Guess the klan got to fat and stupid over time and had to do something that required less physical activity and/or didn't ruin a perfectly good set of sheets.
You would think black people and hispanics would complain about these sort of shenanigans.
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Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.
If you were drawing a timeline of iniquities for Black people in the US, then certainly after slavery you would include covert racist societies, segregation and Jim Crow laws, COINTELPRO, the Southern Strategy, red-lining, the Drug War and racism in judicial outcomes.
Add a very clear connection to slavery and imprisonment to that timeline: the convict leasing system. It started during Reconstruction and it was explicitly defined in the inimitable way of Southern legislatures as a means to control manumitted slaves run amok and reclaim free black labor. Only this time it was even more diabolical. Industry was added into the mix, the scariest and most lethal of industries, and the business owners now had zero vested interest in the keeping their work force alive.
Here's how it worked. Black Codes were passed making pretty much everything from standing in one place to looking at someone funny a crime. Once arrested, black people, mainly men, would be convicted within days and would be sent to prison. The judgment could be straight jail time or a ludicrously costly fine the convict could not pay and thus jail time. Not that it mattered if the fine was paid, mind you. There are plenty of instances where a family raised the money, paid the court and the convict still disappeared into the system never to be heard from again.
Now a state had a sudden explosion of prison population -- Mississippi's inmate population increased tenfold in the decade after the Civil War -- and they certainly were not going to invest in permanent facilities to replace the ones destroyed during the war. That wasn't the point of this at all. These convicts weren't going to be hanging around. They were leased en masse to plantations, coal mines, brick makers, railways, turpentine camps, etc. The lessee housed, clothed and fed the convicts and paid the state a fee per head. The government, therefore, spent nothing and earned a tidy sum for every convict.
The fee was minimal, far less than free labor would cost, and I'm sure I don't need to tell you that the housing, clothing and food was not exactly a pricey investment. The convicts were starved and exposed to the elements. It didn't matter if they survived their jail term. They were so cheap they were entirely expendable and there were always plenty more to be had for the asking.
Sure, convict leasing didn't enslave your children and in theory there was a timer on how long you would be a slave. In practice, it was a sentence to be worked to death and discarded like an animal carcass to make room for the next black body.
The system was finally sort-of eliminated in the 1920s after years of terrible press made the inhumanity of it hard to justify, but it segued neatly into the chain gang era of public works and Shawshank-style contracts, and the Black Codes that fed the beast evolved without a hitch into modern laws against vagrancy, loitering and the cash cow that is drug possession.
Makes me sad, I don't know how widespread convict leasing was, but I remember learning that it was common in GA. I know no place is perfect, but I hope to move one day to a place that isn't backward on everything.
Convict leasing was widespread all over the former Confederacy, primarily Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Mississippi and South Carolina. I'd find it so much more tolerable if people acknowledged the overt and systemic nature of these racist practices whose offshoots continue well into our time. The primary sources mince no words whatsoever, but they don't seem to get aired much in schools or elsewhere so people can delude themselves that it was neither racist nor a system.
As an aside, has anyone ever seen C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America? It's a British "documentary" that examines how history might have been different if the C.S.A. had won the Civil War.
To illustrate the point, it shows several fictional commercials to illustrate how different our culture would be if racism was fully endorsed and institutionalized by the government. Various "products" included: Darkie Toothpaste, Gold Dust Washing Powder, Niggerhair Smoking Tobacco, and the Coon Chicken Inn.
All of these are/were real.
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
In practice, it was a sentence to be worked to death and discarded like an animal carcass to make room for the next black body.
Livius it doesn't make sense to kill people you can exploit. You should learn history.
My, my, my, what a straw man.
Working someone to death is exploitation. If you're evil, and you live in the sort of society that enables this sort of behavior, the economics of it works.
Killing someone for the hell of it isn't rational, no matter how evil you are. Or maybe I missed the parts of history where the European empires shot Black people in Africa, Indians in India, or South East Asians en masse just for kicks?
In practice, it was a sentence to be worked to death and discarded like an animal carcass to make room for the next black body.
Livius it doesn't make sense to kill people you can exploit. You should learn history.
My, my, my, what a straw man.
Working someone to death is exploitation. If you're evil, and you live in the sort of society that enables this sort of behavior, the economics of it works.
Killing someone for the hell of it isn't rational, no matter how evil you are. Or maybe I missed the parts of history where the European empires shot Black people in Africa, Indians in India, or South East Asians en masse just for kicks?
