ListenI live in the United States. Specifically, I live in the deep south in the state of Georgia. I have lived in other places like Canada. I am actually a dual citizen of Canadian and the U.S. All of that said, I am not much of a patriot or enamored of nationality as a key indicator of who I am. However, I am also aware that I am culturally and historically American and cannot help but feel an affinity and accountability to my lineage as a settler subject. The rhythms of my speech, my points of reference, and my childhood memories are all deeply influential in the way I see the world. Although I don’t identify with the nation state of the United States, I am still quintessentially American, despite my best efforts to distance myself from what that has meant historically and in our current moment. When the U.S. nation state acts, I feel responsible. When other Americans act out of hate and bigotry, I am personally embarrassed by the actions of “my people.”
Unlike many of my fellow Americans, I don’t have any nostalgia for the American dream. Nor do I believe that the U.S. nation state has ever been an admirable institution. When the current nation state acts in truly reprehensible ways, I don’t think or say that this is not who we are, because history would prove that to be a falsehood. My people and the nation state that ostensibly represents us have always engaged in truly reprehensible acts of violence and brutality over the past 250 years and before. When I teach my students about racism, misogyny, heterosexism, and classism, it is very difficult, if not impossible to find a historical moment free of astonishing acts of violence and horrific rhetoric against an ever proliferating and mutating set of “others.”
Regrettably, I have to say that this historical moment is a continuation of the worst aspects of the American nightmare. At the same time, it is a time when good and decent people have taken a stand and done what they could to create new possibilities for those of us who live in this land. It is important to note that the acts of good and decent people have always provided a counterpoint to the excesses and corruption that has characterized the process of colonization and expansion of capitalism. It is Foucault who tells us that for every act of oppression there is resistance. And such acts of resistance have always been part of the American narrative.
However, to really understand what Foucault means by resistance, it is necessary to reimagine resistance as being a force that will always exceed domination. That doesn’t mean that domination will be defeated once and for all. It means that the struggle to live as fully as possible never dies away no matter how comprehensive the force deployed to extinguish it. This is because for Foucault domination is the capture and appropriation of living force and creativity. In this sense, creative living force is always there before any attempt to turn it to a particular end. Resistance occurs in the same way that water resists any attempt to dam it or restrict its flow. Given enough time the force of water will find a way through any impediment in its path. Similarly, living force will overflow any attempt to contain it as well. It is a trick of how we see social constructions that this appears as resistance that follows domination when the resistance to domination is always latent in all reactionary formations.
I try and remember this in the darker moments when what the U.S. (we) have done or are doing seems overwhelmingly horrific. There are many, many such instances of such horror in the world that is emerging in the early part of the 21st century. Events and actions that make me want to turn away and disavow any knowledge of what is going on. Certainly, I have friends, colleagues, and family members who have simply turned away. They have stopped watching any kind of news feed or information stream because watching what is happening immobilizes them and throws them into despair.
At a personal level I fully understand the necessity for some of us to turn away. In an age in which anxiety and depression are at pandemic levels, the prospect of tumbling into the abyss of helplessness and immobility is ever present. We are bombarded daily with admonitions about our emotional and psychological fragility. We have an ever-expanding industry of mental health professionals and pharmaceutical companies vying for our attention everywhere we look. And certainly, world and local events in combination with an ever-accelerating flow of information and workplace demands are at times simply too much to bear. The latest horrific account of pain and suffering, bureaucratic corruption, or egregious disenfranchisement of ourselves or the people we love or care about can seem like the last straw that will break us and overwhelm our capacity to walk this razors edge of functional “sanity.”
It would be well be well beyond my remit ethically and compassionately to try and tell anyone else that they are stronger than they think. I must accept and support my brothers and sisters who need to turn away for now. But that means that I and those others who can look, must look. And after looking, act to resist and reverse the trend towards total socio-political psychosis. At whatever level we can, those of us who are able must promote the sanity of actual life affirming collective action over the current social death drive that will surely destroy all we hold dear.
