Memorial Garden, 05-07-2019

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/case-reparations-heirs-victims-lynching/"></div>With the rise of Trump, many of us have become resigned to the fact that our political and electoral agendas are essentially set by cable television ratings. Unfortunately, the same holds for our moral vistas.
For example, one of the most egregious and unconstitutional policies implemented by the US since perhaps the Japanese internment camps is the indefinite imprisonment of suspected terrorists without trials in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. There was some buzz about it during the Obama administration, but the issue now seems to have been put to bed — or at least a deep freeze.
Kierkegaard foresaw the present age as one that would take its cues from mass media, burst into enthusiasm, and then quickly lapse back into lethargy and indifference. Consider the now and again rumblings about reparations. But make no mistake, we won’t hear a peep about reparations in the 2020 election cycle.
So, it is with a sense of resignation, a dash of cynicism, and some self-directed laughter that I insist that it is the duty of the federal and/or state governments to make reparations to heirs of the four thousand plus victims of lynching in the US; victims such as Emmett Till, the 14-year-old tortured and killed in Mississippi in 1955 — the Emmett Till whose memorial plaque was recently shot up by University of Mississippi students.
The Tuskegee Institute estimates that some 4,743 people died in organized racial murders between 1882 and 1968, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 whites. The Equal Justice Initiative has a slightly different tally of 4,084 African Americans being lynched between 1877 and 1950.
These mob executions, sometimes attended by as many as 25,000 spectators, routinely included dismemberment, burning, and other forms of medieval torture. The degree of pure sadism that marched in these murders is enough to hang the jaw of the most jaded reader. For a sample to be skipped over by the squeamish, take the death of Claude Neal. In Florida in 1934, Neal, who, based on circumstantial evidence, was accused of raping and murdering a white woman, was dragged from his cell by a mob. As the newspaper account goes, after castrating Neal, the mob
<blockquote>sliced his sides and stomach with knives and every now and then somebody would cut off a finger or a toe. Red hot irons were used to burn him from top to bottom. From time to time during the torture, a rope would be tied around Neal’s neck and he was pulled up over a limb and held there until he almost choked to death, when he would be let down and the torture began all over again. After several hours of this punishment, they just decided to kill him.</blockquote>
Many victims were burned at the stake — slowly. The vigilantes, who were frequently from the merchant class and who in all likelihood would be found in the pews on Sunday, would start the auto-da-fé, put it out, then start it again. This was the unthinkable fate of Lloyd Warner when he was burned alive in St. Joseph, Missouri in 1933. The coda to a newspaper report of the killing reads: “As the body slumped, wood was piled on and the fire was lighted a third time. The crowd cheered and laughed.”
The majority of these murders took place between the 1890s and 1920s. More than two-thirds of these killings occurred in the South, with the vast majority of victims being African American.  During that dark age, no president took a strong stance against lynching for fear of losing the southern vote. Upcoming lynchings would frequently be announced on the radio days ahead of time. On many occasions, Northern newspapers would send reporters south to cover the carnage. When this harrowing machine came to town, there had to be Atticus Finch type individuals who deplored the macabre events, but they rarely spoke up. Moreover, there were few, if any, whites who ever served prison time for organizing a “necktie party.”
In 1963, Bob Dylan recorded the &#8220;The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.&#8221; The haunting protest song, which awakened the sensibilities of none other than President Carter, relates the true story of a rich man who, out of nowhere and in plain sight, beats a black maid to death with his cane at a Baltimore dinner party. Throughout the chilling verses, Dylan refrains, &#8220;Take the rag away from your face, now ain&#8217;t the time for your tears.&#8221; When, however, he reaches the court scene and the judge lets the killer go with a six month sentence, Dylan brings it home, &#8220;Bury the rag deep in your face for now&#8217;s the time for your tears.&#8221;
With regard to our history of collective violence, now is as good a time as any for our tears.
In April of 2018, the National Museum for Peace and Justice, more popularly known as the National Lynching Memorial, opened its doors in Montgomery, Alabama. Ironically enough, sweet home Alabama was a hotbed for lynching, fertile loam for that &#8220;strange fruit&#8221; that Billie Holiday sang about so plaintively.
But more than tears and memorials, it is — or at least should be — time for reparative justice, for reparations. After all, with lynching, there is no place for the usual dodge that it happened more than 100 years ago!
Prisoners unjustly locked up who are later found to be innocent and released from custody are usually compensated for their lost years spent behind bars. Likewise, the progeny of victims of lynching should be remunerated for the wrecking ball that was run through their families, while the powers that be winked and looked the other way.
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A professor of Philosophy at the St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, Gordon Marino is the author of The Existentialist&#8217;s Survival Guide (Harper 2018).
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A Case for Reparations for Heirs of the Victims of Lynching

