Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Things that I knew about: that the mass incarceration of people in the USA , particularly black men, has direct ties to/is an extension of slavery. Things I did not know: this specific shit about Louisiana HOLY FUCK this is evil.
Prison labor is a problem we need to address soon.
Convicts in prison should have to work like the rest of us.
You mean like slavery?
No, we’re giving them 3 meals and a bed, at our expense, while they just sit around and watch TV. They should have to work!
Right. Like slavery.
It’s not like slavery!
Can they leave?
No.
Can they refuse work?
No.
So how exactly isn’t this slavery?
We DO pay them!
Do we pay in accordance with labor laws?
No. We pay them between 33 cents and $1.41/hour with a maximum daily wage below $5, then take up to half of that as room&board fees and victim compensation.
Below URL image reads “fun bonus fact: enough of our labor market currently relies on labor at these depressed rates, that it has a substantial downward pressure on both wages and job availability in low-skilled sectors. Immigrants aren’t taking your jobs. Slavery is.
End description.
I’d also like to add it’s not just private prisons. It’s also private detention centers where ICE keeps the immigrants.
-fae
The constitution even acknowledges that it’s still slavery
a hefty chunk of items with that ‘made in america’ sticker are in fact made by prison labor
at the very least anything that is a product of prison labor should be required to have a similar sticker to inform consumers they are taking part of this system, which is difficult to track because prison made manufactured goods include almost the entire uniform of a US soldier, road construction in most southern states, and agricultural goods sold in most stores
this…. looks familliar
Prison is just covert slavery and that’s why they wanna keep so many black people in there for the smallest offences.
This is insane
(Just to clarify, I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just giving you more information because you’re right, and I like your blog, and I want you to have sources in case you need them.)
It’s not even covert. It’s blatant and overt. It’s even called slavery in the constitution.
“Slavery is illegal except as punishment for a crime.”
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
People just don’t care because they think it’s all murderers and rapists, despite the fact that the number of violent criminals in jail is so small it might as well be negligible.
As of September 30, 2009 in federal prisons, 7.9% of sentenced prisoners were incarcerated for violent crimes,[39] while at year end 2008 of sentenced prisoners in state prisons, 52.4% had been jailed for violent crimes.[39] In 2002 (latest available data by type of offense), 21.6% of convicted inmates in jails were in prison for violent crimes. Among unconvicted inmates in jails in 2002, 34% had a violent offense as the most serious charge. 41% percent of convicted and unconvicted jail inmates in 2002 had a current or prior violent offense; 46% were nonviolent recidivists.[46]
It’s literally slavery, just dumbass racists and capitalists don’t care enough to figure out why we’re calling it that.
-fae
Actually, no, I got something to add and it’s this video by Knowing Better on Youtube:
Slavery is baked into the US American system so much more firmly than anyone ever really acknowledges.
There’s a very good and very hard-hitting documentary about it on Netflix
Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.
have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.
and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.
black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.
if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you’ve ever met. it doesn’t have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don’t know much, look it up and learn about it together.
This is Juneteenth.
white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.
It’s so significant too that this narrative was collected by Zora Neale Hurston, one of the greatest authors and anthropologists of her time. She was shunned by the “gatekeepers” of both of these professions, largely because of her Blackness, her womanhood, and her uncompromising commitment to honoring and showcasing both in her works. She died penniless and alone in a state-run institution in 1960. All of her works had gone out of publication by then. It took more than a decade before she was rediscovered. A young author by the name of Alice Walker had come across her work and was deeply inspired by it. “In 1973, after an exhaustive search, Walker came across Hurston’s unmarked grave in Ft. Pierce, Fla. She purchased a headstone for Hurston’s tomb and had it inscribed “A Genius of the South.“”
It is through Zora Neale Hurston’s pioneering sacrifice, and the acceptance of that inheritance by Alice Walker that we have found this missing piece of our history. Without the courageous and unfailing work of Black women, we wouldn’t have Cudjo Lewis’s story. We are slowly regaining a narrative that’s been hidden from us, one that continues to be lied about. Trust Black women to lead the way.
“Only 1% of white people in the US had slaves” is a great example of using a fact for misinformation. That is true, but extremely manipulative bc it cuts out really important details about the statistic.
1) It includes the more populous Northern states that did not allow slavery.
