Laura Briggs, "Taking Children: A History of American Terror" (U California Press, 2020)

Dec 31, 2023

Laura Briggs, an author and historian, explores the history of American terror through child abduction as a strategy. She discusses the systemic issues leading to the loss of parental rights, the hyper-criminalization of drug use, and the disenfranchisement of Black and Latinx communities. Briggs also sheds light on resistance efforts and the impact of debt on women and children's lives.

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Introduction

00:00 • 4min

History of Science, Medicine, and Reproductive Politics

04:01 • 16min

Historical Strategies of Taking Children and Their Impact

20:24 • 3min

The Strategy of Cruelty

23:26 • 7min

The Complex History of Child Taking

30:53 • 26min

The Hyper Criminalization of Drug and Alcohol Use and its Impact on the Child Welfare System

56:37 • 7min

The Disenfranchisement of Black and Latinx Communities

01:03:30 • 14min

Debt, Sovereignty, and the Impact on Women and Children

01:17:24 • 2min

Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press 2020) is a forceful and captivating book that readers won’t be able to put down, and that listeners from all sort of backgrounds will definitely want to hear more about. Weaving together histories of Black communities (in the US and the Americas more broadly), Native Americans, and multiple Latin Americans countries, Briggs tells us how taking of children has been used as a strategy to terrorize communities that demand social justice and change. This book, timely as no other, asks readers to question the narrative that portrays taking children as something that is done in the benefit of the child, and instead to see it as a strategy that seeks to control and dominate communities that are deem dangerous to the social order. As Prof. Briggs tells us by the end of the interview, in this summer of racial reckoning the BLM movement has asked to eliminate the foster care system for this has been another vehicle for the policing and criminalization of African American communities in the United States. This demand has everything to do with the long history of talking children that is so thoroughly documented in this book.

Yet this is not only a “History of American Terror” as the title suggests, it is also a history about how individuals, families, communities and organizations have resisted this terrorizing strategy. Make no mistake: this is not a story with a happy ending, still, it is one that teaches us that in our past lies both the ghostly hauntings that explain why taking children has been a strategy used for terror, but also why therein we can find the seeds to resistance and transformation. Definitely a must for these troubling and convoluted times.

Bonus: Prof. Briggs’s son makes a short but hilarious appearance in our conversation. We have decided not to delete this portion of the interview because it demonstrates one of Prof. Briggs main scholarly arguments: the distinction between the private and public is illusory.

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