you mean thank you Cory for boosting Michelle Alexander's effort to educate new generation about the 13th with The New Jim Crow.
anybody descended of slaves has known this since abolition; but it took Prof. Alexander's work to really smack people upside the head with the charade of USA's abolitionism; ESPECIALLY after ghouls like ex-NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly became the face of a new "abolition" movement that called for MORE MASS INCARCERATION
Let's say it's... 1855. A certain percentage of the population of the USA are slaves. I don't have any clue what percentage that is.
Now it's 2024. A certain percentage of the population are prisoners.
I have a couple of percentages in my head from old reading, but I am not sure if they are percentages of prison populations or per capital incarcertation rates.
Anyways, I strongly suspect the second one is probably higher.
I’ve had this on my long-run audio book rotation every year or so for the past 6 years. Expertly eye-opening to those of us educated in the colorblind era of the christian nationalistic South.
@bntn@dinozombie@pluralistic NEGL for me, emotionally, it has been a brutally difficult book to read. i have now lost 3 cousins to the mass incarceration and police brutality. so for me, it's personal, not academic.
@dinozombie@pluralistic When slavery was officially abolished, the white majority in the US scrambled to replace it with various practices that would get them as close to reinstating slavery as possible: share-cropping, Jim Crow, and as you've already pointed out, forced labour via incarceration.
@OrionKidder@dinozombie@pluralistic let’s not forget who the “war on drugs” targeted and which communities are heavily policed. Let’s not forget which defendants are let go without jail time “because they have a bright future” despite being rapists over the age of 18, and which defendants are held without bail for trials that never arrive and/or framed by the cops and
@OrionKidder@dinozombie@pluralistic that someone ever, ever was able to get up and say, with a straight face, that the diluted form of cocaine (crack) was more dangerous and unhealthy and “deserved” more jail time… I will never not be angry at that. I will always be mad that they demonized the diluted form of the rich white boy drug because it helped them put Black people in jail while letting white people get away with it.
@dinozombie@pluralistic The Nazis explicitly modeled aspects of their bigoted political systems on US race laws. Some Nazis concluded (early on) that the US laws (many of which remained in place for over a decade after WW2) were too extreme.
@dinozombie@pluralistic As a punishment. Not as "rehabilitation" but as a punishment. It says so right in the text. The lengths to which we go to make prisoners into un-persons...
@dinozombie
I don’t know if it’s all the states but I’m pretty sure in most of them the plates are made by prisoners. NH is just the most egregiously ironic about it.
Five years ago Colorado voters changed the state constitution to eliminate the “exception clause” as it’s called but prisoners say nothing has really changed. https://www.npr.org/2023/11/13/1210564359/slavery-prison-forced-labor-movement