detention

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/collateral-damage-known-traumas-family-separation/"></div>Science can’t tell us how to act but it can often tell us about the impact of our actions. When it comes to the repercussions of separating infants and children from their caregivers at the US-Mexico border, the science is clear.
Last June, when there were a spate of articles about the harm being wrought by the Trump Administration’s family separation policy, James Coan, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and host of the science podcast ,“<a href="http://circleofwillispodcast.com/">Circle of Willis</a>, penned an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administration-is-committing-violence-against-children/2018/06/15/9be06440-70c0-11e8-bd50-b80389a4e569_story.html">op-ed</a> in The Washington Post, where he naively suggested that if migrant children were “obviously mistreated physically” we wouldn’t stand for it.
Well, sporadic protests aside, we are standing for it. Long after his article, the separations continue.
Hardliners such as former White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions reason that it was the parent’s choice to enter the country outside of proper entry channels that put these children in pens and peril. By their logic, the harm is not blood on our hands.
However, for those who are not convinced by such disingenuous finger-pointing, permit us to rehearse the half-century of solid research warning about the dangers of prying babies and toddlers away from mothers: the worst bruises from isolation are internal — deep in the psyche of the child. They are also large and long-lasting. And for those who support or shrug off the current policies, they should at least acknowledge that forced separation is as violent an action as physical abuse.
Lately there has been an outcry over the lack of toothbrushes and toothpaste for the caged children. But forget cavities. Without diminishing the horrendous conditions that Americans would never tolerate for their own children, there are much more serious dangers than poor dental hygiene. In an interview for Coan’s podcast, Columbia University professor of psychology Nim Tottenham stated, “When we think of the basic needs of a human, we often think about food, water, shelter, medical care. But when you’re talking about a developing human, you have to also add in the caregiver&#8230;”
In the early 1960s, the renowned British psychoanalyst John Bowlby developed an influential theory of attachment, and along with his collaborator James Robertson delineated the stages of distress responses that children go through as they cope with being torn away from their mothers. First, they explain, there is the protest phase in which the child cries and screams. Then comes despair, in which the child gives up hope of reunification and becomes withdrawn. If the separation continues, most children sink into a dangerous state of detachment. At this juncture, the child appears to have annihilated his need for his mother. Later, even when reunited with the family, he or she frequently becomes emotionally distant and develops a fundamental lack of trust in other people. Though some children are more resilient than others, that last state is the most difficult to reverse.
Research on infant–mother attachment has come a long way since Bowlby. Psychologists concur that in the first few months of life, close facial interaction with the mother or mother figure are essential in organizing the developing brain. The dance between caregiver and child is of such developmental importance that the prominent psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott once proclaimed, “There is no such thing as an infant… without maternal care one would find no infant.”
One of the world’s leading researchers on infant mother interaction, Columbia University Clinical Professor  Beatrice Beebe, observed, “There is damage to the mother–child bond even after they are reunited. In many cases, when a baby is brought together with his or her mother again, the baby will initially turn away refusing to acknowledge the mother&#8230; [It] is a long and bumpy road back to the point of normalcy and basic trust.”
Ethical concerns often override the need for controlled, prospective studies of the sequelae resulting from removal of children from their primary caregivers. Instead, today’s researchers often study the outcomes of institutional care (e.g. orphanages) on infants and young children who are subsequently adopted. In an imaging study of the long-term neural correlates of adverse rearing conditions of 12–14-year-old children who were internationally adopted at a median age of 12 months from institutional care, University of Minnesota researchers found that when compared to children of the same age who were brought up in their biological families, “this temporally discrete period of early deprivation is associated with persisting alterations in brain morphology even years after exposure,“ and that these “alterations are not completely ameliorated by subsequent environmental enrichment by early adolescence” (<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811914008441?via%3Dihub">Hodel et al., 2015</a>). Moreover, as Tottenham emphasizes: “At the level of the brain, we know that early caregiving trauma is associated with a hyperactivity of threat-related systems of the brain that go on to produce risks for major depression, anxiety and a whole host of other mental illnesses, including substance abuse, PTSD, conduct problems, and so on” (Circle of Willis, 10:47).
The nightmare of separation is also a traumatic blow to the parents. For most of us, having a child is like having a heart outside oneself. Though trivial by comparison to the separations at the border, one night many years ago, we were in a mall chatting away, and suddenly noticed that our three-year-old had wandered off. For 10 minutes that seemed to stretch 10 years we could not find him. Thinking back over three decades, Susan still shivers about it. “I was so panicked I thought I would die,” she recalls. Three decades and it’s as fresh as yesterday.
Though we have slavery, the Holocaust, and the separation of Native Americans from their families as historical parallels to today’s border separations, it is hard to crawl into the minds  of parents enduring the unthinkable or into the minds of children enduring such trauma. But we should damn well try.
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Collateral Damage: The Known Traumas of Family Separation

The Urge: Our History of Addiction

Gordon Marino received his doctorate from the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. He is professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. He is the author of <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-existentialists-survival-guide-gordon-marino?variant=32118076669986">The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age</a> (Harper, 2018).

Gordon Marino

When Addiction Fails: On Carl Erik Fisher’s “The Urge”

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

"Never be afraid to sit awhile and think." — Lorraine Hansberry

Philosophy &amp; Religion

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

Gordon Marino received his doctorate from the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. He is professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. He is the author of <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-existentialists-survival-guide-gordon-marino?variant=32118076669986">The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age</a> (Harper, 2018).