Category Archives: Uncategorized

Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in Global Reproductive Perspective

January 3, 2018 – 1:22 pm

As these years of an acute sense of crisis on the left roll on, I find myself wondering if reproductive politics—at least as encapsulated in my recent book, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics—is the right subject for these times. From Cornel West’s takedown of Ta-Nehisi Coates to the soul-searching among my Leftbook crew about the failures of the Bernie Sanders campaign, surely the silence we most urgently need to disrupt is about empire, US and otherwise. As Naomi Klein and Opal Tometi recently wrote in The Intercept (in a piece you must read if you haven’t, reframing the rather silly West vs. Coates fight into something much more urgent and important):

“There is no radicalism — Black or otherwise — that ends at the national boundaries of our countries, especially the wealthiest and most heavily armed nation on earth. From the worldwide reach of the financial sector to the rapidly expanding battlefield of U.S. Special Operations to the fact that carbon pollution respects no borders, the forces we are all up against are global. So, too, are the crises we face, from the rise of white supremacy, ethno-chauvinism, and authoritarian strongmen to the fact that more people are being forced from their homes than at any point since World War II. If our movements are to succeed, we will need both analysis and strategies that reflect these truths about our world.”

Empire is my natural first language (as I wrote in books here and here), so why am I carrying around the first book I have written exclusively about the United States at a time when we so urgently need to talk about empire?

Nevertheless, it strikes me that reproductive politics might actually be a powerful way to talk about US empire, most obviously in how it relies on the work of race, nationalism, and the expansion of free market fundamentalism within the borders of the US—and hence, beyond them. I use reproductive politics in the older, socialist feminist sense in which the domain of the “reproductive” is that which is not “productive” in the capitalist sense. Another layer of meaning comes from Black and other women of color feminists in the US like Loretta Ross who speak of “reproductive justice” as not just the politics of whether or not to have children, but also the means to raise them—housing, jobs, food systems, freedom from police brutality, high-quality schools, and the like.

In the War-on-Poverty sixties, government and political movements alike agreed that it was a shared, collective responsibility to make sure that these things were available to all. That was never a promise that was kept, but the power of mid-century social movements was that they could appeal to a shared sense that government and business, alongside religious institutions and neighbors, owed this to the people of a nation. That optimistic sense of what it meant to belong to a society was taken up even more robustly by decolonization and socialist movements outside the US, with their calls for land reform, price controls for staple goods, collective child care, and state-run health care and social security. In the book, I show how the libertarian wind that blew across the country with Reagan (and Thatcher) relied centrally on a racism that was about moral disapproval of others’ families to persuade a majority of people that they not only would accept a smaller social safety net and reduced real wages for all but the top 1%, but wanted such a thing—from associating government transfer payments with (implicitly Black, explicitly immoral) “welfare mothers” to the waves of immigrant deportations that followed Clinton’s “Nannygate,” to lenders who targeted Black and immigrant women in particular for subprime mortgages, and the launching of the Tea Party movement as a claim that the Obama administration was going to bail out “losers’ mortgages” (it didn’t, but that’s another story). The foreclosure crisis was a kind of welfare reform redux, but it unabashedly took down great swathes of the middle class, not just poor folks.

But of course, as the book shows, the place where the US government learned all these moves was in the Third World, where it used debt as a club to undue the kinds of expansive ways that people had imagined the relationship of its people, as structural adjustment programs that operated principally in the realm of relations of reproductive labor–closing hospitals and schools, ending food subsidies, reducing the number of government jobs, and drastically contracting the role of the state in deeply libertarian ways. These were the “reforms” that drove migrants to the US to do nanny work in the first place. They too were accomplished through racism, through a set of claims about the lazy, spendthrift Third World, and could only be secured by closing borders so that those allegedly indolent workers didn’t cross borders to get new jobs as their home economies contracted brutally. These deeply unpopular economic changes, not surprisingly, brought authoritarian rulers to power.

