Political Geography 72 (2019) 144–146
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Political Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Guest editorial
Breaking families: Whiteness, state violence, and the alienable rights of kin
The forcible separation of child migrants from their parents fol-
lowing the Trump administration's April 2018 announcement of a “zero
tolerance” policy became a spectacle of the terrorization of immigrant
communities (Briggs, 2018). This intimate and racialized violence is
foundational to US nationhood, with global implications, given the
resurgence of the far-right. Geographers have engaged with the nation
as an affective and embodied project. We augment this scholarship with
theorizations of anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and queer kinship to
suggest that anti-migrant narratives service a white nation-state by
projecting fear and apathy toward racialized others. We begin from the
premise that US nationalism depends on the marginalization of non-
whites and non-heteromen through settler colonialism, racial capit-
alism, imperialism, and exclusionary immigration policies. We con-
tribute to recent geographic scholarship on the operations of whiteness
by attending to how territory and nation are constituted through the
racialization of kinship. We argue that one way through which the
(white) US nation-state is territorialized is the mechanism of denying
childhood and kinship to racialized peoples in the name of “protecting”
the white family. Performative apathy and cruelty enacts the border
onto racialized bodies, excluding migrant children and families from
the nation, and sanctions violence by naturalizing their subordination
in a racial hierarchy.
Discriminately applied to migrants traveling with children, the
“zero tolerance” policy departed from previous practice of keeping fa-
milies together. Instead, adults were jailed, while children were housed
in makeshift camps run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (such as a
converted Walmart in Texas). Family separation is part of the “Border
Spectacle,” in which asylum-seekers are produced as bogus migrants
and migrants are created as an “illegal” class of people deserving ex-
pulsion (De Genova, 2013; de Vogue & Kopan, 2018), even as it is the
Trump administration's policies against migrants and asylum-seekers
that have been demonstrated to be illegal.
In May 2018, as photographs of children crying in cages circulated,
Jeff Sessions, then Attorney General, defended the policy: “If you are
smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child will be
separated from you as required by law … If you don't like that, then
don't smuggle children over our border” (Rhodan, 2018). The discourse
of “smuggling” not only recalls racialized tropes of coyotes trafficking
children across borders, but also breaks the bond between parents and
children by describing parents as the “smugglers” of (what cannot then
be) their own kin. Thus, vulnerable migrants, even children, are re-
figured as a national security threat to justify the violence of family
separation. This policy perversely recognizes the importance of family
ties by seeking to destroy them in the name of deterring migration,
sending a clear message that for some families, there is no security in
the US.
The separation and subsequent demarcation of some kinship ties as
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.01.001
Received 18 December 2018; Accepted 3 January 2019
Available online 16 January 2019
0962-6298/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
T
“ineligible” (relegating some children to the foster care system) and the
callous failure to maintain careful records connecting parents and
children are manifestations of racial violence as policy—a policy that
denies migrants’ humanity by denying their right to kinship. In refer-
ences to policies that have targeted Native and Indigenous children, the
Native American and Indigenous Studies Association has described the
separation of these children at the border as “a new stolen generation”
(Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, 2018).
Consider the lead plaintiff in the class action suit filed by the ACLU
(de Vogue & Kopan, 2018). Ms. L and her daughter, from the Congo,
arrived at a border port of entry and declared they were seeking
asylum. Four days later, border patrol asked to speak to the six-year-old
daughter alone. Ms. L. could hear her daughter shouting for her help as
Ms. L was informed she would be detained in San Diego and her
daughter taken to Chicago. Her lawyer explains:
The government walked in, and even though everyone knew that
they were separating children as what they believed would be a
deterrent for future people coming, they came in and said, “Well we
took the little girl away for her best interests.” And we said, “Really?
Why is that? Why is it in the best interest this child to be whisked
away?” And they said, “Well, by the time the mother got here from
the Congo, she no longer had all her papers, so we couldn't be sure it
was actually the mother” (Interview with Scahill, 2018)
After a legal battle, DNA test, and seven months of separation, the
mother and daughter were reunited (de Vogue & Kopan, 2018).
