Free/ Cheap Labor is Our Country’s Darkest Legacy

This was for a social studies class I'm taking, which is why it's full of citations. I highly recommend the documentary 13th. It's on Netflix and well worth the watch.
          
          I have had the same argument with my dad a couple of times about the reasons why the Civil War was fought. In the simplest of terms, I always say it was because of slavery, and he claims economics. I think now that we’re both right, but only because slavery was an economic issue. People needed to profit, and the quickest way to increase this was to spend less on labor. That’s why our country stomached the atrocity of human bondage for as long as it did--for profit. I saw this reappear in Douglas Blackmon’s (2008) Slavery by Another Name. When slavery ended, Americans needed a new source for cheap labor, so we invented convict leasing.

And it’s happening right now in America again. Ava DuVernay’s (2016) 13th not only told us this, but also showed us footage of imprisoned Americans making goods that companies like J.C. Penny, Victoria’s Secret, and Microsoft sell for profit. The “loophole” in the 13th Amendment makes the whole thing null and void.

Slavery hasn’t really ended if we can still conscript “convicts” into free labor. And “convicts” should always be in quotes because of the travesty that is our criminal justice system. DuVernay (2016) showed us what this looks like. We got rid of judges’ ability to contextualize crime by forcing mandatory minimums on them, which also meant the responsibility of sentencing fell to prosecutors who are 95% white (DuVernay, 2016). Further, 97% of people arrested never go to trial. They take plea bargains because of the absurdity of mandatory minimums, or if they’re economically advantaged, they post bail (DuVernay, 2016). If they choose to do neither (or can’t), like Kalief Browder, they may spend years in prison awaiting a trial.

Browder’s story broke my heart into a million pieces. He was a child, legally and practically, when he was put in jail for three years before he was convicted of a crime. He was tortured in prison, and DuVernay showed us this footage. This is happening right now, just in a different way than it used to. Like Republican campaign consultant Lee Atwater explicitly said, you can make race abstract, but everybody knows what you’re talking about (DuVernay, 2016).

In his TED Talk, Bryan Stevenson (2012), who is also featured in DuVernay’s documentary, talked about how Germans feel like they can’t have the death penalty because of their past. How in the world is this different from our legacy? We’ve committed genocide against indigenous people, exploited for profit the labor of black, brown, and poor bodies, and now we’ve got the audacity to lock children away for life and continue to exploit their labor while they’re awaiting a death sentence? We have this dark legacy that we, as a country, are somehow willing to separate from what is currently happening.

Howard Zinn (2015) touched on this too, contextualizing the very beginning of the U.S.: “The country therefore was not ‘born free’ but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich” (Zinn, 2015, p. 50). To dispel tensions between these opposing forces, revolutionary leaders figured out a way to “unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality”: “the language of liberty and equality” (Zinn, 2015, p. 58). Before the birth of our nation, we used the idea of our nation to squash potential unrest and unite the “right” kind of people (white, propertied) against the “wrong” kind (indigenous, black, poor).

Columbus set out looking for gold and slaves, and he is the man we celebrate as the discoverer of our great land. When indigenous people proved to be too difficult to enslave, Americans ripped Africans from their homes. We established the cruelest kind of slavery, as Zinn laid out, through “the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture” and “the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color” (Zinn, 2015, p. 28). As a country, we abducted people from their homeland and justified it because of our need for profit and their skin color—profit as motivation and skin color as justification.

I admire Zinn for laying this desolation bare and then following it by outlining the ways that enslaved people resisted their enslavement. They ran away or slowed down work to assert “their dignity as human beings” (Zinn, 2015, p. 32). DuVernay showed us Slave Gordon and the scars that resulted from his assertion of his human dignity (DuVernay, 2016). Images like this were powerful then, and they’re powerful now. This dehumanization was happening then, and it’s happening now. That is why we teach history, and it’s especially why we teach people to be critical of history.

References

Blackmon, D. (2008). Slavery by another name: The re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Random House.

DuVernay, A., Barish, H., & Averick, S.(Producers), & DuVernay, A. (Director). (2016). 13th [Documentary]. US: Netflix.

Stevenson, B. (Presenter), & TED Talks (Producer). (March 2012). We need to talk about an injustice. [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice.

Zinn, H. (2015). A people’s history of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial.