Charles Ungerleider,
Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia
[permission granted
to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]
The enduring police racism toward Black men shocks the
conscience. “Shocks the conscience” is a legal
judgment that a government’s agent has acted in a manner that is outside of
the boundary of human decency. Such racism is systemic, by which I mean discriminatory
values and practices are deeply imbedded in society’s laws and institutions,
including the legal, political, economic and its education systems.
Let me illustrate another system in which racism operates in
the United States, and then show how it works in Canada and show its connection
to education. The forcible separation of a child from their asylum-seeking,
immigrant parents in the United States was abhorrent. In a ruling requiring
that children must be reunited with their families within 30 days, a judge said that
the Government’s practice of separating children from their parents and failing
to reunite them shocks the conscience.
Family separation was a deliberate strategy of the U.S.
government designed to deter migrants from attempting to enter the United
States without authorization. The strategy provoked outrage around the world.
One subtext to the outrage was that the cold-hearted policy was simply another
manifestation of the contempt that the current US President has espoused toward
immigrants and people of colour. A second subtext in this country was
self-righteousness: “Canada would never do anything like that!”
Aboriginal children were separated from their parents and sent to residential
schools beginning in the last quarter of the 19th century, a
practice that continued for about 100 years but whose impact may be felt for
generations to come. The education Indigenous children received in residential
schools was a form of cultural
genocide; Indigenous children were prevented from speaking their languages
and their contact with families and communities was restricted in a conscious
attempt to “take the Indian out of the Child.” The children and grandchildren of residential
school survivors have suffered from the impact of the trauma their parents experienced
directly.
Just prior to the Judge’s ruling in the US family separation
case, the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) issued a “statement
of evidence” in which it documented the body of research showing that
family separation has damaging psychological
and health consequences for children, their families and communities. According
to the SRCD, the problems engendered by parent child separation do not end when
parents and their children are reunited.
The research, to which the SRCD referred, dates to studies
of the impact of family separation during the Second World War showing that the
effects can be long-lasting – even when parents and children have been reunited. The effects include increased risk of mental
illness, poor inter-personal relations, reactivity to stress and even
mortality. Both parents and children can be affected by the separation and
separation can produce negative consequences across the lifespan of the
children and their children’s children.
In Canada, even after the closure of most of the residential
schools, removing Indigenous children from the homes of their parents and
placing them in foster homes was a relatively common practice that was evident
through the 1980s. The practice was not
confined to Indigenous parents and children. Children
of Sons of Freedom Doukhobors and unwed mothers were also separated from
their children (who were defined as ‘illegitimate’ children) and placed in
foster or adoptive families.
The children and grandchildren from families that have been
separated may suffer most but the entire community is affected by them as well.
Schools, health, justice, and social welfare systems must address the cognitive,
emotional, physical, and inter-personal effects of family separation.
The disgust we felt about the use of family separation as a
method of social control signals greater empathy on our part. But we should not
be so pious as to believe that it cannot happen again. The roots of such
practices are built into the human calculus of the social system, suggesting
that some lives are more valuable than others. Those roots must be completely
removed from all systems.
Canadian
public schools today are more likely to address the devastating impact of colonization
on Indigenous people than in the past. But they still teach history as if the
settlers are central to the stories and the Indigenous peoples are “other” and marginal
to the dominant narrative. Canadian history begins with settler contact as if
there was no story prior to the arrival of Europeans.
Because of their centrality in the social system and their
influence on beliefs and behaviours, schools are pivotal to the elimination of
racism. The Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of Canada has pointed the way toward reconciliation.[1]
We must acknowledge the injustices done, recognize that they were part of the
human calculus of the Canadian social system, commit to their elimination, and
ensure that the values we profess – equality among all people – are built into
our social system.
[1] Many
of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action address education,
language, and culture. https://nctr.ca/reports.php.