My sister has a friend in Canada. He’s very wealthy, very successful, has a great family. His relatives’ two small children have been orphaned. The friend, of course, wants to adopt the children. He loves them, his family loves them. This could be a good solution for children in a tragic situation.
But no, the government takes the kids and puts them in foster care. You’d think the government would be happy to save some money and give the kids to the wealthy relatives who desperately want to take them. There is a complication, though. The children have some Native heritage. And the wealthy relatives don’t. So instead of letting the kids go to uncle’s familiar house, they are shipped off to a reservation where they’d never been and where they know nobody. Because “a white man will not be able to preserve their Native culture.”
This is one-drop theory of race, and it’s as disgusting today as it was when it was invented by slaveowners. Behind all of the words about culture and decolonization is the reality that kids with “one drop of non-white blood” are being shipped off somewhere out of sight of the new elite.
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