Babies in Boats, Babies in Cages
Susan Honeyman
Through analysis of twentieth-century comic strips, adventure
stories, youth- authored memoir, and children’s fiction, Susan Honeyman’s
forthcoming Perils of Protection:
Shipwreck, Orphans, and Children’s Rights highlights protectionist
rhetoric, the islanding and “containerizing” of children, and the demand for
participatory rights to balance imposed protections.
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If the
past few years have taught those of us in the profession of language and
literary study anything, it is that rhetoric can be wielded just as powerfully,
if not more so, than evidence. Memes with the viral photo of dead refugee
toddler Alan Kurdi and, more recently, the phrase "babies in cages,"
reduce complicated issues down to simple but affective responses that entirely
circumvent reason. A positive is how they communicate across differences. But
by drawing from the common pool of strong emotions, they also inadvertently
reinforce unfair assumptions. Like “alternative facts,” sentimemes get their
power through words and image, not meaning; affect, not logic; sentimentality,
not caring.
Children
have long served in such reductions as rhetorical trump cards, lobbing over
levelheaded argument to get right to our deepest fears, by-passing democratic
disagreement straight to unquestioning acceptance. Some credit the Alan Kurdi
meme with changing the tide of international sympathy towards migrants as
asylum-seeking refugees. By casting humanitarian issues through images of child
innocence and/or victimization, political actors not only avoid the apathy that
can come from ethical abstraction—they can also personalize such issues,
appealing to individualistic views of political agency, not in terms of what is
best for the whole, but according to how voters think politics will affect
themselves (taxes, jobs, etc.).
Often the
skillful use of child images results in genuine political mobilization.
Photographs of Emmett Till’s brutalized corpse once helped to increase
membership and action in the civil rights movement. However, communicating
through sentimemes can have negative consequences, not just for notions of
accuracy and fairness, but also for real persons legally defined as minors.
Just as Alan Kurdi became the urchild, an everychild representing all refugees
fleeing political violence in Syria, "babies in cages" came to
represent immigrant children (mostly older) separated from parents in U.S.
detention. Endless variations on the phrase operate as ideological shortkeys to
establish a liberal’s identity or a right-winger’s insistence that "I don’t
hate brown people (I just don’t want them in my country)." But more
consequentially, sentimemes can lock political discussion into a specific
emotive groove—in this case provoking familial protectiveness. Many journalists
have reported thinking of their own children, when this mass child
incarceration should have them thinking about other children
as a protected class of people with their own inalienable rights. Instead,
everyone simply pats themselves on the back for at least wanting innocent
children out of cages.
Some
critics point directly to the incarceration of the youngest detainees, but
usually the logic embedded emphasizes similar elements of the story as most
shocking: "children ripped from their mothers," who remained unaware
of their “little one’s” whereabouts, as if the worst of the violations are
those threatening parental authority. These are, necessarily, appeals to adult
emotion and action, not a child’s. Such moments are likely to be met with
universal empathy, but the invisible cost of this rhetoric is focusing too
narrowly on parental rights, not children’s. When a child’s rights depend upon
the autonomy of the family and solely upon the authority of parents, they are
not protective rights at all but simply good intentions. And like truth, in our
current political habitus, good intentions are dissolvable as the words we use
to express them.
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