*
My, my, my, maybe I missed where anyone claimed that people were being killed "for the hell of it" or "just for kicks." Sounds like a facile argument I can't see anyone here making.
Though really, it is cute to speak about eugenics and ethnic cleansing in such minimizing terms. Except it is not, it is disgusting and reprehensible.
My, my, my, maybe I missed where anyone claimed that people were being killed "for the hell of it" or "just for kicks." Sounds like a facile argument I can't see anyone here making.
Quote:
The War on Drugs is just the government's excuse to kill brown people.-Ari, post #4
Quote:
Originally Posted by Demimonde
Though really, it is cute to speak about eugenics and ethnic cleansing in such minimizing terms. Except it is not, it is disgusting and reprehensible.
Did the English, French and Spanish do this for groundless reasons? No. They wanted the land that was owned by the people already living there and they didn't give a fuck how dirty they got doing it.
Is the United States and every other country that is a signatory of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs trying to kill people in a bid to land-grab Central America?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Demimonde
*Quoted due to your penchant for edits.
You must have me confused for someone else. Aside from fixing typos or adding to posts, I almost never edit.
What did Southern white people have to gain by lynching innocent black people?
I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have just gone around killing black people for kicks.
Yeah, lynch mobs were officially sanctioned and financially supported entities working for the United States government. Just like murderers and abortion clinic bombers are today.
"This photograph was published by the Portland Telegram on August 2, 1921, after local reporters were summoned to the Multnomah Hotel in Portland by an enticing phone message the day before. Upon arriving, the newspapermen entered a room full of some of the most influential men in the city, including the mayor and the chief of police, who had received the same "mysterious" phone call.
The calls were made by members of the Ku Klux Klan and at least two representatives of the Oregon chapter, dressed in the recognizable robes and hoods of Klan members, were on hand. The "Exalted Cyclops" to the right in the photograph was Fred Gifford, a former line superintendent for the Northwestern Electric Company. Gifford was made the Grand Dragon in 1921 in order to recruit new members and gain influence in government. The "nameless officer" in the center of the photograph was "King Kleagle" Luther I. Powell. Powell called the meeting in order to counter the recent negative press against the KKK's illegal activities and to document the supposed collaboration of Klan members and city officials in retaining "law and order." "
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Ishmaeline of Domesticity drinker of smurf tears
The general perception is that lynchings were spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment things, and that they were typically done in secret. But all too often, lynchings were done right out in the open, with no attempt whatsoever to hide what was happening. Indeed, or so I've read, that was often the point -- to send a very clear message to the Black Community. Often, crowds would gather -- and those crowds often included law enforcement officials and even children -- and get their pictures taken with the victim's corpse. Many of the photos were made into postcards. According to Edward Malone, it was not uncommon for pieces of the victim's body to be sold as souvenirs; in some instances, newspapers advertised the event in advance, telling people when and where the lynching would take place, and local railway companies would offer special rates and times for people who wanted to go to the lynching.
Gruesome, hateful examples of very public lynchings: here, here, here, here, and here, for example.
__________________
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Slavery sanctioned violence on black bodies to maintain control over their labor within a private, family context. When blacks were freed, violence continued to play the same role in forcing control over blacks and their labor, except that now the violence was done publicly, since they were outside of the private, family context of slavery and "freed" into the public domain. But it had the same effect: force and violence maintained control over the black population to force them to work and occupy the very lowest levels of social strata.
John W. Whitehead on the for-profit prison corporations, via HuffPo April 2012:
Quote:
Consider this: despite the fact that violent crime in America has been on the decline, the nation's incarceration rate has tripled since 1980. Approximately 13 million people are introduced to American jails in any given year. Incredibly, more than six million people are under "correctional supervision" in America, meaning that one in fifty Americans are working their way through the prison system, either as inmates, or while on parole or probation. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of those being held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses -- namely, marijuana. Presently, one out of every 100 Americans is serving time behind bars.
Little wonder, then, that public prisons are overcrowded. Yet while providing security, housing, food, medical care, etc., for six million Americans is a hardship for cash-strapped states, to profit-hungry corporations such as Corrections Corp of America (CCA) and GEO Group, the leaders in the partnership corrections industry, it's a $70 billion gold mine. Thus, with an eye toward increasing its bottom line, CCA has floated a proposal to prison officials in 48 states offering to buy and manage public prisons at a substantial cost savings to the states. In exchange, and here's the kicker, the prisons would have to contain at least 1,000 beds and states would have agree to maintain a 90 percent occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years.