The second conversation that the book is, I hope, contributing to, is about the work of whiteness and evangelical Christianity in producing a certain kind of highly exportable reactionary formation. Thanks to Margaret Atwood and the television series The Handmaids Tale, we can call it Gilead—an authoritarian regime that centers a white/ethno-chauvinist reproduction in nuclear families at the expense of women’s rights, queers, transgender folk, Although Phyllis Schlafly and the rise of right-wing “family values” women caught our attention in the 1980s, many commentators seem to have forgotten about them, and are mystified by the fact that a majority of US white women voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and Roy Moore in 2017. Meanwhile, these folks have never been closer to power, from Jeff Sessions campaign for “religious freedom” from his perch as attorney general, a campaign to ensure that US law “will never demand that sincere [Christian] beliefs be abandoned,” even or especially if that means denying the right to contraception, birth control, non-heterosexual marriage, or, god forbid, for trans people to use the bathroom. Mike Pence has campaigned for “conversion therapy” for gay folks, an end to abortion rights for women, and has worked to eliminate maternity and prenatal care for poor folks through the failed Republican American Health Care Act and his work to stop Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. Betsy DeVos has begun the systematic transfer of education dollars from public schools to private and charter schools. A host of people at the Department of Health and Human Services have mounted campaigns insisting that birth control doesn’t work and most women who say they are raped are lying.

This political formation, which was launched as anti-feminist and anti-gay, has deep alliances with racist ethno-nationalisms and free market fundamentalism. It is also a profoundly transnational project, traveling first with evangelical Christian missionaries in the Reagan and Bush ersa from Africa to Latin America, and subsequently through Catholic circles. Most famously, the person most associated with the Guatemalan genocide, Efrían Ríos Montt, was a pastor in the Church of the Word from Reagan’s California. The Ugandan “kill the gays bill,” the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014 was engineered by Massachusetts pastor Scott Lively of Abiding Truth Ministries, who has also been active in Latvia and Russia. These kinds of conservative Christian political formations followed the opposite trajectory as structural adjustment programs: from the United States to the region we used to call the third world. But in both instances, reproductive and kinship politics become economics and state policy. In a phrase, they’ve all become reproductive politics.

Reposted from the UCPress site: https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/34007/race-ethnicity-and-nationalism-in-global-reproductive-perspective/

By Laura Briggs | Comments (0)

Feminism’s Roy Moore problem

December 11, 2017 – 6:05 am

Dear Feminism,
We have a Roy Moore problem. It’s not the same one that David Brooks said the GOP has, though it’s related. It is that 6 in 10 white women in Alabama support Roy Moore. (15 years ago, I was telling vaguely disbelieving folks that polls told us that US Black and Latinx women supported feminism more than white women. No, they’d say. The problem is that feminism is full of white women. No, I’d say. The bigger problem is white women’s anti-feminism. After the Trump election, that ought to be easier to explain.) It’s the same problem we had with Phyllis Schlafly, who was also more popular than feminists.

We need to look beyond our Atwoodian notion of Wives, econowives, Marthas, and Handmaids to understand this. White female Moore-voters in Alabama are not stupid, hopelessly oppressed, or duped. They may not want particularly to be married to a 30-year old Roy Moore at 14, but they know which side their bread is buttered on. Bethany Moreton has it right in To Serve God and Wal-Mart. They know a lot about what feminism has to offer–about lower wages, endemic sexual harassment and assault, the difficulty of not being pregnant when birth control and abortion are hard to get, and the gendered division of labor at home. They just look at us gender traitors and un-women (Atwood again) and think we got a worse deal–low wages, exposure to all that sexual threat in public, housework and paid labor, scrambling to gather up what’s needed to keep households together. And they at least can hold out the hope of a women-at-home, elders and children supported kind of existence if they marry right. Or, barring that, maybe the double day and poverty wages and the whole thing, but at least what my mother’s generation called the pedestal. A reverence for female softness and vulnerability, their love and self-sacrifice for the children. And this whole #MeToo thing is actually feeding this sense that they are right.


We need a movement against sexual harassment that actually imagines a workplace–a world–where the shaming and blaming aren’t just shifted from the women being harassed to the men doing the harassing. (Although don’t get me wrong, this is, without a doubt, a huge improvement.) But actual procedures in workplaces (universities, colleges, the wider world) where it is possible to get accountability for making public space free from sexist sexual predation. I’m concerned that the mass resignations are feeding a “bad apples” narrative that is basically wrong. (Not unlike imprisonment’s account of criminality.) As long as their are power imbalances, sexism, and opportunity, these guys are going to be replaced with other sexual harassers. We need a better, clearer vision of what we’re demanding, including a way to real process to report (and hence potentially also to refute) sexual harassment allegations. Because after Emmett Till, we can’t just believe women.

By Laura Briggs | Comments (0)

Feminism, the Right, and #MeToo

December 11, 2017 – 5:52 am

Question: are Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein proxies for a war against Trump?

