Addict oppression: intergenerational erasure

Addicts are systematically prevented from creating community across time.

Read the other entries in this series here.

The argument I will mount in this post, and my general conceptualization of the phenomenon I term “oppression by intergenerational erasure,” relies on a claim I’ve described previously. The underlying idea is pretty simple: organized communities are the mechanism via which change happens, and hence preventing people from forming such communities keeps them oppressed.

From a recent thread.

Eugenics versus generational oppression

Eugenics has historically been a central motivator of the oppression of disabled and otherwise-marginalized people, from the forced sterilization of the “feeble-minded” to Canada’s MAiD regime of today. Addiction is no different. There are ongoing efforts to isolate addict “genes” and link markers for alcoholism to those of Madness. Those are relevant as I endeavor to describe a class of mechanisms through which addicts are prevented from having and raising children. Some of these—sterilization, reproductive coercion, criminalization of pregnancy—might properly be called “anti-addict eugenics.”

But I don’t use that term, eugenics, as the unifying descriptor. I instead introduce the concept of “intergenerational erasure,” which is somewhat different in meaning. What I put under this umbrella aren’t just attempts to prevent addicts from existing and reproducing. Those are elements of it, yes. But the underlying justification isn’t just about genetics. It’s broader in scope, constituting the forced separation of addicts from intergenerational communities, and their prohibition from participating in self-determining societies.

Why do I bother with this distinction between eugenics and the class of oppressions I’ll proceed to characterize? Recall: the major upshot of my post on the carceral-clinical seesaw is that perceptions of addicts’ dangerousness, not blameworthiness, facilitate the seesaw’s operation. The same thing is going on here. Stomping out addict genes might have been a fulcrum for oppression in the past, but it isn’t anymore. Explicitly stating that addicts shouldn’t exist is more than is needed to facilitate this sort of subjugation. Defeating the potential of addicts to organize and advocate for ourselves doesn’t require that addicts not exist! It requires, mostly, that we not connect—with each other or with potential allies. That’s an important element of addict and Mad oppression. Indeed, I think it’s the centerpiece, and eugenics often takes a backseat.

Intergenerational erasure

Sterilization

If I told you alcoholics were among the first groups targeted by the Nazis’ eugenics programme¹, you probably wouldn’t be surprised. But sterilization of pathologized groups can be traced consistently from long before that to now. The Canadian province of Alberta sterilized Mad people until 1972. Public-facing exposes have addressed the recent (and possibly ongoing) sterilization of Californian prisoners. I could dig up a bunch of similar examples, but the upshot is that compulsory and coercive sterilization of addicts and Mad people is not a closed chapter in Western history.

The nonprofit Project Prevention offers addicts money to undergo sterilization or take long-term birth control. Its website proudly proclaims the number of addicts whose tubal ligation (2,663), vasectomy (516), or access to long-term birth control (4,771) it has funded to date.

“We don’t allow dogs to breed. We spay them. We neuter them. We try to keep them from having unwanted puppies, and yet these women are literally having litters of children.”
-Barbara Harris, founder of Project Prevention

Billboard advertising Project Prevention reads, “She has her Daddy’s eyes, and her Mommy’s heroin addiction.”

It’s controversial, sure, but it’s been supported and funded by politicians such as Laura Schlessinger and Richard Mellon Scaife. It’s also received support from noted members of the rationalist community.

“Eugenics for thee, but not for me.” (The reply is by Scott Alexander, author of the Slate Star Codex blog.)

You might think, “Eh, well, those people all sound like race realists or transhumanists or adherents to some other fringe ideology.” Not so. Criminal judges have offered addict defendants shorter sentences if they agree to be sterilized: for example, Oklahoma City District Judge Stephen Friot advised an addict convicted of passing a bad check to “present medical evidence to the court establishing that she has been rendered incapable of procreation.” (When she did so, he pronounced that she would “receive a shorter sentence because she made that decision.”) Tennessee judge Sam Benningfield issued a similar policy on a wider scale, in the interest of giving drug-related criminal offenders “a chance…to not be burdened with children.” He offered White County inmates who procured a vasectomy or contraceptive implant a 30-day credit toward their sentence. A New York addict was ordered by family court judge Patricia Gallagher to refrain from becoming pregnant. A Wisconsin addict was required not to procreate as a parole condition. West Virginia state senator Randy Smith has recently proposed legislation to enshrine the practice of reducing sentences for addicts who volunteer for sterilization.

