Again we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor—both black and white, both here and abroad.1
IF ANYONE READING THIS book in the future wants to know the American historical context in which it was composed, the drafting was finished in August 2014, while the national trauma of Ferguson was going on, and the finishing touches were made during the aftermath of the Charleston Massacre of June 2015.
Today, people are no longer sold like livestock in the public market, but the racism slavery engendered has been resilient, having become a seemingly systematic disfigurement of American society.
The post-emancipation history is a gloomy one. The only group that was brought to America against their will is still on the bottom. After the brief period of Reconstruction that saw much progress, including the establishment of black colleges, the freedmen were abandoned by the North to the mercy of Southern sheriffs by the time of the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877. Their rights and possibilities were severely limited by ever more discriminatory “black codes” that locked white supremacy into place. While they were no longer legally treated as chattel, African Americans were systematically excluded from educational, professional, and housing opportunities, were frequently denied the possibility of relocating, were sometimes forced to labor, and were generally the victims of a nearly century-long postwar campaign of domestic terrorism. They suffered through peonage, debt servitude, sharecropping, and a sustained campaign of lynching.
The golden age of the American economy following the Second World War—in which the working class did better relative to the wealthy than at any other time in American history—pointedly excluded black people. African Americans’ collective struggle took until the 1960s to result in full legal rights: enforcement of Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Housing Act of 1968.
The counter-revolution to this “Second Reconstruction” was immediate. African Americans were further ghettoized: black neighborhoods around the country were lacerated and even destroyed by the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, whose construction began in 1956. The interstate rammed elevated highways through the poorer parts of many cities,* demolishing black business districts and isolating existing housing projects in cul-de-sacs, while black applicants were denied mortgages in the suburbs that the new highways facilitated. African Americans ended up clustered in the old city cores that the whites abandoned, with their children attending dilapidated, underfunded, black-only schools.
Beginning in 1971 with President Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs,” along with “three strikes” laws and other mandatory sentencing guidelines, and a plea-bargaining system that made jury trials practically a thing of the past, the US prison population exploded in size, including millions of nonviolent drug offenders. As we write, the United States has for some years been the world’s number-one incarcerator by far, holding at present (according to the most commonly cited figure) around 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. In what has come to be known as the “cradle-to-prison pipeline,” black men are incarcerated at about six times the rate relative to population of white men, and black women at about double the rate of white women. The prison population is heavily skewed toward the South: ten of the top eleven American incarcerators are former slave states, with Louisiana number one and Mississippi number two. Private, for-profit prisons began in 1984, with their growth stimulated by a 1995 model “Prison Industries Act” introduced into state legislatures around the country in an organized campaign by the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Convicted felons have a hard time getting a job, and since felons are disfranchised in many states, black people have been disproportionately removed from the voting rolls.
Last hired, first fired: increased post-civil rights economic and professional opportunities were countered by a redistribution to the wealthy that picked up steam in the post-Reagan years. Education and medical care have been repriced out of the reach of the poor, and increasingly require legal sophistication to navigate. The new inequality hit the long-term disadvantaged the hardest, a tendency that accelerated dramatically in the post-Bush v. Gore years. The financial crisis that began in late 2007 wiped out gains that had been made by many African Americans, especially those targeted by predatory lending. “Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates, referring to the twenty-first-century subprime mortgage crisis that disproportionately affected black homeowners.3 Meanwhile, police brutality and murder, a longstanding problem, has emerged as a national issue in the age of video documentation, when it is no longer possible to pretend it doesn’t happen, while open-carry and other firearm laws favor increased aggression by white supremacist hate groups, whose numbers “skyrocketed” during the Obama presidency.4
To be sure, society does not look like it did when the Civil War Centennial began in 1961. Some African Americans occupy high professional and political positions. But the economic gap between black and white has not been bridged. Black unemployment remained more than double that of whites in the fifty years from 1963 to 2013, with African Americans earning on the average two-thirds as much; 27.6 percent of African American households were in poverty in 2013, compared with 9.8 percent for whites.5 Multigenerational wealth and multigenerational poverty seem to be nearly intractable forces, especially under the protection of a government by the wealthy, for the wealthy.
In talking about this book-in-progress with friends and strangers, we have frequently heard people say: but slavery is still going on today.
The highly charged S-word—sometimes used metaphorically, sometimes not—is a broad term that can take in many different kinds of inhumane practices; scholars today speak of “slaveries.” Our brief in writing this book has not extended to covering the postbellum forms of unfree labor, some legal and some not, which have been amply documented elsewhere: the postbellum neoslavery of convict leasing that made Birmingham, Alabama, a steel capital and continued in the South until the Second World War; the prison-industrial complex of the modern mass incarceration state; contemporary migrant exploitation, sex trafficking, and other forms of coerced labor; sweatshop and agricultural labor; and present-day work of all kinds performed in an environment of social brutality and under surveillance.6
That people persist in describing these as “slavery” is perhaps a measure of the continuing weight of antebellum slavery and its burdensome shaping influence on our consciousness and our society, for which there have never been adequate reparations.
Over the years we have been researching our nation’s history, we have seen repeatedly that no matter how bad we thought slavery was, it was even worse. There’s no end to it.
No one living today can fully understand what the enslaved endured in the total-slavery world of the Old South, where the economy was dependent on the production of chattel laborers by female reproduction workers who could be forcibly impregnated for that purpose, with their sexual violation approved by law.
Unfortunately, the agenda of the slave society seems all too familiar to us in the twenty-first-century world.
Antebellum slavery required a complex of social, legal, financial, and political institutions structured to maximize profits that flowed only to a small elite, while leaving the rest of the population poor. It wanted no legal oversight beyond the local, no public education, and no dissent. For laborers, it wanted no person-hood: no wages, education, privacy, clothing, human rights, civic identity, civil rights, reproductive rights, or even the right to keep a stable family. It existed at the cost of everything else in the society, including the most basic notions of humanity.
The history of the slave-breeding industry demonstrates how far the unrestrained pursuit of profit can go.
*Four examples: the Bronx, New Orleans, Miami, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.