The stakes are existential and escalating. For those of us in Child and Youth Care I would argue that we hold a profound responsibility to halt the devastation to our lived experience of our social, environmental, political, cultural, psychological, emotional, and personal lives. If we care, then that caring must take concrete form that goes beyond assisting young people to behave, go to school, be nice to their elders, and get a job. Instead, I would suggest that we have an ethical imperative, an obligation to join with them in resisting assimilation into the machinery of cynicism and narcissistic nihilism that is default mode of subjectivity in the world of global capitalism today.
This is certainly true of the area of care where so much of CYC originated; residential care. While Gharabaghi has repeatedly and cogently critiqued the ways in which residential care is being practiced in traditional settings, I want to draw our attention to the incarceration of young people in immigrant detention camps as aspect of residential care being developed and expanded in the U.S.
Of course, there is a long and troubled history of the use of residential programs to incarcerate and subjugate colonized young people in the U.S. Residential schools are key exemplars of this kind of brutal effort to use “care” as mode of forced assimilation. The incarceration of Japanese American families in camps during World War II could well be seen as a precursor to what can only be called race-based detention. We could also include “slave quarters” on the plantations during the long period of American enslavement of African peoples. The practice of incarcerating young people and their families in substandard housing with no real legal pretense has been an established pattern of governmental practice since the inception of the North American colonial project.
In the 21st century, this pattern has continued with the incarceration of migrant families and their children by several U.S administrations. The Obama administration used family detentions as a means of discouraging the migration of children and families attempting to escape violence in Central America. This included unaccompanied minors who arrived in the U.S. without families. Reports about these detention centers included accounts of depression, insomnia, lack of medical care, and jail-like conditions.
In 2015 the courts ruled that detaining young people under these conditions violated the 1997 Flores settlement which specifies that migrant young people must be released from any form of detention without unnecessary delay and if held, must be placed in the least restrictive setting appropriate to their age. The settlement also mandates that migrant young people be provided necessities such as showers, drinking water, hygiene items and medical assistance.
The current administration has done everything it can to ignore or violate the Flores settlement. It has incarcerated migrant young people and their families in facilities where they are subjected to, “food contaminated with worms and mold, limited access to clean drinking water, inadequate medical care.” There are reports of young people with no history of mental health issues developing nightmares, nightly crying and constant sadness. “I mean, a big kid, he was maybe 16 or 17 that he cries every night when he goes to sleep in the detention center where he's held with his father.”
Young people and their families with high-risk ongoing medical issues are not being treated or are incorrectly treated.
The ongoing maltreatment of parents and children has a damaging impact on their sense of self and relationship with their children.
Watching the dynamic between the parents and the kids is just painful,” said Mr. Castro, a father of three. “To watch these parents suffer indignity while their kids are watching them — you see the illusion of being able to protect them melts away. I don’t know that those relationships will ever be the same. There’s a brutality and cruelty now even beyond what existed before,” he said. “You can just feel it.”
While these accounts of the ways in which young people and their families are being treated in these camps is deeply disturbing, recent actions by the Trump administration regarding pregnant minors is also deeply disturbing. Up until last July pregnant minors were housed in several different facilities across the U.S. These facilities were designed to provide services to pregnant minors with appropriately trained staff and medical personnel. In July that changed and all pregnant minors were sent to a single facility in Texas that was not designed to serve these young women. Over a dozen pregnant minors were sent to this facility with some being as young as 13 and about half pregnant because of rape. It is notable that Texas has banned abortion in almost all circumstances including rape and incest. As Diane Romero (professor and director of the Center on Immigrant, Refugee and Global Health at the CUNY graduate school of public health) puts it
Forcing any individual to carry a pregnancy to term is an “egregious” violation of rights, and relocation from other locations around the country to states with more restrictive abortion laws “adds a whole other layer of concern”.
Jonathan White (former top official working with children’s programs under the Obama and Trump administrations) states powerfully that “making the decision for these girls whether they will give birth to their rapist’s baby” is “an extraordinary human rights problem. Everyone attempts to write their politics on the bodies of these children.”
Perhaps this is the question we must ask as CYC workers, will we allow others to write their politics on the bodies of the children we are ethically committed to serve? Horrifically, what is happening in the U.S. is also happening in refugee camps across the world. We in CYC must take a stand on behalf of migrant young people across the world. It is our obligation and our moral imperative to do so. I pass this on to us as a field that has high investiture in residential care for young people. Let us stand up and be counted. It is the very least we can do.
