Alan Dettlaff
speaker
269 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Alan Dettlaff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We see the crack baby era where black children were separated from their parents because of their mother's substance use.
When I worked in the system during that time, there was no investigation of those cases at all.
If a mother was born positive for crack cocaine, the baby was just instantly removed and placed in foster care.
And I think there's other periods in history where we see another good example is just recently when children were separated from their parents at the southern border of the United States, the US-Mexico border.
And I think that's a time in history where people saw how horrific this practice of separating children from their parents is.
And there was so much outrage during that time that that outrage actually led to the policy, the zero tolerance policy being ended.
But in that entire period of zero tolerance, about 5,000 children were separated from their parents.
What people don't realize is that every year in the United States today, the state forcibly separates upwards of 200,000 children from their parents.
And those separations go entirely unrecognized.
But the pain, the trauma that people saw on their TVs when they were watching children being taken from their parents during zero tolerance is the same pain and trauma that Black children are experiencing now and have experienced for centuries in this country.
Yeah, exactly.
That's something that I learned about as I was researching the book.
I knew about the incredibly large numbers of separations that happened during slavery, but really didn't realize that that in many ways was the catalyst for the abolition movement.
At the time, there were a lot of abolition newspapers and abolition pamphlets that were done in a very underground way and then sent to the North so that white Northerners could become aware of the problem of slavery.
And they included many different stories about slavery, the horrors that you just mentioned, the beatings, the rapings, the whippings, all of that.
But it was stories of children being separated from their mothers
and images that were drawn, images, but images of babies being taken away from their mother's arms or a mother on an auction block and her child in the audience grabbing her or reaching for her and crying.
And the people who were developing these newspapers realized that it was those stories that were really starting to break through.
I think any parent can understand just the visceral horror of having your child literally taken out of your arms and sold away from you.
And so, like you said, despite all of the horrors of slavery that many people were ambivalent towards, it was this horror of children being taken away from their parents that really started to break through.
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