This is the question I’m increasingly fascinated by, in relation to the role of feminism in national politics. On the one hand, feminism appeared for a moment last year to have failed in more or less exactly the way the ERA failed: Serena Joy, oops, I mean Phyllis Schlafly split most women away from even the most trivial notion of feminism by calling on the notion of (white) “privilege,” especially women-only bathrooms. This was almost precisely replayed in 2016: 53% of white women voted for Trump over and against a pretty godawful version of feminism in the figure of Hillary Clinton (nb: there were good feminist arguments against the ERA, just as there were good feminist arguments against Clinton, which don’t bear repeating here but which I elaborate with some care in my new book, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics). So an anti-queer, anti-trans, pro-“family” conservative politics got mobilized in relationship to white women’s fear of sexual violence outside the walls of the nuclear family.

But the evangelical Christian right, which has never been stronger than it is now, with Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, Neil Gorsuch, and a host of people at HHS all defending Christianity, heteronormativity, anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-abortion, birth control, maternity care, and anti-(poor) kid policies, can’t keep the genie in the bottle. Mobilizing women around fear of sexual harassment and violence brought down Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes on the right, and now threatens the darling of the Christian far-right, Roy “10 commandments” Moore, who really does advocate a Handmaid’s Tale-style Gilead. They’ve tried to weaponize accusations against Al Franken, by having Roger Stone get out ahead of the Lee Ann Tweeden accusation and then have an army of right-wing bots push the story. Accusations by media are incredibly vulnerable to political manipulation, and don’t actually put in place any mechanisms that enable women to report or demand a workplace free of sexual harassment or assault. Meanwhile, feminists have suggested that the hordes of enablers and procurers around people like Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer need to step aside.

But a lot of this seems to me to be a proxy war aimed at Donald “grab them by pussy,” with more than 14 accusers, including a teenager he allegedly raped. If we can hang on to the notion that sexual misconduct is (a) incredibly common and generally unprosecuted, and (b) that allegations have to be refutable (because they are also frequently weaponized against queer folks–I have my own harrowing stories), feminist #MeToo politics may yet be the most potent weapon there is against the Trumpian right-wing coalition.

By Laura Briggs | Tagged | Comments (0)

This is the Republican Party on Reproductive Politics

April 7, 2017 – 6:10 am

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             The Republicans currently in power seem determined to end the availability of basic sexual and reproductive health services. Last week, the Senate, by the thinnest of margins, passed a bill now on the president’s desk that would allow states to defund Planned Parenthood. In many communities, Planned Parenthood the only provider of abortion (for which federal funds already cannot be used), but also birth control, pregnancy tests, free or cheap condoms, HIV and STD testing, breast/chest exams, physical exams, and a host of other health services. If the Senate confirms Neil Gorsuch and one other Supreme Court Kustice (hardly a long shot, with Ruth Bader Ginsberg in poor health at 84), Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned, throwing abortion back to the states to decide. The various versions of the Republican health bill that failed to replace Obamacare eliminated birth control coverage and sharply limited maternity care. Women—as women—along with queer and trans folks are firmly in the Republican sights.

            What’s more, the GOP is loving the optics of white men controlling women’s reproduction. Old-school sexism is back, and it’s a political tactic to consolidate power on the right. It’s a risky strategy, because Republicans need the support of white women in particular to stay in power, a demographic that elected Trump and has leaned right in every presidential election since Bill Clinton’s. In the absence of a vigorous and effective feminist movement, though, it seems to be working.

It used to be that if you wanted to rally the right-wing troops, your misogyny had to be racially coded to mostly exclude white women. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected by campaigning against fraud by (implicitly Black) “welfare queens.” Even though white women and children were those most likely to get benefits from AFDC, Reagan’s welfare queen in the pink Cadillac who cashed her checks at the liquor store played to every stereotype white people had about “inner city” Black folks, and this racist misogyny delighted his followers, who loved to hate Black women. In 1994, California Governor Pete Wilson and anti-immigrant activists showed how very useful it could be to hate undocumented immigrant women, and a Proposition 187 campaign targeted all those pregnant women crossing the border, sucking up resources for prenatal care and then demanding seats in public schools for their children. Although 187 was ultimately defeated in court, it won with 59% of the vote, and set off a new wave of immigrant criminalization, detention, and deportation under the Clinton administration that has grown steadily since.