“The Supreme Court has yet to recognize a constitutional right to bring crack or methamphetamine addicted babies into this world.” -Judge Stephen P. Friot

“If you want to lessen your prison sentence, if you’re a man, you can get a vasectomy so you can’t produce anymore...If you’re a woman, then you get your tubes tied, so you don’t bring any more drug babies into the system.” -Senator Randy Smith

Welfarism for thee, but not for me

I hope we can agree coercively sterilizing addicts is bad. If you care about addicts but don’t agree with that, then I can’t really reach you by a blog post. Some sort of Daryl Davis-style intervention is needed. You have to get to know addicts, come to recognize that we are individuals with interests and ideas. DM me on Twitter, I guess. It is my job to educate—because so many great people would be otherwise lost.

In what remains of this post, I’m going to be extremely critical of lots of people who probably self-identify as progressive. I don’t think they’re bad people. Rather, I think we have facilitated the building of a society in which it is very natural for abled people to treat disabled people as not having interests as complex as theirs. It’s a two-tiered conception of the good. For abled people, well-being is multifaceted. It often requires challenge, pain, or discomfort for the achievement of greater goals. But for disabled people, well-being is simple: they should be made comfortable. Like pillow angels, or the prevailing intuition that the concept of intellectually disabled people having sex is horrifying. It reflects the view that disabled people just can’t ever access the higher plane of Mill’s taxonomy of pleasures. We’re given to understand that there’s no way in which the disabled—especially intellectually disabled and Mad people—can self-realize. They just need to be pacified. I call this mindset “welfarism for thee, but not for me.”

This is a particularly pernicious problem not for militant eugenicists (they don’t care about disabled people’s interests in the first place) but for those who self-conceptualize as allies. That’s partly why we started this project. Addicts need to be among the people advocating for addicts, lest our whole interiority be misconstrued. That is not a possibility avoidable through careful planning. It’s a logical consequence of not engaging with addict self-reports. It is so easy for nonaddicts walking past the Tenderloin Center to fail to recognize the inherent dignity of the people in there, to just think it’s the end of history that people like that should live like that. The revolutionary power of harms reduction gets eliminated if it becomes a mechanism through which nonaddicts placate addicts out into infinitum. We cannot let it be co-opted in that way. Harms reduction endeavors are good! But they are, importantly, an intermediate point on the path to liberation.

The reason I bring all this up is that I need to make another disclaimer. The remainder of this post will be a frog-boiling enterprise of unimaginable proportion. If you were on board with the carceral-clinical seesaw, then likely my discussion of sterilization was sympathetic to you. But now I am going to levy some claims that will seem extreme even by radical lights: that monitoring prenatal substance use is wrong, and that the systematic use of child protective services to move children into nonaddict homes is child trafficking. This is where I am going to lose people.

The most common response I get when I define and defend the concept of intergenerational erasure is “You’re right, this is terrible, but if not taking addicts’ kids away, what should we do in these situations? Surely you don’t think we should just let people abuse their children? In the fullness of time, we should have a different system, but the way things are now, we need to save the kids!” That’s frustrating: it sets a debate double standard where the advocate of status quo policy just has to point out some bad downstream effects of immediately instantiating the changes desired by the radical, whereas the radical has to come up with an ingeniously creative proposal for how to solve all the problems they believe were created by the policy system favored by their opponent. It’s very effective as a dissent-quashing mechanism against idealists: it makes all the terrible consequences of the moderate approach their problem! But it is what it is.

And in this case, it’s maybe even helpful. I can state outright that I agree with this imagined liberal to some extent. A lot of the things they think are bad, are bad. I’m not arguing that we are incorrectly characterizing things that aren’t harms as harms. I’m not saying prenatal substance use is good actually. (I am very wary of uncritical substance-use-is-transgressive-and-therefore-good discourse.) I think it’s bad for children to test positive for meth at birth—I just disagree that it’s the parent who is the harmer in that situation.

Nor am I saying that children’s harms don’t matter here. Indeed, it is in particular the interests of (usually racialized) addicts’ children that are undermined when intergenerational erasure is perpetrated. Hence I think we should identify the harms suffered by children born to addicts as an effect or form of addict oppression. (Although, obviously, babies can’t be addicts.)²

So if you are unnerved by the portrait I paint in what follows, remember that I’m not saying societal mechanisms should just butt out of nuclear families and small communities and let things go as they may. I am saying we should not try to, and indeed cannot, systematically eliminate prenatal substance use, children’s exposure to drug manufacture, etc. through the mechanisms we currently use for that alleged purpose.

