began a campaign to assimilate Native American children into white American society by separating them from their families and stripping them of their language and culture.

In 1819, Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act, which provided religious organizations the resources to run schools for Native American children "for introducing among them the habits and arts of civilization."

Sixty years later, Capt. Richard Henry Pratt founded the first Indian boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Native American children were taken from their parents and communities and forced to attend similar institutions that aimed to "kill the Indian, and save the man," as Pratt famously said.

Native American girls from the Omaha tribe at Carlisle School, Pennsylvania.

The removal of Mexican immigrants

During the Great Depression, a wave of anti-Mexican hysteria swept parts of the nation. Federal and local authorities rounded up large numbers of Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans, forcing them to leave their homes on the Arizona, California and Texas borders and relocate to Mexico.

Many Americans at the time blamed Mexican communities for taking away jobs and public assistance resources from them. That may have been the 1930s, but that justification is not too far off from Trump suggesting that immigration hurts American workers.

This period in history is often referred to as the Mexican Repatriation. But that term suggests those who left were returning voluntarily to their native country.

In fact, an estimated 60% of those who were pushed out were US citizens, Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez wrote in their book "Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s." Facing threats of unemployment and the loss of social assistance, the families who packed up their bags often felt like they had no other choice but to leave.

Another consequence of the deportations?

Some families were separated.

Japanese-American internment camps

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the US government began to fear Japanese-Americans might turn against it.

In 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order that gave the military the authority to exclude citizens from certain areas. While the order didn't mention Japanese-Americans specifically, it targeted virtually all the Japanese Americans living on the West Coast.

A US flag flies at a Japanese-American internment camp, circa 1942

There are certainly differences between the internment of Japanese-Americans and the detention of migrants at the US-Mexico border, said Simeon Man, an assistant professor of history at the University of California, San Diego.

Japanese-Americans were deemed an "enemy race" and incarcerated, while migrants at the US-Mexico border are fleeing their home countries, being apprehended at the border and detained.

But there are some fundamental similarities.

"In both cases, the military was used to warehouse people in a time of emergency in the name of national security, and they were both framed as benevolent acts in which the US government is providing care for the people," Man wrote in an email to CNN. "But as we know, all that has obscured the fact that people are being held against their will in prison-like conditions -- they are not receiving proper medical care, and they're malnourished."