There have been signs for years that white women might be next. The religious right has been trying to prevent all women, regardless of race, from getting abortion or birth control, a “war on women” effort that clearly challenged the white exemption. Campaigns for “conscience clauses” that would allow pharmacists to avoid filling prescriptions for birth control have been making it very hard to get, especially in smaller towns in the South, where there may only be one pharmacy. So-called “TRAP laws”—targeted regulation of abortion providers—have multiplied in recent years, trying to put onerous restrictions on abortion clinics that would ultimately drive them out of business. Although last year’s Whole Women’s Health case seemed to put some limits on this strategy—the Supreme Court ruled that laws affecting clinics had to have some rational relationship to women’s health—countless abortion clinics have already been shut down. In a case that Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch had a bite at as a Circuit Court judge, Hobby Lobby further restricted access to birth control by insisting that corporations could have religious beliefs, and those beliefs might prevent them from allowing women to get birth control on their health insurance—though not, apparently, with their salaries.

While anti-abortion campaigns have always been couched in terms of concern about the fetus, I’ve never found these arguments persuasive. Virtually all regulation of abortion leaves open exceptions for rape and incest—that is to say, when women are “innocent” of wanting to have sex. If abortion opponents really believed that the procedure was murder, the conditions of conception wouldn’t matter—murder is always murder. But leaving the door open to these exceptions makes the purpose plain: it’s about regulating women, who are always guilty if they open their legs, and pregnancy is their punishment. If there was any doubt that this was so, the regulation of birth control makes it explicit. Women who have sex and get pregnant will raise any resulting children, whether they want to or not.

The Trump administration has taken this kind of pro-natalist control of women to the next level. One of its opening moves (alongside the ill-fated Muslim travel ban and the successful effort to restart the Dakota Access Pipeline) was to sign and expand the global gag rule, flanked by a coterie of smiling white men. More recently, Mike Pence tweeted out a photo with the same optics—a meeting with an all-white, all-male Republican “Freedom Caucus” about removing maternity coverage from the proposed replacement for the Affordable Care Act. A smart analysis by Jill Filipovic made a terrifying point: this wasn’t a gaffe. This was deliberate, a strategy to whip up Republican male support for the bill. After running a campaign of aggrieved white masculinity—white men can’t count on all the good jobs anymore, throw the immigrants out and punish “the blacks” and Native people—the Trump administration is governing through explicit racism and out-and-out misogyny.

In How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics, I argue that the systematic dismantling of the social safety net—government support for families, households, and communities—of the past half-century was accomplished in significant part through holding up certain women for fear and loathing: single Black mothers as “welfare queens” and immigrant women with children as unfairly taking public benefits. The primary beneficiaries of this change were business—the largest employers after welfare reform were Walmart and the fast-food industry, paying starvation wages and offering no benefits. We have lived this political and economic realignment as ever-more stressed households and families, whether middle-class women postponing childbearing until after a long period of education and getting established in a job or queer folks seeking same-sex marriage to try to contort complex households into the shape of a “nuclear family” to replace a disappearing social safety net. The subprime lending crisis had the same dynamics: high-interest loans that disproportionately targeted unmarried Black and Latinx parents, regardless of whether they were eligible for better loans. Efforts to demand a bailout after Wall Street brought down the economy with predatory loans slammed into the Tea Party, born in a rant about “losers’ mortgages.” Again, racism and misogyny provided the political fodder to consolidate the power of Wall Street and exploitative business practices while curbing the redistributive power of government to even minimally correct the extractive power of the 1%, while mobilizing white voters (women and men) to keep Republicans in power.

While all of these kinds of misogyny have clearly affected white people, it’s been a while since they targeted white women as such, or better, targeted women broadly without focusing narrowly on women of color. The inability to prevent unwanted pregnancy clearly keeps women (heterosexual or not; rape is a great equalizer, affecting transmen as well) out of the halls of power and facing an increased likelihood of being fired, laid off or underemployed. Some of the new measures around abortion emerging in the current moment make it even clearer than usual that these controversies are fundamentally about whether women get to be full citizens and control their bodies. One proposed law in Iowa, for example, allows the parents of adult unmarried women to make abortion decisions for her. As Tina Fey recently said during an ACLU fundraiser, in remarks addressed white women (the majority of whom voted Republican in the last election): the Trump administration is coming after you next. “You can’t look away because it doesn’t affect you this minute, but it’s going to affect you eventually.”

 

By Laura Briggs | Comments (0)

Policing Northampton

April 6, 2017 – 7:51 am

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Policing Northampton

   A month ago, a group of parents, school board members, and teachers in Northampton, Massachusetts asked for a meeting with the superintendent and the police chief about a “high-five” program that had been awkwardly rolled out. In January, without any clear explanation and only a little notice, a group of armed police officers showed up at the elementary schools to give kids “high fives” on the way into class. A flash of blue, then the officers disappeared without ever saying anything to the kids about why they were there.