Criminalization of procreation

Above, I reported several anecdotal cases indicative of a general trend—gaining increasing legal favor in light of the fentanyl panic—to incentivize, coerce, or compel addicts not to conceive children. Another element of intergenerational erasure is punishing addicts for having children. In particular, many active addicts continue to use drugs while they’re pregnant. Society at large is roiling at the question of what to do about such people. One canonical response is the criminalization of prenatal substance exposure.

South Carolina’s state Supreme Court, in 1997, was the first to rule that a fetus counts as a person for the purpose of child abuse and neglect legislation. That state can send a parent to prison for the crime of giving birth to an infant who tests positive for a controlled substance. Similar laws have now been passed in several states, and still others are under consideration in state legislatures.

But really the personhood statutes haven’t affected much: states have long made use of loopholes for charging addicts with felonies for prenatal substance use. Some examples are discussed in an excellent 1994 article by Frances Elizabeth Garrity-Rokous. The defendant in the 1989 case Florida v. Johnson was charged and convicted of “delivering drugs to a minor”: the minor was her infant child “during the 60 seconds between birth and severance of the umbilical cord.” Other courts have sentenced pregnant addicts to excessively long terms in the interest of keeping them drug-free until their children are born. And three U.S. states make substance use during pregnancy grounds for civil commitment.

Another loophole is charging pregnant addicts through pure use statutes (some examples of which are also discussed by Garrity-Rokous). One such contemporary case is Abbey Lynn Steele, a young Lakota woman who died while incarcerated at the Pennington County Jail in South Dakota in 2022. About eighteen months earlier, Steele had given birth to a boy who tested positive for methamphetamine, as did she. Steele was charged with ingestion of a controlled substance. (South Dakota is the only U.S. state in which this is a felony.) She “struggled to comply with the conditions of her pretrial release,” missing court dates, failing drug tests, and being repeatedly reincarcerated at least six times—a story addicts, and racialized addicts in particular, know well. Days after giving birth to her second child, she was re-arrested for missed court appearances on November 16. She was found unresponsive in her cell later that day. Two weeks later, she was dead. The South Dakota State Division of Criminal Investigation recently cleared police and jail staff on the basis of still-unreleased footage, calling her death an “accidental” result of “methamphetamine toxicity and pneumonia.”

An image of Abbey from her tribute wall.

Even progressive liberals who celebrate reproductive autonomy wring their hands when faced with the case of pregnant addicts. Those extremely in favor of widespread access to abortion are no less susceptible to the idea that anyone malicious or negligent enough to continue using substances while pregnant should be met with a slate of social, institutional, and carceral penalties. I’m not saying this is contradictory; it’s actually quite consistent. The way they see it, the fetuses that are going to be aborted are retroactively eliminated from moral consideration as soon as that decision is rendered. The fetuses that won’t be, aren’t, so the harms they sustain count. Hence carrying to term a baby who will be “born addicted” is, to them, making two bad choices: having a baby even though you’re an addict, and grotesquely subjecting your child to your substance use.³ The Los Angeles Times’s Sandy Banks writes in this vein—note that she quotes this addict’s mother as invoking abortion.

Lazhanae was the third of nine children of 33-year-old Shamana Johnson, a single mother who had served time in prison and had a history of substance abuse. [She] “was always sure she didn’t want to raise her kids but never aborted any of them,” Johnson's mother told reporters. “She always gave birth and made sure they were placed in safe homes.”

I had to read that more than once, to make sure I understood: Johnson knew she didn't want to be a mother. Yet she had nine children, then parceled them out like puppies (2009).

Puppies! The same dog language used by Barbara Harris. Banks is more ostensibly sympathetic to addicts than Harris; elsewhere she writes that addict parents have suffered, “punished by shame and regret.” But—but—“the children they bore suffered too; that’s something we can’t afford to forget” (2014). “I know it’s not politically correct,” Banks admits, but maintains that “when your addiction lands your children in the foster care system, you should be ushered into substance abuse treatment and strongly encouraged to use birth control.”

It’s obvious from the above that coercive sterilization and criminalization of prenatal substance use are inextricably related to presuppositions about rights conflicts between addict parent and newborn (or unborn) child. Less obvious but still present is the insidious conception of addicts’ dispositional unfitness for parenthood. Subscribing to this view doesn’t track with politics. Both progressive Sandy Banks and conservative Randy Smith describe addiction as a public health crisis. You don’t have to demonize addicts to accomplish the political project of intergenerational erasure! As with my discussion of the justification for the carceral-clinical seesaw: Most of the people who side with the eugenicists here don’t think addicts are evil. They just think we’re dangerous.

