Many of us try to distance ourselves from the history of slavery, claiming it happened “so long ago.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis famously stated, “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” DeSantis’s statement implies that he believes those slaves could not have attained those skills through ethical means on their land. The idea that the very same people who believed the Africans to be so below them as to enslave them would then hire those same “lesser beings” instead of another white person is ignorant. Being “free” did not equate to “freedom”. After slavery ended, many of those “freed” slaves ended up doing the same labor as they did before for a paltry paycheck due to a system that ensured they remained uneducated and unable to assimilate as free people in the United States.
The powers that be have continued to stamp out attempts at leveling the playing field both outright and systematically. In 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, also known as Black Wall Street was a thriving, educated, African-American community that was at the forefront of black excellence and entrepreneurship at the time. Tragically, all thirty-five blocks of the neighborhood were set ablaze in an attack that left an estimated three hundred people dead. Oddly enough, the government did little in response to this massacre. No one was prosecuted for this brazen act of violence, and they claimed it was a riot with two perpetrators, rather than a one-sided assault. This is just one of the many times the government has actively stopped any attempt at progress within the Black community.
Today, many public schools suffer from a lack of resources such as textbooks and qualified teachers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are currently 567,000 fewer educators in America’s public schools today than there were before the pandemic. One may ask, how does this link the flawed school system to high incarceration, when the majority of those enrolled in public education are white? According to the Prison Policy Initiative, Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and it also has one of the lowest per-student funding in high school according to the Education Data Initiative. Louisiana also has the second-highest population of Black people. Keeping them ignorant directly benefits this multifaceted system of oppression and rewards greed, feeding into this cycle of incarceration and free labor. Put simply, it is a rebranded 21st-century version of slavery.
Once someone ends up in prison, there is no distinction between a murderer and someone who committed forgery, they are just labeled criminals. They are stripped of their clothes, possessions, and most importantly, their rights. They lose many basic human rights, such as privacy, freedom of speech, and in some cases, the right to vote. But rights many aren’t aware of, are contractual and employment rights. Sentenced inmates are required to work to “subsidize” massive prisons. On average, prisoners save the prison system about nine billion dollars a year in “maintenance costs”. The problem with this comes from the fact that these prisoners are not fairly compensated for their labor and are paid such a menial wage that they might as well be working for free, and in some states they are.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the minimum wage for the average inmate is only thirteen cents. To put that into perspective, the minimum wage in the US is seven dollars and twenty-five cents, which seems like an incredible disparity, made even more tragic when you understand that minimum wage isn’t even a livable wage since it hasn’t changed since 2009 and doesn’t account for inflation. An alternative that some prisoners take is to work for large corporations for a slightly larger wage of eighty-six cents, but harder labor. For example, McDonald’s and Wendy’s use prisoners to process meat, and Walmart uses them for packaging. If you use Verizon or Sprint and you have ever called the help center, you’ve had a chance of getting assistance from an inmate. The savings are going straight to some of the largest corporations in the world, which make over two billion dollars a year off this prison labor alone. The prisons couldn’t care less, however, because they have an agreed-upon contract with the companies to get a cut of their earnings and there is no government oversight.
The United States government would much rather turn a blind eye to injustice, especially if that injustice has been allowed to become a vital part of our economic system. The more people our justice system incarcerates, the more (essentially free) labor they have access to, which leads to economic benefits for our country, and bigger dividends for private prison investors. These prisons exploit and abuse instead of rehabilitating and healing. It is a cruel system that marginalizes people at birth and punishes them when they inevitably mess up. The absence of accountability in this system is a breeding ground for greed.
Slavery, America’s original sin, is a memorable part of the United State’s history with far-reaching consequences. Throughout history, many activists have worked to end this barbaric practice. But every time we begin to move forward as a country, obstacles stand in the way of change. As long as greed continues to be rewarded in America, oppression will continue. The self-serving and powerful will take any advantage they can get and abuse any system to get ahead, paying no heed to the ones who suffer due to this systematic exploitation. When those in power are taught to view people as tools they can use to their advantage, cycles of oppression will continue against those who have been marginalized since the day they came to this country.
We as a country and especially as young people inheriting this system, need to push for more change that allows equity in education, labor, and opportunity. There are laws in place to help these people like WOTC, which gives a tax credit to employers to hire those normally barred from employment such as former convicts. We need to push more laws like this, not ones that put more money in politicians’ pockets. If we remain ignorant, this cycle of oppression will repeat itself, and slavery will continue to rebrand itself over and over again. We must hold our politicians accountable and demand transparency in their earnings statements and we must keep talking about it. I think 20th-century political activist Emma Goldman said it best, “The ultimate end of revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.”