By the time the meeting happened, the Chief and Superintendent had already suspended the program, citing concerns about undocumented kids in a context of massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. With its future uncertain, we talked about how the program felt for our kids—mostly kids of color. A foster parent talked about her kids’ trauma after being taken from their birth family by the police. Another said that the police in a different district had violently arrested their middle-schooler when she had a mental health crisis at school, and why her first grader was then alarmed to see the police at school. A parent talked about her happy-go-lucky, goofy black boy and how hard she worked to teach him to be deferential and keep his hands still and visible in the presence of the police. “Please do not teach my kid that it’s okay to high-five a police officer. I want him to be very respectful and a little afraid.” An immigrant parent talked about the deep, everyday terror the Trump administration’s raids have produced in immigrants, documented or not.

The police chief, Jodi Kasper, spoke about Ferguson, Missouri, and the aftermath of Mike Brown’s shooting. “It was a wake up call for me, and for police forces around the country,” she said. She spoke about the report of Obama’s President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing and its recommendations for improving relationships and accountability to make police seem less like an occupying force in communities of color. She talked about transparency, public meetings, and trying to think about how to follow its recommendations to institute programs with youth. She also spoke of the police’s absolute commitment not to increase the fear of kids with immigrant parents. After the meeting, she decided to continue the program’s suspension.

In pulling the police from the school, Kasper joined a growing number of city officials doing surprising things to distance themselves from the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant raids. In Santa Cruz, CA, the police chief blasted Homeland Security for conducting a secret anti-immigrant raid under the auspices of gang enforcement. In Seattle, a City Councilmember called for that city’s police department to battle ICE agents in the streets. In Los Angeles, officials asked ICE agents to stop identifying themselves as “police.” In Boston, Mayor Marty Walsh said undocumented immigrants could take refuge in City Hall. In sanctuary cities around the country, even as the Trump administration threatens their federal grants (which in small towns is basically school lunch), defiant police and public officials are refusing to cooperate with ICE, saying that it threatens their relationships with the communities they serve. Churches, schools, universities, cities, and police forces are forging a language of resistance that has positioned local civic institutions against a federal anti-immigrant program.

National news stories about Northampton didn’t get discussed in that context, though. An out-of-town blogger got wind of the suspension of the “high five” program, and in a post laced with homophobia and misinformation, stripped the issue of its immigration-enforcement context, and turned it into a thing about lesbian Black Lives Matter activists, the better to rally the right-wing troops. Which it did. From mainstream national news outlets to Bill O’Reilly, the end of the program was discussed as a question of Black community policing.

Apparently we’re growing used to the remarkable Sanctuary city story about police, but find a narrative of them concerned about the sensibilities of Black youth controversial. We shouldn’t, though. The Movement for Black Lives has long talked about immigrants, and its mobilizations over the past five years have shaped the thinking of activists, police, and publics.

The de-linking of immigration and anti-Black racism in the conversation about Northampton’s community policing initiative worked to obscure how interesting the resistance to the current Republican administration is becoming. Taken together with other kinds of small town actions, like the town-hall mobilizations in Republican districts like Murfreesboro, Tennesee and Cottonwood Heights, Utah to demand accountability on things like the Affordable Care Act, we’re seeing progressive activists rallying their neighbors.

There are a lot of stories being told to try to contain the burgeoning sense of a progressive mobilization. Activists are being paid, we hear, by Obama or George Soros or someone else (a story debunked by Tucker Carlson on Fox News, no less!). Police in West Mass are being bullied by gay-married Black Lives Matter activists.

Here’s the real story: a self-described “progressive” police department, together with the mayor and superintendent of schools in a small sanctuary city, listened to parents and teachers say that their presence at elementary schools was disruptive to the education of kids with disabilities, immigrant and other kids of color, particularly the youngest ones. It meant listening the Presidential commission’s on policing’s language: “agencies should avoid using law enforcement tactics that unnecessarily stigmatize you and marginalize their participation in schools.” It was a small thing; a small-town thing, a work-in-progress about the relationship of police and communities. But it should worry the Trump administration a great deal.

A version of this post was published by the Hampshire Gazette: http://www.gazettenet.com/Columnist-Laura-Briggs-explains-why-compassionate-officials-can-see-policing-differently-8457493

By Laura Briggs | Comments (0)

Кет Казино – азартный сервис №1

October 14, 2014 – 7:40 am

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By Laura Briggs | Comments (0)

Заходим и играем в азартные игры на Вавада

October 14, 2014 – 7:40 am

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By Laura Briggs | Comments (0)

Central American Child Migrants: Why Are Kids Arriving Unaccompanied? What Should Happen with Them?