Videos of reunifications, showing children's trauma in their affect-
less avoidance of crying parents, are performatively shrugged off by
Trump administration officials as a small price to pay for protecting the
nation. A form of torture for children that will cause lasting damage,
these separations are a component of a suite of Trump's family-targeting
policies, including those intended to end so-called “chain migration.”
We see historical precedent for this policy in the removal of Indigenous
children and in slavery's destruction of Black familial ties. We raise
three points to consider in contextualizing this crisis, and conclude by
pointing to ways this analysis might be productive beyond the US case.
1. Who has the right to childhood?
Appeals to childhood as a universal are rooted in protecting white
innocence, a privilege not afforded to children of color who are routi-
nely hypercriminalized or incarcerated. The violent absurdity of tod-
dlers representing themselves in court (Torres, 2018) parallels the ra-
cialization of Black boys like Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin, as taller,
heavier, dangerous adults and of Black girls, sexualized at young ages
and blamed for their experiences of violence. Protecting all children
would necessitate an overhaul of criminal justice and immigration, as
Guest editorial
abolitionists and migrant activists have articulated (Gilmore, 2007;
Kaba & Meiners, 2014; Loyd, Mitchelson, & Burridge, 2013).
In what contexts are children considered innocent and requiring
protection? Which children? Whose? Migrant labor has historically se-
parated children from families; yet this class-based division of labor,
rather than soliciting white empathy, pathologizes migrant parents and
naturalizes laborers’ suffering. It is crucial not to rely on the innocence
of children to allocate empathy, nor to distinguish between exceptional
“deserving migrants” (children, heroes, doctors) and unexceptional
“illegal immigrants.” Parsing mobile people into such categories aligns
an impossible spectrum of voluntary/involuntary migration with moral
demarcations – “undeserving trespassers” versus “those who deserve
rights and care from the state” (Holmes & Castañeda, 2016, p. 13) – and
proliferates violence by valuing some people as more worthy of care,
and hence, more human, than others.
2. Severing kinship ties to protect the fictive white nation state
Family separation's dehumanizing logics sever ties between parents
and children, in a haunting echo of the foundational racial violences
that enabled the fictive kinship of the white nation state. The theft of
children through residential schools and assimilationist policies lies at
the heart of settler colonialism's campaign to hollow out Turtle Island's
ancestral content, knowledge, languages, and community life, in order
to fill up both land and bodies with European whiteness (Briggs, 2018;
Dunbar-Ortiz, 2017). As argued by Brown and Estes (2018), residential
schools “were key to the U.S. government's project of destroying In-
digenous nations.” This genocidal logic persists in the ongoing erasure
of Indigenous life through the foster care system's overpopulation with
Indigenous children taken from their communities, violence against
Indigenous women, disproportionate police violence targeting In-
digenous men, and in DNA sciences used to undermine tribal sover-
eignty claims (Reardon & TallBear, 2012).
The scenes of family separation immediately recalled transAtlantic
slavery's project of natal alienation (Holden, 2018), as the theft of
children was key to breaking kinship, ancestral and parental connec-
tions in order to destroy social life and render people into property
(Spillers, 2003). Anti-Black violence manifests in forced sterilization's
denial of reproductive rights, reproduced in foster care and incarcera-
tion alike, and in the carceralization of urban spaces that destroy Black
family life (Roberts, 2014; Shabazz, 2015). Collins (2004, p. 4) de-
scribes white supremacy as a “white family,” without empathy for Black
people who are “no kin” to them. Patriarchal white supremacy's hall-
mark is its insistence on the power of those embodying whiteness to
dictate who gets to have ancestors and who gets to have children.
3. Intentional apathy and racial abjection
The cruelty directed at brown migrant children is part of a perfor-
mative apathy that shores up whiteness through a devaluation of other
bodies represented as threat, or as naturally abject. We read the Trump
family's public performances through this lens. Days after the story
broke, Ivanka Trump posted an Instagram photo of herself and her son
(in pajamas, in her arms) with the caption “my [emoji heart].” Melania
Trump was photographed wearing a jacket (on a warm day) with “I
really don't care, do u?” written on the back – en route to visit migrant
children. Even if unintentional, these public proclamations, combined
with policy, represent a celebration of white family and mother-child
love, reiterating racial purity at the very moment of public outcry about
the mistreatment of racialized migrant families.
