Taking Children

"Taking Children provocatively argues that the United States has taken children for political ends for four hundred years. Black children, Native children, Latinx children, and the children of the poor have all been seized from their families. As Laura Briggs's sweeping but concise narrative shows, the practice existed on the auction block, in the boarding schools that were designed to pacify the Native American population, in the foster care system that was used to put down the Black freedom movement, in the United States' anti-Communist coups in Central America, and in the moral panic about "crack babies." In chilling detail we see how Central Americans were made into a population that could be stripped of their children and how every US administration beginning with Reagan has put children of immigrants and refugees in detention camps. Yet this history of terror has met with resistance from every generation, and Briggs challenges us to stand and resist in this powerful corrective to American history"--