Family separation

I’ve enumerated coercive sterilization, abstinence as a parole condition, and arrests for fetal endangerment. These are all elements of a mechanism of systemic oppression weaponizing the sensibility that addicts are particularly dangerous in the capacity of participating in nonaddicts’ domestic life and interacting with children. But the paradigm instantiation of it is something else altogether: out-of-community adoption of addicts’ children. So if you’re still with me, buckle up once again. It is time to challenge the long-held sensibility that children must be shepherded to safety by being separated from their addict parents.

In 25 U.S. states and D.C., “prenatal exposure to controlled substances is included in definitions of child abuse or neglect in civil statutes, regulations, or agency policies.” Such policies are often thought unproblematic because they don’t punish the addict. They’re invoked to terminate parental rights, but need not impose carceral consequences. This is all wrong. I will walk through one particularly timely and intersectional case to explain why.

The challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act

The pending Supreme Court case Haaland v. Brackeen will determine whether Indigenous children whose parents are members of tribal nations can be adopted by non-Indian U.S. citizens against the tribe’s wishes. The Brackeens are co-plaintiffs, along with two other white couples. A few years ago they adopted a Navajo infant after he was separated from his addict mother. (That is overwhelmingly the case in these situations—the child tests positive at birth, or the parents are addicts.) They later attempted to adopt his younger sister. The Navajo Nation fought both efforts, seeking to have the children placed with tribal citizens. Backing up the Nation is the 1978 federal Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which roughly states that Indian children cannot be placed with non-Indian families absent tribal approval. The Brackeens’ federal suit amounts to a direct challenge to ICWA on the grounds of violation of equal protection.

Activists protesting the SCOTUS challenge to ICWA.

ICWA was passed precisely to combat the redistribution and assimilation of indigenous children into white homes. Before it, unwarranted displacement of Native children was rationalized by “prejudicial stigma that portrayed Native Americans as highly susceptible to substance abuse and addiction” (275). Up to 35% of Indigenous children were adopted by non-Indigenous families or placed in non-Indian-run orphanages and schools.⁴ (Perhaps the most famous is the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, at which children were violently abused and many died.)

ICWA and political sovereignty

Critique of ICWA are often framed as claims that the law is itself racist: it unfairly gives greater weight to Native American interests in cases concerning children of mixed heritage. In a Hoover Institution article titled “Native American Children: Separate But Equal?,” Clint Bolick makes that argument. He compares the South Carolina Supreme Court’s decision that an infant who was “1.2% (3/256) Cherokee” be “handed over to her biological father, who had attempted to relinquish his parental rights,” to one-drop laws of America’s past:

More than a century ago, Adolph Plessy was consigned by law to a separate “colored” streetcar because he was one-eighth black. Today, children with only a small percentage of Indian blood and few if any ties to a reservation are involuntarily made subject to tribal jurisdiction and deprived of their full rights of American citizenship.

First off, invoking Jim Crow as an analogy for modern “reverse racism” is unserious because the cases are obviously dissimilar. To draw the comparison is to ignore why protected classes exist, i.e. why some groups would need protection and others not. But more importantly, if you’re counting someone’s Indigenous drops of blood to make your point, then you are the racist in the argument. The party in this debate that brings up degree of Indigenous heritage—invoking the kinds of considerations we might analogize to one-drop laws—is the anti-ICWA camp, not the pro-ICWA camp. They’re the ones who think percentage of Indigenous heritage matters, that the treatment should be asymmetric. They argue that a partially Indigenous child shouldn’t fall under the scope of the law, precisely on the grounds that such a child is partly non-Indigenous. So it seems Bolick is saying that if Plessy were 100% Black, it would be proper to consign him to the colored streetcar! These people are not self-aware.

On this point, the fixation on children’s percentage of Indigenous heritage reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what ICWA is and how it functions. To object to ICWA on the grounds that it spuriously gives preference to Indian Nations in the determination of placement of “barely” Indian children is to improperly construe “Indian” as a racial designation when it is in fact a citizenship status. It’s binary. Nobody is 3/256 of a Cherokee citizen; that isn’t a kind of relationship to a tribal nation that you can have. I am a Canadian citizen. I have “few if any ties” to Canada, but that has nothing to do with it! I’m still entitled to the protections of Canadian law. If my Canadian parent were deemed unfit, it would not be the place of another government to interfere. That would remain true even if Canada were woefully unable to deal with my abuse or neglect (which I’m not saying is the case for Indian Nations—it’s not). And it would seem strange at least, maybe even insincere, for American legal scholars to say: “But we must interfere! The lives of children are at stake!” This isn’t about race at all; it’s a sovereignty issue.

