By Lauren Silver

This blog is fueled by my outrage at the state’s violent and forcibly separation of families at present and across more than 400 years of U.S. history. I make a case for abolition and transformative justice now.

545.

A number.

A Universe.

Symmetry.

Horror beyond measure.

I write this propelled by rage. Last week, media sources across the U.S. and world reported that parents of 545 migrant children, currently in the United States, could not be found. These children were forcibly separated from their families at the U.S. border under 45’s terroristic 2017-18 “policy.”   

I can play with the numbers—the surreal reality of 45’s placement within 545—but that will not change the horror at play. When I try to connect with 545, I feel a sense of panic and an utter inability to imagine.  The compulsion, and it is a shameful one, is to disconnect. The stories behind this number are buried somewhere in the bodies and psyches of the living who I cannot reach. 

I am accountable for this harm. 

We are accountable for the harm.

It is not enough to feel broken-hearted at our sheer incapacity to imagine the lives and narratives of these disrupted families. We must make amends to the children, their families, and the webs of community that will be pained for generations from these violent ruptures of care and relationship.  

Reckoning. It is time for racial reckoning.

Family breaking is part of this nation’s fabric.

In her recent work, Laura Briggs shows how for over 400 years, U.S. state terrorism has taken different forms under slavery, in Indigenous boarding schools, in the foster care system, detainment at the U.S. boarder, and through mass incarceration. Briggs makes visible how U.S. economic and political interference in Latin America is largely responsible for the harsh conditions, which have pushed out-migration of the now-separated families.

It is time for abolition.

Dorothy Roberts calls for the abolition of the “family policing system” across schools, health care, and the so-called justice system and child welfare system. Across time, poor communities of color have always and continue to resist and organize in the face of anguish and terror. These are the transformative justice (TJ) practices that historic and contemporary abolitionists draw upon. TJ works to rectify the conditions that make harm possible, and calls attention to state violence, which must be healed, not restored, so that society can be actively transformed. I find abolitionist movements and TJ motivating because these strategies work hand-in-hand, giving us guidance for how to dismantle oppressive systems and policies but also how to imagine loving care webs that include all of us. The abolitionist movement has gained cultural traction in the U.S. in the wake of Black Lives Matter and most recently, in the torrid aftermath of the execution of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Walter Wallace, Jr. by the police. #AbolishPolice, #AbolishPrisons, #SayHerName, #AbolishICE have entered mainstream lexicon.

Where do I find hope? I find vision and draw inspiration from the Black, Brown, and queer young people and educators I’ve collaborated with across eleven year of feminist ethnography in Camden, New Jersey. As a childhood studies scholar and professor, I trace the intersection of childhood studies, abolition, and queer kinship. At these crossroads, my work and teaching look critically at concepts of protection, vulnerability, responsibility, capacity, and the family, in order to imagine more just and inclusive ways to build lives together.

I also draw from the intimate space of my home: my practice as a queer feminist ethnographer is deeply informed by my transracial family and the queer kinship web we are crafting. The book I’m writing, Abolitionist Childhood: Forging Freedom at the Rifts of Racial Capitalism, shares this fieldwork at the crossroads of critical childhood studies, abolitionist practices and queer kinship.  Together we engage in experiments in educational and creative freedom, “shapeshifting” and crafting spaces of liberation in the cracks within neoliberal capitalist confinement.  

Camden is a besieged city of paradox—Camden’s history is recorded in the collective leger of Northeastern urban deindustrialization, demographic migrations, racial strife, white flight, and state takeover with corporate occupation. The political disenfranchisement of the city’s largely Black and Brown residents is the result of historic and ongoing racist policies and practices. The young people I learn from and with are from the “other” Camden—the heavily surveilled, segregated, low-income urban space that is largely erased from the acclaimed corporate waterfront, the “Camden Rising.” And still, these participants engage in freedom, self-creation, community building, and resistance. What I found at a small public high school inspired me to understand transformative justice (TJ) practices and to name them as such: teachers alleviating harm from an underfunded public transportation system by driving their students to work or taking them to extracurricular activities. Or, a student dealing with homelessness and a parent’s drug addiction staying on a best friend’s couch and becoming an honorary member of the friend’s family.

The divide between the corporate white Camden and the “other” Black and Brown part of the city continues to be incomplete. Following one of my teacher collaborators and some of her students, I now partner with a community-based nonprofit youth arts center. Interestingly, this center is largely funded through the corporate sector in Camden and has recently relocated to a facility in the waterfront district. The mostly Black and Brown leadership and youth artists travel to the location from the “other” Camden. The landscape is never fully determined, and this artistic community is forging new pathways of creative freedom. The Independence Public Media Foundation supported project, “Johnson Park: A Gallery of History Reimagined,” is just starting to create media and art in relation to the racist and contested frieze, as well as other monuments in Johnson Park. Together, we plan to center his/her/theirstory and will share the Black, Latinx, and Indigenous perspectives that otherwise have been and continue to be erased.

Abolitionist Childhood guides scholars, activists, and practitioners to take accountability for the structural and intimate spaces that cause harm to subjugated children and families. Transformative Childhood Studies (TCS) is a way of imagining and enacting a world where the relationships, institutions, and environments that harm children could be undone and built anew to promote healing, freedom, and wellbeing.  TCS is urgent because harm has been and continues to be disguised as care or love (e.g. “child protection services”). Radical love—love as guidance for uprising and collective justice—continues to be misperceived as rowdy and harmful (e.g. “Bad things happen in Philadelphia”). Black children are misperceived as many years older than their age, which feeds the ways officials, teachers, and law enforcement mistreat them. In Abolitionist Childhood, I ask: how can critical insights from young people and childhood studies counter myths and clarify visions for abolition? How can the momentum from abolitionist movements radicalize childhood studies and center our scholarship in the lives of Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, and queer youth? 

None of us are innocent of the carceral realities that rip 545 migrant children from their families and disproportionately criminalize queer, Black, and disabled child bodies. Adults claim that “children are the future,” and this sentiment enables us to avoid accountability for these harms.  If we are going to make this claim, we must look beyond the children living in our nuclear family—we need to practice collective queer kinship. All of our children must count. 

About the author

Lauren J. Silver is an Associate Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. As a critical ethnographer, her work lies at the intersection of the anthropology of youth, feminist methodologies, Black and queer urban studies, and analyses of young people’s freedom strategies. She is the author of System Kids: Adolescent Mothers and the Politics of Regulation (UNC Press, 2015).