Slavery by any other name
In 1639, Virginia passed this country’s first specifically anti-Black law. It read, “All persons except Negroes are to be provided with arms and ammunitions or be fined at the pleasure of the governor and council.”
Countless anti-Black laws followed and they came from every direction. For example, by the mid 1600s, so many Black children were being murdered in Virginia that something had to be done. It wasn’t just that these children were being killed. They were being skinned and boiled and beaten to death. These brutal and tortuous murders of Black children were being committed by white women. Black women were being raped by white enslavers and the children born of this circumstance were being viciously executed by the wives of these enslavers. And so the law stepped in, but not to protect the children. In 1669, Virginia passed the Casual Killing Act, protecting white women from prosecution, effectively incentivizing their continued infanticide.
In 1864, the 13th Amendment was passed, which many celebrate as the end of slavery. But this is an unfounded celebration, as the amendment itself reads, “Nether slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Knowing the country spent the 225 years from 1639 to 1864 criminalizing Blackness, it’s easy to guess who is implied by the 13th Amendment’s criminal exception. In a country so incapable of comprehending Black innocence that it would legally protect the vicious murders of Black children, it’s obvious who is likely to be “duly convicted” and who is not. Immediately following the Civil War, Black people were arrested en masse across the South.
These Black “criminals” were lent out to plantation owners and various private companies, forced into free labor through a common practice called convict leasing. As these plantation owners and companies were no longer responsible for the health of these Black people, convict leasing was often a more brutal system to endure than slavery.
Though the practice was “officially” ended in 1941, versions of convict leasing still exist today. According to the National Equal Justice Association: “Use of convict labor by commercial enterprises now exists in 37 states. Major corporations such as Microsoft, CMY Blue, American Express, Bank of America, Starbucks, J.C. Penney, Chevron, Honda, Levi Strauss, The Gap, Lee Jeans, Victoria’s Secret, Revlon, Sprint and McDonalds have joined hundreds of others in using cheap prison labor for their profit.”
The same fiendish, systemic objectification of Blackness has not gone away, either. A decade ago, the story of a Black teen named Kalief Browder made national news. Kalief was only 17 years old in 2010 when he was arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack. He was imprisoned at New York’s Rikers Island jail without trial from May 15, 2010 to May 29, 2013, when the charges were dropped. While at Rikers, Kalief faced tortuous abuse from guards and spent 800 days in solitary confinement. In 2015, Kalief Browder took his own life.
According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Black people, while only 13 percent of the U.S. population, currently make up 38.7 percent of federal inmates. White people comprise 57.1 percent of the federal inmate population and 71 percent of the nation’s population. Drug offenses are the cause of the largest share of convictions, at 44 percent, which is due to race-based anti-drug polices in effect as far back as 1875, but Black people aren’t the only ones swept up in this inhumanity.
White leadership in this country has a consistent history of hurting other white people just to hurt Black people. In 1902, Virginia wrote poll taxes and literacy tests into its constitution, an attempt to keep Black Virginians from voting. While the effort was successful in blocking 90 percent of the Black vote, it also blocked nearly half of the white vote. During desegregation, white-run municipalities across the country closed their public swimming pools to keep Black swimmers out. Bigots are banning books and closing their own libraries as you read this.
An investigation producing allegations of “harassment, hazing and retaliation” among Maine State Prison workers, as well as “inappropriate relations” between staff and incarcerated residents, according to Department of Corrections Commissioner Randall Liberty, led the prison in Warren to replace its warden last month. Maine’s child prison, Long Creek Youth Development Center, has been keeping its inmates — half of whom still have pending cases — under frequent 23-hour lockdown. Long Creek blames this on staffing shortages, even though those shortages have persisted for years while the prison’s population has declined. MSP’s scandals have persisted since it opened in 1824, regardless of leadership.
The only thing more persistent than the institutions themselves is the culture of racism and white self-destruction that continues to guide the entire prison-industrial complex to this day.
Samuel James is a musician and storyteller whose work has been featured on The Moth as well as This American Life. He also writes “Banned Histories of Race in America” at samuelj.substack.com.
