You do not need to consult a child psychologist to figure out whether the Trump administration’s policy of forcibly wrenching children away from their parents at the southern border is traumatizing for those children. Just ask any parent.

But I submit that there is more at work here than the natural reaction of any parent anywhere. Rather, there is a particular reason why we as Americans have expressed a collective national shudder. Simply put, we’ve been here before.

This new government policy harks back to the days of our national sin. There were many horrors associated with slavery, but the most dreaded was the practice of breaking up slave families. Slavery was so patently morally abhorrent that white society had to rationalize the institution through notions of white supremacy. Ultimately, after considerable bloodshed, the 13th Amendment was enacted to outlaw slavery along with all its foul attributes.

When the Trump administration seeks unfettered power to separate Latino immigrant children from their parents, most of us are troubled by a sense that something radically amiss is taking place. What irks us is not merely a question of our moral obligation to nurture vulnerable children. Rather, it is the fear of a return to the most shameful aspect of the racist past we had hoped was behind us.

And this is true regardless of our individual backgrounds, or whether we are first generation or seventh, or how we identify ourselves ethnically. Collectively, we share a repressed national traumatic memory.

The Trump administration openly expresses its desire to use family separation as a weapon of terror. It’s a safe bet that our president has never read a William Faulkner novel. But he seems to be making a deliberate effort to prove Faulkner right: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

James Shepard-Kegl

North Yarmouth

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