The upshot is that the ICWA debate is importantly political. Though laden with the rhetoric of racial preference and of children’s interests (the latter of which I’ll discuss next), it is not about individual kids, or individual families, or even small communities. It concerns the American government’s mode of interaction with large-scale political entities—in this case formal ones—operating in the spirit of independence, self-determination, and the desire for liberation.

That’s one of the reasons I address it at such length here. Sure, the challenge to ICWA is also a clear instantiation of Indigenous addict oppression by itself. And it’s a useful example of the ways in which intersectional lenses of analysis can benefit from my framework: the mechanisms of addict oppression are levied against members of communities marginalized in other ways, and ignoring that double-marginalization underdescribes how such modes of subjugation work. All those things make the potential overturning of ICWA relevant to my activist project. But at its root, it is the most salient case of a policy for systemically redistributing addicts’ children into nonaddict (and generally more privileged) communities, rhetorically justified by appeal to children’s safety but undergirded by representations of children as separable outgrowths of organized entities advocating for themselves, the removal of which threatens those entities.

“But the children!”

So let’s more closely examine the intersection of this issue with addict oppression. Aside from the reverse racism allegation, the other common argument levied by ICWA detractors—also hit upon by Bolick—is the children’s best interest. Recall Banks’s pleas: “Children[’s] rights ought to be as important as Mom’s.” A New York Post polemic against ICWA relays a similar sentiment: “There is no doubt that—all things being equal—staying with extended family is a good option for children when their parents cannot care for them…But when kids have suffered from abuse or neglect at the hands of their parents, all things are certainly not equal.”

It is good to fear that this kind of rhetoric is disingenuous, that the children’s-best-interest narrative expands out into a broad and overarching condemnation of the parenting ability of people from marginalized groups. This is basically why I hate the generational trauma narrative of addiction—I’ll come back to that in my clarification post, but for now suffice it to point out this opening sentence from the abstract of a well-meaning 1992 journal article directed toward improving communication between Indigenous people and social workers:

“The oppression suffered by Native Americans has so undermined their culture and ability to parent that child abuse and neglect are frequent problems” (Horejsi et al. 1992, 329).
Read it if you don’t believe me!

Even in ostensibly sympathetic research, there is a longstanding conflation between Indigenous people and child abusers. This induces a double bind. If you’re Indigenous, being declared a bad parent inadvertently counts toward the narrative that Indigenous people are bad at parenting, whereas being declared a good parent merely individuates you as not like the rest. Indigenous people, we are meant to believe, are unfit for parenthood. Neglect and abuse are some of the ways in which that parental unfitness manifests, but they aren’t the totality of it. It goes deeper: a dispositional and cultural inadequacy.

In response to this kind of thinking, introducing context about generational trauma is totally useless in changing institutional responses. People say, sure, the problem is ultimately white people’s fault, but crucially, we are long past caring about that. It was in the past. Today, there are children to think of! If these people are so fucked up from being oppressed that they abuse their kids, then maybe the child abuse isn’t their fault. But that doesn’t mean political institutions can’t interfere. Appreciating the complexity of the issue is a moral mandate, not a political one. It’s the same as what Banks said: addicts are “punished by shame and regret. But the children they bore suffered too; that’s something we can’t afford to forget” (2014). This is empty rhetoric that asks for an attitudinal shift and absolutely no other shifts. We still have to take the kids away; we just have to remember to be nice about it.⁵

This holds for addicts of all cultural backgrounds, and is clearly apparent from the ways in which addict parenthood is monitored through the legal apparatus. The deployment of criminal statutes for “exposing children to illegal drug activity” (which exist in 33 states and at least one territory) is revealingly stringent. In 19 states, it’s a felony to manufacture meth in the presence of a child. In 12, it’s a felony to manufacture meth if a child is anywhere on the premises. On the one hand, such statutes seem intuitive: illegal substance is dangerous for young children, isn’t it? But children can test positive for drugs even if exposed to negligible amounts by accident, such as “residue falling on the floor” to which an infant touches their exposed skin. There is no gradient corresponding to whether the child’s exposure is negligible and non-harmful or physically endangering. U.S. officials render the blanket claim that “any amount” of a controlled substance “is uncalled for and should never be in a child’s system.” If it is found, the court should be petitioned for custody.

“The three unspoken rules in families struggling with addiction are ‘Don’t talk.’ ‘Don’t share.’ ‘Don’t feel.’” -Kavitha Cardoza for NPR, reporting on the Claudia Black Young Adult Center. The upshot: addicts are inherently emotionally abusive parents.