June 28, 2014 – 11:26 am

Image

by Liz Oglesby

Here’s why Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson is exactly wrong on the Central American migrant issue.

Two questions are relevant here: why are Central Americans crossing the border, and why are kids coming without adult relatives?

To the first question there are numerous answers, some structural and some immediate. Poverty, inequitable land tenure, lack of opportunity, violence and the local-level political economic effects of free trade are all structural factors that propel Central American migration. US policy in the region has a decades-long legacy of exacerbating these structural inequities , and the current humanitarian crisis on the border is most definitely a kind of “blow-back.”

There are also immediate reasons for the sharp rise in Central American children crossing the border. I agree with Secretary Johnson on the key role of smuggling networks in misinformation campaigns directed at Central Americans, spreading false information about minors being able to secure “permisos” to stay in the United States.

But why are kids making the dangerous trek unaccompanied by their parents or adult relatives? During last week’s House hearings, I heard no effort to analyze that question. Yet based on research I have done, as well as other important research done at the University of Arizona by Murphy Woodhouse, Jeremy Slack, Geoff Boyce, Richard Johnson, and others, here’s why these kids are coming without their families.

The kids are coming unaccompanied by relatives because of the militarization of the US border that has occurred since the mid 1990s and especially since the mid 2000s. The details of this militarization are well known, and the bottom line is that as the trek north has become riskier (walking days through the treacherous desert), it has also become a lot more expensive. It currently costs between $8,000 and $12,000 for one person to make the trip from Guatemala to the US. In the past, there was a lot more circular migration from Mexico and Central America; parents could work in the US and return home, or travel to pick up their kids for the journey north. “Coyotes” were not drug smugglers, but usually just people from the community who knew the routes.

These days, what is the choice for parents who are already in the US? In many cases, the choice is either to arrange for the kids to come north on their own via ever more dangerous networks, or never see them again.

And so, why is Secretary Johnson exactly wrong on this issue?

In last week’s hearings, he stressed that the “key” policy tool would be to ramp up Mexico’s “deterrence” capability vis-à-vis Central American migrants.

First of all, it’s hard to see how the migrant routes could possibly become more militarized, but even if that were to happen, it would only push the Central American children ever more tightly into the clutches of criminal trafficking networks. And it would make it more likely—not less—that children would travel unaccompanied by an adult relative, since the cost to migrate would become even more prohibitive.

Of course, stopping Central Americans before they reach Mexico’s northern border has long been a goal of US policy. But this doesn’t solve the humanitarian crisis; it merely displaces it out of range of US television cameras.

I could write another essay on why Joe Biden’s offer to increase funding to Central America via USAID anti-gang programs is useless to stop out-migration (this is just more of the same top-down development policy, and these funds will go to government agencies and large NGOs and will have little or no effect on the communities of migrants).

Why should US citizens care about this?

Besides the humanitarian debacle playing out on our border, which we had a decisive hand in creating, a significant amount of money is being wasted in this “security theater.” Research shows that punitive measures taken against migrants don’t deter migration, they just increase people’s suffering.

The Central American kids won’t stop coming no matter how many National Guard troops we put on the border or how much we coerce Mexico into persecuting them along the way. They will only stop if conditions change in Central America, and to support that, we should have a much broader discussion of US policy toward the region.

In the meantime, why not treat the Central American migrants the way we treat Cubans? Why not simply let them stay? Given our nefarious history in the region, it is the least we can do.

Liz Oglesby is Associate Professor of Geography and Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She has worked in Central America since the 1980s. She is a former editor of Central America Report (Guatemala City) and co-editor of The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

By Laura Briggs | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Russia’s Adoption Ban

January 8, 2013 – 10:41 am

Russian baby

The Russian adoption ban and the US Magnitsky Act offer all the absurdity of the Cold War, with less geopolitically at stake. Both sides are claiming the other is cruel to children, and neither is making much sense. There are real issues to talk about related to the care of children, but the conversation in the blogosphere and the press on both the Russian and U.S. sides relies on caricatures of each other, children, and adoption.

In early December, Congress passed and Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, which was aimed at Russian officials responsible for the death in prison of Sergei Magnitsky. a lawyer who had supposedly uncovered a tax fraud scheme by Russian officials against Hermitage Capital Management, a U.K.-based financial company that lobbied heavily for the Act. It also imposed visa and financial sanctions against all Russian officials responsible for “gross violations of human rights.” It’s unclear at best what this means, but it does seem to violate US and international law—Russian officials apparently could have assets frozen and even be incarcerated if they set foot on US soil, based simply on allegations by U.S. NGOs.

