DISCOVERING THE WAR ON YOUTH
Think Progress has just informed us that the Trump administration is targeting children. This comes in reference to the cruel and horrible policy of separating children from undocumented immigrants crossing the southern borders. What is missed here is that the war on youth has been going on for some time in the US under both political parties and is evident in the criminalization of youths in schools, particularly through zero tolerance polices which accelerate the school-to-prison pipeline.
It is also evident in the number of children being written out of crucial social policies and provisions such as the food stamp program, head start, and health insurance for poor students. It is also evident in police violence against Black youth in the inner cities and elsewhere. It is rampant in the foster care system with stories of children suffering sexual assaults, beatings, and broken limbs. It is also at work in the enormous levels of poverty to which young people are subjected.
All of these indexes point to a hard war at work in a neoliberal regime of cruel casino capitalism--one that mutilates the body and inflicts enormous psychic damage on young people.
If a society's well-being and level of democracy is to be measured in terms of how it treats it young people, especially those marginalized by race, class, and citizenship status, it is failing miserably. See my book, Youth in a Suspect Society for more in great detail.
― Henry Giroux
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