These sorts of zero-tolerance, one-strike policies demonstrate that the panic is not really about addicts’ exposure of their children to drugs. It’s about the interpretation of drug residue as a smoking gun for parental abuse: addicts are unfit parents.⁶ As with the loophole legislations used to convict addicts for prenatal substance use, the sticking point—testing positive for a controlled substance—is the mechanism by which addict parents are discovered and subjected to penalty, but not the mechanism by which children are regarded as harmed. From a 2018 ASPE research brief:

In many sites, the child welfare staff at the nexus of these issues believe that cases involving serious substance misuse or disorders overwhelmingly require the removal of children from the home and are very likely to end in termination of parental rights. The strong inclination in many places is to remove children from the home in cases with significant parental substance use, often regardless of other factors. This view is particularly prevalent among judges, district attorneys, and court personnel, especially regarding substance-exposed newborns (emphasis mine).

A 2021 Drug Policy Alliance publication adds that parental substance use “has become one of the most prevalent allegations in maltreatment investigations, even though the assumption that drug use results in the inability to care for children is not supported by evidence.”

This isn’t to say that the impetus to remove children from addicts’ homes is totally unrelated to safety considerations. Obviously the general public is running around hand-wringing about the constant danger in which addicts’ children live. But witness or exposure to drug and alcohol use is not the way in which these children are believed to be made unsafe. The underlying fear concerns the parents’ addict status, which creeps out into a threatening stereotype. Addicts are abusers; addicts are neglectful. The perceived parental unfitness goes well beyond potentially exposing children to controlled substances. The canard of the crack-exposed child is a golden event representing addict parents’ selfishness and disorganization, not its primary manifestation. This strikes me as explanatory of why many states and territories have “fast track” adoption laws that “limit the time a child may remain in foster care before the State brings proceedings to terminate parental rights and free the child for adoption.” It needs to be fast! People live in fear that if they dilly-dally, addicts will get our shit together and come knocking for our kids—pulling them right back into harm’s way. This insecurity remains even when we are in remission; it is our mere membership in the category that causes fear.

Addicts and Indigenous people (let alone Indigenous addicts) are bad parents, we’re told, by nature. Hence public-facing pieces such as Bolick’s frame adoptive parents as angelic saviors:

In the 1990s, I represented Scott and Lou Ann Mullen, Texans whose family of natural, foster, and adopted children resembled a mini-United Nations. An infant named Matthew came into their foster care, infected with syphilis and addicted to crack cocaine from the womb…They decided to adopt him and his older brother Joseph. But state officials told the Mullens they could not adopt them because the boys were black and Scott (who is white) and Lou Ann (who is Native American) were not.

Wow! This couple has facilitated several children’s egress from lives of certain misery! Who cares what color they are? Into the melting pot you go, kiddo!⁷

To be less glib: I find such cynical exhortations to multiculturalism very concerning. “A mini-United Nations”? Come on, now. The organizational principle of endeavors such as these is not racial diversity. It is, rather, cultural homogeneity—the systemic eradication of community agendas in favor of an operationally barren “equal rights” sensibility that does not demand material change for oppressed groups.

The foundational principle of Carlisle Indian Industrial School founder Richard Henry Pratt was “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” This view—that Indigenousness, Blackness, poverty, addiction, are things from which children need to be plucked like Medea, extricated by a grappling hook dropped through a skylight—continues to underscore public sanction of widespread out-of-community adoption. People from these categories are considered self-evidently dangerous to children; the only way to save the children is to get them away from proximate exposure to the identities. Problematic behaviors like abuse and neglect are just downstream manifestations of what it means to be a member of these marginalized groups.

Taking the children doesn’t save them

The sensibility that children need to be plucked out of dangerous circumstances is deeply rooted in our cultural hermeneutics. I imagine that for the “it’s-complicated” crowd, it’s like looking at an optical illusion—the five-legged elephant, or Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit. Your mind ping-pongs between two envisionings. “Think of the children.” “But think of the communities.”

Some optical illusions.

But this optical illusion is constructed and emergent; the debate is built in a way that makes things complicated. The conception of these two goals as opposed, as necessarily interacting in a complex calculus of tradeoffs, is all wrong. It’s based on the misguided inclination to individuate children from society, to separate their harms and futures from those of their communities. The removal of addicts’ children gets atomized into an isolated phenomenon; we imagine ourselves to be uprooting such children only in a few edge cases, not systematically. We treat it as having no immediate or second-order effects. The cleanly-delineated possible worlds are the one in which a child suffers and the one in which she doesn’t. By removing the child from the community, we make her happy and healthy. So the choice is tough to actually execute, but morally almost syllogistic. That should sound questionable! Sure, moral dilemmas might exist. But usually in cases where the right decision is obvious, we don’t feel torn up about it.