Silva (2018: 79) observes that “white-bred dreams of citizenship
and nation-making” rely on “white reproduction as central to con-
solidating power,” through love as cruelty. Silva argues that “love” of
(white) family is at the center of violence that is portrayed by the
current administration as “misguided patriotism,” resulting in cruelty,
hate crimes, or human rights abuses. Thus, while pardoning Joe Arpaio
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Political Geography 72 (2019) 144–146
for civil immigration violations, Trump explained, “Sheriff Joe is a
patriot. Sheriff Joe loves our country,” his anti-immigrant violence
masquerading as “nation-making love” (Silva, 2018: 83). As migrant-
directed apathy plays out in the public sphere, Ivanka and Melania
signal where care must be directed.
The protection of white bodies and concomitant violence against
those who are Black and Brown is central to racial categorization, en-
tangled in representations of white experiences of violence as remark-
able, and violent conditions for Black and Brown people as ordinary
(Kobayashi & Peake, 2000). What is at stake is the embodiment of race
and gender through violence, tautologically justified because the same
people are repeatedly targeted by that violence: thus, violence against
migrants becomes naturalized as the inevitable fate of “illegal” people
(Holmes & Castañeda, 2016). The direction of love toward the deser-
ving white child is, in Spillers’s (2003, p. 218), terms, “the vertical
transfer of a bloodline, of a patronymic, of titles and entitlements, of
real estate and the prerogatives of ‘cold cash,’ from fathers to sons and
in the supposedly free exchange of affectional ties between a male and a
female of his choice.” Family thus defined, “becomes the mythically
revered privilege of a free and freed community.”
4. An agenda for political geographers
As political geographers, what might we learn from this ongoing
crisis, and what analytic tools might we bring to bear? We encourage
geographers to engage feminists of color analyses that demonstrate how
whiteness is constructed through fictive kinship and destroying or ap-
propriating Black, Brown, Native, and migrant kinship (e.g. Collins,
2004; Reardon & TallBear, 2012; Roberts, 2014). These analyses further
political geographic scholarship by taking kinship and families as cen-
tral to the affective and embodied production of territory, borders, and
nation-states. We also ought to attend to the labor through which
kinship is recovered and sustained for survival and building a future
(e.g. Brown & Estes, 2018; Smiles, 2018). We direct attention to re-
volutionary mothering and moves to queer kinship (e.g. Gumbs,
Martens, & Williams, 2016), and to political struggles centering In-
digenous people's rights to self-determine what it means to be related
(e.g. Dennison, 2012; Leroux, 2018). We also ask ourselves on what
basis we demand justice: the rhetoric of “what if it was your child,”
upholds colorblind celebrations of the nuclear family, and fails to queer
normative structures of caring (Oswin, 2012).
We encourage geographers to extend work on the abolition of
borders, cages, and prisons by highlighting the coalitional possibilities
(Chávez, 2013) of linking Native, Black, Brown, and marginalized mi-
grant struggles, articulated in messages like “No ban on stolen land”
(e.g., Mays, 2016, see also the Red Nation Manifesto). We see echoes of
racialization and dehumanization in the “refugee crisis,” in Europe and
elsewhere (e.g., De Genova, 2013; Loyd et al., 2013), and suggest that
resonant analyses could emerge from contextual grounding in relation
to European understandings of race (Bialasiewicz, 2006), whiteness and
territoriality (Nayak, 2010), and in the global far-right turn We close by
asking geographers to dismantle the social and political life of these
racial logics by enacting fugitivity (Harney & Moten, 2013) as re-
searchers and educators.
Conflicts of interest
None.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.01.001.
Guest editorial
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Sara Smith∗
Carolina Hall 222/Campus Box 3220, Department of Geography,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA
E-mail address: shsmith1@email.unc.edu.
Pavithra Vasudevan
Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, Center for Women's
and Gender Studies, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Carlos Serrano
Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA
Banu Gökarıksel
Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA