Taking Children

A History of American Terror

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Pub Date 16 Jun 2020 | Archive Date 23 Nov 2020

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Description

"You have to take the children away."—Donald Trump
 
Taking Children
argues that for four hundred years the United States has taken children for political ends. Black children, Native children, Latinx children, and the children of the poor have all been seized from their kin and caregivers. As Laura Briggs’s sweeping narrative shows, the practice played out on the auction block, in the boarding schools designed to pacify the Native American population, in the foster care system used to put down the Black freedom movement, in the US’s anti-Communist coups in Central America, and in the moral panic about “crack babies.” In chilling detail we see how Central Americans were made into a population that could be stripped of their children and how every US administration beginning with Reagan has put children of immigrants and refugees in detention camps. Yet these tactics of terror have encountered opposition from every generation, and Briggs challenges us to stand and resist in this powerful corrective to American history.

"You have to take the children away."—Donald Trump
 
Taking Children
argues that for four hundred years the United States has taken children for political ends. Black children, Native children, Latinx...


Advance Praise

“Sweeping through the hemisphere and the centuries, this book illuminates a dark thread that runs through our history. I hope it inspires people to break that thread forever.”—Adam Hochschild, author of Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

Taking Children offers an alarming new perspective on US child welfare policy as political state violence and dispels the still common and misguided view that it is a form of benevolent protection of children. Laura Briggs’s framing of child removal as a repressive response to social movements and rebellions by oppressed people is especially enlightening.”—Dorothy E. Roberts, author of Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare

“Sweeping through the hemisphere and the centuries, this book illuminates a dark thread that runs through our history. I hope it inspires people to break that thread forever.”—Adam Hochschild, author...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780520343672
PRICE $24.95 (USD)
PAGES 256

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