Even if growing up in the foster system were a rosy alternative in terms of the child’s happiness, the idea that it uniformly increases well-being would still be misguided, for several reasons. First, removing children from a community has ramifications for the community, and for future children that will enter into it. The oppression self-reinforces! The fact that this situation goes the way it does when it arises is part of the reason it continues to arise. Taking the baby away helps to make it the case that more babies will test positive at birth. By facilitating children’s transfer into “safer” settings, political structures message to addicts that if they seek assistance, their children too will be taken. Addicts withhold information from clinicians and social workers out of fear of being reported to CPS. As Dorothy Roberts wrote in the Harvard Law Review at the height of the crack crisis, punishing addicts who have babies is wildly counterproductive: “it is only by affirming the personhood and equality of poor women of color that the survival of their future generation will be ensured.” A 2022 study of recently-pregnant opioid addicts in Massachusetts found that the participants were overwhelmingly “concerned about increased scrutiny and potential loss of custody due to mandated child protective services reporting for opioid-exposure at delivery.” (I’ll come back to that study in the next post.) Only in philosophical thought experiments do moral choices happen in stealth and secrecy. In reality, this is not a one-shot game.

And more importantly, family separation frustrates the development of the intergenerational political coalitions that might create a world in which babies do not test positive for controlled substances at birth. It desecrates groups that would otherwise be the loci of intersectional addict activism: poor Black communities, Indian Nations, opioid-pierced Appalachia. We will never know what kinds of ameliorative justice interventions, designed by and for Indigenous addicts, might now exist if only the Indian Child Welfare Act had been passed thirty years earlier. The generation that might have built them is missing. This is another respect in which the best interests of the children cannot be evaluated independently of addicts’ material conditions; the systematic removal of children from communities undermines those communities’ ability to devise interventions that will improve the lives of their members. Many hands—including small ones!—make light work.

Also, when people make pretensions to some all-knowing astral perspective in the consideration of the counterfactual lives children will have if they remain in their birth communities, they tend to be reductivist about what it means for the lives of children to go well. Children’s happiness is not coextensive with their well-being! Earlier I mentioned my “welfarism for thee, but not for me” theory, which I think applies to how adults conceptualize the goodness of children’s lives. Though it manifests in a variety of ways that can seem different, the dominant single element evaluated in the common understanding of child welfare is children’s subjection to pressures and circumstances that intuitively aren’t for children. The canonical allegation of child abuse levied at addicts is parentification, which is—like a lot of the other ways we talk about childhood trauma culturally—a total basilisk. When we reduce children’s well-being to the hedonistic account, to being protected, we ignore the complex avenues for self-determination available to children. Sometimes children’s alienation from their cultural connection is invoked as a loss sustained if they are removed, and I think that’s true. Growing up isolated from your heritage is bad for you. But more generally, family separation forestalls children’s opportunity to participate in advocacy for a marginalized group with which they feel a profound sense of belonging. It shutters them off from playing an active role in developing intergenerational goals of liberation. And playing such a role is certainly an element of the good life.

It was never about the children

In summary, the type of person who is inclined to wring their hands about the suffering children is misguided here. They mean well, but they’re ignoring the self-perpetuating properties of these intergenerational erasure apparatuses. My biggest worry is that really that kind of person is a useful idiot. In conceptualizing this issue that way, they allow the architects of policy encroachment like fetal harm legislation and the attack on ICWA to claim to be ultimately concerned with child welfare when really their purposes are much more nefarious.

At heart, the appeal to children’s welfare in overturning structures like ICWA is cynical. The campaign against ICWA is “a political attack on tribes generally,” according to Tehassi Hill, chairman of Oneida Nation. Rebecca Nagle, host of the podcast This Land and member of Cherokee Nation, writes in an Intercept interview that Haaland v. Brackeen is terrifying because of its potential downstream ramifications for federal Indian law. In an Atlantic editorial, she elaborates further:

If ICWA is unconstitutional because it is based on race, then what of the clinic where I get my health care that serves only tribal citizens?…The U.S. has been passing laws that treat tribes and tribal citizens differently from non-Native citizens since the founding of the republic. If that is unconstitutional, the entire legal structure defending the legal rights of Indigenous nations could crumble.

