Who owns our children? Thoughts on Freedom, Control, and Slavery
“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” –James Baldwin
In response to the question of why, despite being such a small population, they think trans rights became such a big focus for conservatives in the election, Jamie Lauren Keiles speculates that conservatives have major concerns about “who owns children.” I silently nodded my head in affirmation as I listened to the rest of the interview.
It doesn’t take heavy calculation to conclude that those who hold onto the belief (like a balloon) that one can own non-human animals and land (viewing them both as unthinking vacuous actualities and types of “personal property” in need of up-keep and management) also believe they have the “right” to own their children and condition them the way a barbarous behaviorist might: by bossing them around while offering lots of rewards and punishments in order to prevent them from deviating from the “normal.”
At about the 47:30 mark of the interview with Jay Kaspian Kang, Keiles says this:
“The idea that your children don’t directly reproduce the set of values you instill in them is the greatest concern of conservative people.”
They might be on to something here…
Who do our children belong to? In concordance with Baldwin above, yes, they belong to God. Which is to say they belong to the World. All of us, including non-human life, are familial in the sense that we literally make up the body of God (and as a Christian I get a snack every Sunday to remind me that I’m not only swimming in The Divine but eating them too ((we are what we eat, after all!))). As our indigenous friends teach us, we’re all relatives living beneath what Saint Francis calls Brother Sun and Sister Moon.
However, if we are to believe any of this, then we must also accept (and fiercely guard against) what David Graber has shown us through his work on the history of debt: that deliberately stripping away cultural, familial, and ecological ties is a FANTASTIC way to keep individuals isolated, powerless, and enslaved.
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Illustration above by Yuying He
Thanks to Pete for the Baldwin quote 😊
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