As an American, I was taught in elementary school that the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawed slavery.
It didn’t. There’s a specific carve-out, in the text of the amendment. “Except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Anyone in jail today is legally a slave.
This is how Jim Crow maintained slavery. Black men would be convicted of crimes, often with scant evidence, and placed into involuntary servitude for years. Paul Muni played a victim of this slavery in the 1932 film I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. The Jim Crow system was so ingrained at that time, a white actor portrayed this predominantly black experience.
Excessive convictions of black men didn’t end with the Civil Rights movement. Neither did the use of prisoners as slave labor for private profit.
Immigrant Slavery
Immigration represents a second form of slavery. Profit makes the lies told about immigrants easy to sell.
If you’re an immigrant without papers, most protections of U.S. law are absent for you. Employers can easily rob immigrants. Immigrants can be denied health care. Southern states have been trying to make teachers immigration cops, passing laws supporting child labor and withholding of basic protections like drinks on a hot day. They’re reinforcing slavery.
There are millions of slave immigrants in the U.S. economy. They make our food, they harvest our crops, they wipe your mom’s ass in the nursing home. Employers know what they’re doing. State governments turn a blind eye.
Political rhetoric around immigration reinforces this. We call immigrants thieves, terrorists, and murderers. An immigrant commits a horrible crime and politicians use it to dehumanize all immigrants. Democrats can’t solve the problem without Republican support. Yet Republican terms are rejected. The racism is too ingrained, the economic benefits are too obvious, and the media refuses to point it out. The stain of 1787, the “sleeping serpent in every moment of the nation’s life,” remains alive. No, check that. It thrives.
Slavery is vital to many industries. It may take a second Civil War to eradicate it. Without an underclass, forbidden by law from escaping its station, your investments in many companies might be worthless. In a contest between money and human rights, money usually wins.