For people who know Native history, all of this is reminiscent of a terrifying pattern, in which attacks on Native children are a prelude to broader attacks on tribal sovereignty…The justification for [federal Indian schools] was that Native people would achieve “equality” in the United States only if they assimilated to white society…But the schools also served another purpose. At the same time, the U.S. wanted to privatize tribal land and open big areas to white settlers. In the pressure campaign, Native children were the bargaining chips. “The children would be hostages for the good behavior of their people,” one U.S. official wrote at the time. And it worked. When Lakota and Dakota leaders agreed to land cessions in 1889, they acknowledged that losing their children had driven them to the bargaining table.

There are tremendous federal policy interests concerning Indian Nations that are often left unspoken in discussions of ICWA. Sovereignty over land and its development. The right to self-determined leadership, and what role the IAB plays in determining who the legitimate representatives of tribal nations are. This is the respect in which ICWA, although its locus is Indigenous people and in particular Indigenous addicts, is exemplary of how intergenerational erasure works more broadly. It’s not about the children, really. It is about breaking the organizing potential of communities that might otherwise have political power. Every successful state-sanctioned marginalization effort you can name, across time and history, has involved systematically taking away (and reeducating) marginalized people’s children. That is because it is effective. It functions to gradually eliminate cultures; it prevents the development of long-term politics. When its children are taken, a marginalized group cannot educate and work with a new generation. It can’t convey an understanding of its identity that persists and becomes refined across generations. Thus are the marginalized hindered from creating an activist program, sophisticating their hermeneutical resources, devising blueprints for their own liberation.

I think we should call this what it is—child trafficking.

Upshot

If you’re still reading this far, thanks. This is probably going to be the longest entry in the series, and it’s heavy stuff. But I think it’s important to introduce intergenerational erasure to the lexicon. We already know that systematic sterilization, family separation, and criminalization of procreation operate in a unified way toward the decimation of marginalized communities. But we don’t discuss how what this really does is prevent those communities from developing the understanding necessary to seek, and the critical mass necessary to implement, liberationist goals.

The broader concept of addict oppression should be understood mostly as footnotes to intergenerational erasure. In the next post I’ll talk about immigration and social mobility restrictions. I categorize these under the grab-bag of what I call “the resource gap”: mechanisms by which various positive forms of intervention permitted to nonaddicts are denied to addicts. But if you think about the operational effect of immigration restrictions, clearly they’re in line with the intergenerational erasure narrative I’ve described herein. They are efforts to prevent addicts from moving in place or status—from entering politically charged roles. Addicts are denied housing because housed people, as a bloc, are politically powerful. They’re denied welfare and benefits, again, because getting money makes you immediately more politically virile. This pattern generalizes: almost any other form of addict oppression can be considered a subset of intergenerational erasure.⁸ The carceral-clinical seesaw described in the previous entry operationalizes the same stuff! It keeps addicts not from existing, but from organizing.

1. The forced sterilization law of 1933 applied to alcoholics in addition to psychiatric patients. (Compulsory sterilization of alcoholics had already been proposed and rejected at the turn of the century.) The policy was not applied gender-neutrally: its architect, Kurt Pohlisch, argued that alcoholic women were “easier to sterilize” because they were less likely to be “psychopath[s]” and likelier to have children with other alcoholics (Zeidman, 335). Pohlisch did not also advocate sterilizing morphine addicts (it seems he thought they were constitutionally infertile), but his compatriot Walther Birkmayer implied that those “who had fallen prey to any kind of addiction” should be “remove[d] like dust particles” from the gene pool (355).

2. Some of the oppressions faced by children who test positive at birth are oppressions also faced by adolescent and adult addicts, but the paradigmatic feature of being marginalized in light of atypical substance use patterns is missing. Addicts are oppressed in virtue of being punished for use patterns they are led to believe they are freely choosing; nobody thinks babies choose to do just about anything. So, children can be addicts, but babies can’t, at least not given our current cultural conceptualizations of what babies are like.

3. And anyway, fetuses that are aborted are, in the liberal mind, better off than anyone born with fetal alcohol syndrome. “Better dead than disabled.”

4. What I find salient about this is that for all their performative obsession about the causes of things, the legal scholars interested in challenging ICWA don’t seem to have inquired into Chesterton’s fence at all—realized that there is good reason for this to exist. Or, more likely, they know exactly what will follow its elimination.

5. In fact one worries the generational trauma narrative makes things worse: it primes people to be on the lookout for generational cycles of trauma manifesting in child abuse when they learn a parent is Indigenous.

6. People are always looking for compromises. If “We just have to help addicts get better at parenting” sounds like something you’d say, I recommend the excellent new sci-fi novel The School for Good Mothers.

7. I’m not even going to address the cynical deployment of the fact that one of the foster parents is Native American.

8. Economic exploitation is a bit weird; it’s different from the others, for reasons I’ll talk about when I get to it.