Family Separation: My Personal Story

My grandmother immigrated to the U.S. on the SS George Washington.

I hesitate to write the above headline, because the story I'm about to tell is not anywhere near as traumatic as the family separation currently happening to asylum seekers at the U.S./Mexico border. Nor does it compare to the brutal family separation that occurred during slavery, the disappearances during Jim Crow, in Native American "boarding schools" or currently in a culture of mass incarceration and immigrant detention. I hate to compare one person's trauma to another's, but some hesitation is warranted here.

Nevertheless, I think my story does a good job of showing how separation of any kind leaves long lasting trauma that affects our behavior and attitudes for generations to come—and how this trauma needs to be healed before full unity and wholeness in society or our institutions can be achieved.

***

My grandmother immigrated from what is now modern day Slovakia to the United States (Ohio) in the early 1920s. She was 17 years old. She remembered saying goodbye to her mother. At that moment, she instinctively knew that she would never see her again. That turned out to be true.

She did return once to see her family back in Europe in the 1960s. She saw her brothers, sisters and extended family. I'm sure it was wonderful to have that reunion. It must also have been bittersweet to realize all the life together they were not going to experience.

Her first born son Emery joined the Navy and went off to the Pacific theater of World War II. He was 17 or 18—the same age as my grandmother when she left home for good. While overseas, he married a Philipino woman. They had three children, many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They moved around a lot but always stayed in the Pacific rim. They settled on Hawaii, which was a halfway point for their respective families—and close to neither!

Growing up, we would see them as often as once every year. Their visits were full and fun. We actually saw them more frequently, and had more in-depth interactions with them, than some of my other aunts and uncles who lived a lot closer. We made sure to make our limited time together count. But there was always a pain. Uncle Emery and Aunt Betsy just couldn't be a regular fixture. We didn't see them at random weddings, funerals or 4th of July cookouts. We didn't just run into each other in the grocery store. No matter how close we were, the miles between us were always there. I have only seen some of my cousins once in my life.

These experiences of immigration brought out the best in people. It helped them to be daring, entrepreneurial and full of vigor. There is an energy that immigrants have that is hard to find anywhere else. But in these cases, it also brought lasting wounds for both themselves and their families. Some of those wounds have remained for decades, and it's the 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants who have to do the work to restore and heal.

Fast forwards several decades: I come of age. Without considering any of this history, I am surprised by how much hostility my family has to any of my plans to move around. Go to a faraway college? Move to another city? Move out of state? Travel abroad?? All those ideas were met with anger, resistance and disapproval. I actually hid those plans from my folks up until the last minute because I just couldn't bear all the guilt and negativity, which I saw as an affront to my own ideas and initiative. And it was. But today I see some of this in a new light.

I'm sure a lot more factored into my family's reactions than our immigration history, but I bet they factored in a whole lot more than any of us ever realized.

You see, nowadays communication and travel are different. It is relatively easy to get a plane ticket. Highways are well-developed. Phone calls are cheaper, if not downright free with you plan. Social media and video chatting are everyday realities rather than something only imagined on Star Trek. And the Soviet "iron curtain" no longer divides the world. 

But somewhere embedded in my family's consciousness is the idea that people who leave never come back. It's a permanent separation. You might as well be dead to them if you are going to leave your hometown. When I was about to make an out-of-state move, I watched them steel themselves emotionally as if they were preparing for a funeral. Their reactions seemed so over the top, so out of proportion—but today I see it differently. Their reactions were based on the 1920s rather than the realities of 2020.

My experiences are not unlike those of the character Miguel in the Disney Pixar movie Coco. The movie does a phenomenal job showing how trauma can continue to impact people in a family generations after the initial incident occurred, even when the initial incident is unknown to present day people. My family's fear of dividing the family was putting us at risk of causing a rift in the family again.

Multi-generational trauma is a significant factor at the foundation of just about every division in society.

