Slavery Never Ended – No Matter What You Heard
Slavery continued, only using other tactics like convict leasing, segregation, and now mass incarceration and the private prison industrial complex. Following is a harrowing tale that starts with the emancipation proclamation, which keeps people of color fighting for equality still not yet achieved.
Since slavery was technically abolished in 1865, there has been a perfect storm of repression, injustice, and racism in the law that has kept people of color in this country dispossessed and disenfranchised. They were supposed to have been set free, but today they still find themselves trapped by an unjust and inhumane set of circumstances designed to keep them enslaved.
The US designed a system to oppress them on purpose.
This country has systematically handed the Black community crumbs since they were “set free” in 1864. The whole time, Republicans planned a system behind their backs designed to keep the Black community begging for more crumbs. Every time it appears they make progress, it turns out to be a shift into the next system of oppression.
The election of President Donald Trump didn’t make the problems worse. Trump’s election win simply emboldened the ignorant among us to start being honest about their contempt.
RACISM
Lately, the term racism is thrown around so much that it can start to lose meaning. On top of that, it seems that many people are simply unwilling to listen when a person of color wants to tell them they are racist. They stubbornly refuse to let go of their ignorance.
I recently had to explain to some fellow white people on social media that using the term ‘white power’ is indeed racist. I had to explain that WHITE isn’t even a race, it’s a social construct. Hell, Jews are white, but the Nazis certainly didn’t think so.
I had to say things like:
“No, indentured servitude to pay off your boat ride here (Irish ‘slavery’) was not even CLOSE to being literally owned part and parcel like you were a lamp or a tractor or a cow.”
BLOODLINES, NOT SKIN COLOR
I am a Viking. My people were Vikings before they were Scottish and then Irish. I am very proud of that. Of course, none of the ‘we wanna say white power’ crew even knew where their people were from originally. I gave up after a few hours of being called a triggered snowflake who hates the color of my own skin.
I told them it was people like them who make me hate the color of my skin. Although, I don’t. I abhor those that are ONLY proud of the color of their skin with no clue where they are actually from, though. I have very little patience for those that remain unwilling to challenge their ignorance.
Please don’t be that guy.
This piece is not just about the systemic racism woven into the very fabric of this country, though. There is no denying that’s a fact. This article explains why racism exists at all, and how the system keeps people of color slaves to the state by working to rework different systems of oppression for 150 years.
SOME STATISTICS TO ROCK YOUR WORLD
Most of us realize that there are major problems with the judicial system in America. But when I read these statistics, I was absolutely floored. Like most of you, I had no idea just how badly broken and unjust the system actually is.
Former President Barack Obama pointed out in a speech that:
“The United States is home to 5 percent of the population but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.”
In 1972 the prison population in the U.S. was 300,000 people. Today that number has risen to a shocking 2.3 million, and it’s climbing. “The land of the free” is home to the world’s largest prison population, by far.
Right now, if you are a white man in the United States, you have a 1 in 17 chance of going to jail sometime during your life. If you are a Black man in the United States, you have a 1 in 3 chance of seeing the inside of a jail cell in your lifetime.
THIS WILL NOT BE COMFORTABLE
Reading this isn’t going to feel good. It is some exceedingly difficult stuff to process. Before Trump and the past year, perhaps we wanted to believe that these problems were behind us. Perhaps we all wanted so badly to pretend we could ignore color and pretend things were equal that we just didn’t want to look closely enough.
We have all been complacent to one extent or another.
Well, those days are over. It’s high time we felt uncomfortable. It’s high time we faced the truth. Not only about what is really going on in this country, but the truth about our part in it, no matter how seemingly innocent, or how small. Our only option now is to listen and listen hard.
Pretending this isn’t happening just won’t fly any longer. It cannot. Bryan Stevenson said in the 13th:
“People say all the time:
Well, I don’t understand how people could have tolerated slavery. How could they have made peace with that? How could people have gone to a lynching and participated in that? That’s so crazy, if I was living at that time I would never have tolerated anything like that.’
And the truth is we are living in this time, and we are tolerating it.”
This system is entirely corrupt from the initial arrest, through sentencing, and right through the parole hearing, and the state stacked the process against people of color in ways that shocked me to my core when I researched this piece. There are things that you haven’t even thought about, I assure you.
Read on, learn something, do even more research. Our government has kept a boot on the necks of people of color for long enough.
The following series will take you on a trip through an America you won’t want to believe exists. I will walk you through the past and guide you from a perspective that I can guarantee you haven’t viewed things from before.
Because, no matter what, we cannot continue to allow them to get away with it.
Read Keep it Real for some real stories and some facts that will blow your mind, and stick around because this is only the first part in a 6 part series on just how we got to this place. In part 2 we start with early U.S. slavery that started right after the Civil War.
Featured Image Via YouTube Video.