Russia responded by denouncing the hypocrisy of US complaints about Russian human rights standards as long as Guantanamo’s prison was open, and its parliament passed the Dima Yakovlev Act, which banned U.S. NGOs from operating in Russia, including those involved with adoptions. Dima Yakovlev was an adopted Russian toddler who died when his new father forgot to drop him off at daycare, and left him strapped into a hot car in July, 2008 for nine hours in a Washington, D.C. area parking lot. The case made headlines in Russia when the father was acquitted on manslaughter charges, joining a steady stream of other terrible cases reported regularly in the Russian press of adoptees beaten, neglected, and killed by their U.S. parents, time and time again igniting calls for an international adoption ban. While the actions of a mother in Tennessee, who put her seven-year old adopted son from Russia on a plane back to that country in 2010 made headlines in the U.S., for Russians it was just another in a long series, a steady drumbeat of distressing stories about serious abuse of Russian adoptees. While there is little doubt that it was the Magnitsky Act that precipitated the ban on U.S. adoptions from Russia, it wouldn’t have been possible to mobilize so quickly to stop them if there were not already a great deal of pre-existing political sentiment in this direction.

The whole thing seems like nothing so much as the Nixon-Krushchev kitchen debate, the 1959 exchange between the two leaders about a washing machine in a model house they were touring with press in tow. Krushchev accused the U.S. of “capitalist attitudes” that exploited and oppressed women in the home. Nixon touted the U.S. standard of living, and said that while misogynist attitudes were universal, the purpose of things like washing machines was to make things easier for “our housewives.”

The Magnitsky-Yakovlev exchange mirrors this conversation in all its foolishness. The trouble with the U.S. position is that it is entirely too sentimental about how great the nuclear family is for children, while the Russian side is too cynical. For one thing, the U.S. press keeps talking about Russian “orphans.” But almost none of the children living in large Russian institutions—about 120,000, according to most estimates—is actually an orphan. They are, like the 400,000 children in the U.S. child welfare system, victims of variously bad circumstances, from parental homelessness to alcoholism or mental illness to abuse. Some have physical or emotional disabilities that make it very difficulty for them to live in a family. Certainly the Russian child welfare system has few things to recommend it, being among other things severely underfunded. (One possibly productive side-effect of all of this is the promise of more funding flowing to Russian child-welfare institutions.)

On the U.S. side, after our own experiments with large-scale institutions for children through the 1960s, we have swung to a new anti-institutional extreme that is informing our desire to “rescue” Russian “orphans.” We imagine that virtually all children—no matter what their history, their emotional or physical state, or the likelihood that their parents might return for them or at least visit—would be better off in a nuclear family. This is sentimental and naïve. While most adoptions of children from Russian institutions go well, post-institutional children or those dealing with the aftermath of abuse, whether from U.S. foster care, Russian orphanages, or any number of other places sometimes have extremely challenging behaviors, outside the box of normal childhood challenges. Some are frighteningly violent, which accounts for some (although by no means all) of the reports of U.S. parents responding with terrible violence of their own to Russian adoptees. The Tennessee single mother who returned her son to Russia had told the local sheriff in her town that the seven year-old had made credible threats that he would burn the house down while she and her other children slept. She got no help. As the viral circulation of the blog post known as “I am Adam Lanza’s mother” made clear, we have few supports and essentially no idea what to do when families say they are afraid of their children’s violence. This, alongside a rejection of the therapeutic culture that seems to have little to offer either parents or children in these situations, provokes a certain acquiescence and even support for the kind of “spare the rod, spoil the child” parenting that can lead to horrific abuse.

The Russians, like Krushchev in 1959, imagine our families as places that exploit the weak and vulnerable—children, this time.

There is nothing good about the Magnitsky-Yakovlev exchange, nor what it produces for institutionalized Russian children or adoptees in the U.S. But wouldn’t it be interesting if we could use it to talk about real issues facing children, parents, and states in the U.S., Russia, and across the globe?

By Laura Briggs | Comments (2)

Missing Mila

October 23, 2012 – 7:40 am

One of the most remarkable books I’ve read this year is Missing Mila, Finding Family by Margaret Ward, which leaves me with a strong sense that the adoption debate could be—should be—different. It is also a profoundly particular—and hence human—story about how two families, one Salvadoran, one  in the U.S., work through their understanding of a wrenching series of events, including death, adoption, and the loss of a child, and somehow come out the other side with an extraordinary measure of grace.