Many people today don't understand why we should do anything to atone for slavery, for example. Or the brutalities of colonization. Many don't understand why we would bother do expend energy trying to mend Christian disunity, especially when some of the wounds are 500-1000 years old! But the more we come to understand how multi-generational trauma works, the more clearly we understand the imperative to do the good, ole fashioned Christian work of seeking forgiveness, atoning for wrongdoings and working toward restitution. Very few things are simply "in the past." People say that history does not impact them, but it clearly does, whether we realize it or not.

Multi-generational trauma impacts the Christian family tree as much as it does any other family. We'll explore that in the next post, stay tuned!

***

This is the second part in our series commemorating All Saints and All Souls Days, as well as Day of the Dead in Hispanic cultures. Reformation Sunday in Protestant churches. The voices, experiences and wounds of people in the past have a greater impact on us today than many of us even realize. On the path toward unity, we have to consider the role of multi-generational trauma plays in our divisions.

Part 1:  A Tale of Two Americas

Book Recommendation: Thinking Theologically about Mass Incarceration

Click here to buy

It's hard to imagine a more urgent and timely topic: How can Christian churches understand and address the problems of racism, especially in its most current manifestation, mass incarceration?

BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Thinking Theologically about Mass Incarceration, Biblical Foundations and Justice Imperatives.  Churches, seminaries, social action groups and other concerned Christians: This is a fantastic book for any Christian who wants to better understand—and take action on—racism in the U.S in its contemporary form: Mass incarceration.

26 writers—representing nearly as many Christian denominations—contributed brave essays, prophetic sermons and top-notch scholarly pieces on this very topic as part of the Faith & Order Commission of the National Council of Churches. It was the fruit of a multi-year process of vigorous discussion and discernment. The essays are powerful. 

Topics covered include racism, white supremacy/privilege, prison ministry and the main focus, mass incarceration.

Full disclosure: I am one of the authors who has a piece in this volume.

YOU CAN PURCHASE IT HERE.

This book is a great volume for prayer, study and action on this extremely important, contemporary issue! It's a "must have" for libraries, seminaries as well as personal and group reflection! It is academically robust, but it’s written in an accessible style so that non-experts can engage.  Thanks, Paulist Press!

What is mass incarceration?

If you talk about what racism was like before the Civil War, you couldn’t do that without talking about slavery—it’s most sinister manifestation. For 100 years after the Civil War, you couldn’t talk about racism without mentioning the way Jim Crow laws in the U.S. South institutionalized segregation and, along with it, racism. Today, you can’t really get a full grasp on the reality of racism without understanding how it manifests itself in the phenomenon of mass incarceration and the selective bias and privilege which fuel it.

Mass incarceration is the disproportionate treatment of people of color in all aspects of the criminal justice system—everything from shopkeepers being overly suspicious of black patrons to the statistics that say that people of color are more likely to be questioned by police (such as in a traffic stop), more likely to be searched, more likely to be arrested, and more likely to be convicted and, once convicted, more likely to have the harshest sentences. And the only factor that seems to correlate to these differences is skin color. I’m only restating what has been said so well in Michelle Alexanders seminal book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

A young African American kid is shot and killed for sporting a water pistol in Cleveland, Ohio. A white man who was arrested after shooting 9 black people in Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, is taken to the drive-thru at Burger King immediately after the incident. Perhaps a single incident could be excused for any number of reasons, but there are hundreds and hundreds of comparable examples all across the nation.

The end result is that African Americans have a familiarity with the criminal justice system that most Caucasian Americans will never have. This leaves empty spots in the pews, a gap in father-child relationships, a permanent mark on one's work history and a lifetime ban from voting. While some individual African Americans may fare well, the overall result of this is a permanent 2nd class caste system for African Americans in general.

What can we do about this?  And more specifically, what can our churches do about it? I recommend Thinking Theologically about Mass Incarceration, Biblical Foundations and Justice Imperatives to help with that.

YOU CAN PURCHASE IT HERE.