The (White) Lost Generation

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091115/ap_on_re_eu/child_migrants_apology_4

I was already familiar with Australia's disgraceful treatment of Aborigines by taking children from their families and placing them in the care of white familes in a ludicrous attempt to incorporate the obviously Aboriginal chilfren into a highly racist society. I was also aware of the British policy of colonization by deportation, although my collateral relatives actually reached Australia as chaplains rather than convicts. I was even aware that the last official blackface show in Britain was canceled in the Seventies, shortly after my birth. I had not known, however, that the United Kingdom had sent (effectively deporting) many white children, sometimes orphans or bastards (in the technical term, although not legally anymore in the UK) guilty of no crime to the British colonies, where they often ended in institutions or as cheap farm labor without any inconvenient family ties. No doubt this infusion of unfortunates allowed the Australian government to stave off for a time the specter of Asian immigration, since they were white, whatever their other sins might be. Every time I read about these sorts of cold calculation regarding human stock, such as Australian adoption policies, American eugenics, African slavery, or Asian denial of the existance of outcast castes, I wonder how many more I might not have discovered.