The world is full of adoption narratives. They tend to be sentimental, to dwell on falling in love with a to-be-adopted child, to either romanticize the birthmother’s relinquishment or ignore her altogether, and to emphasize the as-if-born-to quality of the newly created adopted family, although recently, with a proud acknowledgement, too, of its (slight) difference. Missing Mila doesn’t do any of these things. Mila is the birth mother of the child Ward adopts, and the “family” they find is the gradual bringing together of all Mila’s children, from Salvador, Costa Rica, and Massachusetts, their birth father, grandmother, and all the people who raise them into one remarkable group who genuinely care for one another and look after each other.

Ward’s story of how she and husband Tom first came to learn about the child they called Nelson, then spend several weeks in Honduras as guests of Diana Negroponte (wife of US ambassador John Negroponte), is peculiarly flat and factual, preoccupied with what they knew and when, particularly about John Negroponte’s awareness of—and participation in–Honduras’s role in the wars in Salvador and Nicaragua. Peculiar, that is, until Ward tells us later that the first people she wrote that account for were his Salvadoran family, whose understanding at that point was only that there was a baby, Roberto (Nelson), who had disappeared when his mother, an FMLN militant, had disappeared and had probably been killed. It’s hard to write about joy and tragedy in the same lines, and it suggests a great deal about the affective work of the sentimental in covering over violence (as feminist scholars have long argued) that it can have no place here.

Instead, what takes the place of the emotional crescendo of that encounter is another, in 1997, when Nelson was 16 and his U.S. family flew to Costa Rica to meet his relatives. It is a wrenching, tearful meeting, and Nelson (and ultimately his adoptive brother, Derek as well), form particularly strong bonds with Roberto/Nelson’s bio-grandmother and father, but also “their” siblings, two sisters and a brother. The Ward’s gradual process of coming to understand how Nelson had come to be available for adoption is wrenching—that his mother had been shot by Honduran security forces, that he had a grandmother who had never stopped looking for him and a father, too. Understandably, they are terrified that they will lose him, that this is a challenge to the legality of the adoption in Honduras (it is), and perhaps also to their family and living arrangement, despite the gentle assurances to the contrary by his bio-family, whose very first letters, sent into the void in hopes of locating their Roberto, assure them all that they understand that Margaret and Tom are Nelson’s “real” parents.

The rest of the book weaves together the voices of virtually everyone involved, as Margaret Ward first sought to build a record for Nelson, but ultimately with an awareness that she would write this book. Over the course of more than a decade, the children grew, completed higher education, helped each other in business, and wrote a blog together. Margaret spent months in archives, collected oral history from family and friends, and tried to “find” Mila, in a quest that perhaps became more important to her than to the children. They celebrated holidays, birthdays, the anniversary of Mila’s death, shared vacations. In short, remarkably, they all became a family.

A final chapter on the disappeared children of Salvador tries, and to a considerable extent succeeds, in giving us a history of human rights efforts to find and demand justice for the children disappeared during the war, including prominently the work of La Asociación pro Búsqueda de Niñas y Niños Desaparecidos. This is a real service, because that group’s careful work in documenting the fates of children in the post-war period, and their meticulous work in helping communities—and families on both sides of the adopter/lost child divide—become reconciled in the aftermath of the conflict has been little documented by historians and scholars. We have a great deal from and about Argentina’s Abuelas de Plaza de Maya, but aside from Pro Búsqueda’s own books, in Spanish, there is nothing about the comparable (and almost certainly much larger) effort in Salvador.

The greatest contribution of this book, though, aside from the fact that the Ward’s and Escobar/Coto’s families’ stories are compelling in their own right, is the telling of an ultimately courageous narrative about what is possible in the aftermath of atrocious human rights violations in Central America. Not just gangs of torturers, mafias of demobilized militaries, the victories of neoliberalism, and mass migration, but rich, complex lives marked by possibility and—if one can say it without being trite—healing.

The other thing it does is make us aware of how incredibly, depressingly limited the conversation about adoption usually is. Families in the U.S. regularly confess in online adoption forums that they adopt from overseas to avoid the “problem” of birth families. In fact, much of the policy discussion of adoption continues to insist that the whole subject is about “orphans,” as if by pretending that adoptable children have no parents the parents can be made to not exist. What if, instead, we imagined that it really is possible—not always but sometimes—to have rich, meaningful, and sustaining relationships between adoptive families and birth families?

By Laura Briggs | Comments (2)