2) It ignores the fact that family units were much larger and only the family patriarch tended to actually own the slaves for the family, meaning there were significantly more slave-holders than slave-OWNERS. So you need to measure by household.
So, using the exact same data (the 1860 census) you can determine that about 25% of households in the south had slaves. In Mississippi alone 49% of households had slaves. South Carolina is 46%. The 1% figure I’ve believed in the past is propaganda to undersell the role of the general white population in slavery and to undersell just how much everyday southern whites benefitted from slavery.
And I haven’t even mentioned that slave owners often rented out their slaves…
And ignores how many people, even without necessarily owning slaves, fought vehemently against the idea of abolition. Even in states that didn’t allow slavery, there were incidents of violence against abolitionists.
It also ignores that even then, white people knew it was wrong, so they’d use euphemisms. My Grampa was a genealogist and turned up an ancestor’s will from 1807 that included the phrase “to my wife I leave my slave Cris, being my wife’s servant….”
Notice how nice and neat he went from “slave” to “servant”? I’d bet a nickel somewhere in there was a way to say he didn’t technically own slaves.
ALSO. If you’re wondering why it says basically “I leave my property, which belongs to my wife,” EVERYTHING IN THE HOUSE BELONGED TO THE MAN. That will also includes a section where he bequeathed to his wife her clothes, her kitchen implements, her jewelry, and so on. And it specifically names them as ALREADY BEING HERS. So we can here establish that 100% of the adults in that household had slaves. It’s just that only one person in the house could legally own them.
This shit is real. Remember, there are three kinds of untruths: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I wish there were more images from the Met Gala like this- not just revelling in the glamour of fashion but also acknowledging the human cost of it.
On the one hand this picture is a reminder of how far America has come in terms of race relations, giving us hope for further evolution (which is so sorely needed). On the other hand, it reminds us of the blood, sweat and tears that went into building America’s cotton industry. Sadly, there are huge travesties and injustices that still happen in the name of fashion.
Today marks the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition.
The United Nations recognizes that at least 15 million African women, men, non-men, children, and elders were kidnapped and trafficked across the Atlantic world (W. Europe, the Americas, and Caribbean). The founders of the United States and the European leaders of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries are ALL connected to this legacy of state-sanctioned exploitation and dehumanization.
August 22, 1791, marked the start of a series of revolts and slave uprisings led by enslaved and liberated Black and indigenous people, chief among them Sanite Bélair, Catherine Flon, Marie-Louise Coidavid, and Victorian Montou. This event would come to be known as the Haitian Revolution. 🇭🇹
As we continue decolonizing our politics and day-to-day practices, it’s important that we take time to unlearn our miseducation and reclaim our history.
She was born to a rich plantation family in the American South during the time of slavery. She owned a slave, Hetty, a girl her parents gave her when she was a child. She was absolutely the sort of person whose racism you could justify as being ‘of her time’ and ‘just the way she was raised’.
And she cited the injustices she saw growing up on the plantation as the motivation for her becoming an abolitionist as an adult.
When she was a kid, she tried to give bible lessons to the slaves on her Dad’s plantation, and taught her own slave to read and write. As an adult, she and her sister campaigned for the end of slavery. When she found out that one of her brothers had raped one of his own slaves and gotten her pregnant three times, she welcomed her nephews into the family and paid for education for the two that wanted it.
This was a woman who was raised in a culture of slavery, looked around her as a child and said “hey, wait a minute, we’re all assholes!” and spent the rest of her life trying to put things right.
It absolutely was a choice.
This is something I’ve been forced to learn in the past two years. The world around me is turning into something I was raised to believe could only happen in history books, or maybe in other parts of the world that sort of belonged in history books.
The more I see this happening–and the more I learn about the past and how hard people did fight to stop Hitler from initially rising to power, or to point out the humanity of slaves–the more apparent it becomes that we have always had these choices, and they’ve always been the same.
And we’re always going to have genuinely appealing opportunities to make the worst possible choices again, no matter how much more modern the world appears.
You know who else doesn’t get enough heat for their colonialism? Portugal. Those people will be burning in hell
Started the slave trade and get to sit there while France and England get all the smoke nah. Brazil has the second largest population of Black people in the world.
Hellfire immediately. Don’t pass go don’t collect $200