The problem with this scenario, as Roger Werholtz, former Kansas secretary of corrections, recognizes is that while states may be tempted by the quick infusion of cash, they "would be obligated to maintain these (occupancy) rates and subtle pressure would be applied to make sentencing laws more severe with a clear intent to drive up the population." Unfortunately, that's exactly what has happened. Among the laws aimed at increasing the prison population and growing the profit margins of special interest corporations like CCA are three-strike laws (mandating sentences of 25 years to life for multiple felony convictions) and "truth-in-sentencing" legislation (mandating that those sentenced to prison serve most or all of their time).
And yes, in case you were wondering, part of the investment pitch for CCA and its cohort GEO Group include the profits to be made in building "kindler, gentler" minimum-security facilities designed for detaining illegal immigrants, especially low-risk detainees like women and children.
Contractual requirements to maintain a minimum level of incarceration in the prisons these corporations run.
Natasha Lennard at Salon, regarding the truth in Kanye's anti-prison rap performance on SNL:
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...the War on Drugs, abetted by and fueling the private prison industry, currently serves to incarcerate hundreds of thousands of black men in the United States, who provide dirt cheap labor. Various industries — from call centers, to weapons manufacturers to retail companies — rely on prison labor. Private prisons pay inmate workers as little as 25 cents an hour; prisoners who refuse to work are regularly held in isolation. These are the de facto “new slaves” of the prison industrial complex. The CCA (the Corrections Corp of America) is one of two major private prison corporations, which (along with the GEO Group) share in a market worth $70 billion.
...>snip<...
While the entire U.S. population is only 13.6 percent black, 40 percent of its vast prison population (over 2.5 million) is black. In 2010 black males were incarcerated at the rate of 4,347 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents of the same race and gender. White males were incarcerated at the rate of 678 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents. The disparities are striking, especially when the majority of those held in U.S. prisons are guilty of minor drug offenses.
Note to reader, this post doesn't contain every bit of information about the war on drugs, there may in fact be facts and evidence not mentioned here. The war on drugs is multi-faceted with many different groups trying to enact their agenda, racism is just one of these many agendas unfortunately it was a big one.
As we've seen it's pretty clear a lot of brown people are being locked up and drug laws are being used to do it. While this could end up as a long rambling history of the last hundred years or so, I wanted to look at one of the issues it appears Kashmir was getting to; Did they plan it this way or was it latched onto by racists who distorted it.
Yes, yes they did. QED.
It's been admitted by DEA agents that drug laws are not enforced in certain, white, areas and statistics clearly back this up. This isn't just an out of control police force as the laws they enforce have been twisted to the point of contradiction to facilitate this racism.
Marihauna
Yes I know I keep spelling it funny. This is the way it is written in many laws regulating it as well as racist propaganda against it. While it wasn't until 1937 that the federal government got involved, many southern border states had banned it as early as 1900 citing its use by mexicans. The 1937 tax act didn't technically make marihuana illegal but required growers and sellers to incriminate themselves and it was ruled unconstitutional in 1969.
Welcome to the 1970s scheduling act. Which introduced the scheduling system we know so well today.
It seems surprising that both Marihuana and THC are listed under Schedule I, and many medical groups thought so as well. In 1971 medical groups petitioned the government to lower the scheduling and the Shafer Commission was formed to study the effects of Marihuana.
Unfortunately Nixon had already vowed to veto any attempt to reduce the Scheduling, personally telling Shafer,
That's just a Dick of a president, clearly a new administration would change things, and it did in 1980 when Marinol™a synthetic THC was approved by the government and placed into Schedule III. Finally the government has recognized the medical uses of THC, or not. Both Marihuana and THC remain in Schedule I even though Marinol is chemically identical to THC (this disparity remains today, as the government today claims that THC has both no medical use and medical use). The Beginning of the 80s saw both the New Southern Strategy and the war on drugs promoted by the Reagan administration. In 1984 and again in 1986 the government voted to not only keep Marihuana and THC schedule 1 but to twice increase penalties while reducing the quantity needed to activate mandatory prison sentencing. Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" Campaign was filled with Marijuana myths that had been dispelled 10 years prior by the government in the Shafer Commission but that follow the racial narrative of the apathetic, dangerous, drug addict quite well.
Crack
Cocaine throws a wrench into the works (doesn't it always) as it became popular with both black and white people. As cocaine hit the streets it become clear that black people used more Crack Cocaine and whites liked Powdered Cocaine. Thus in 1986 sentencing laws were changed to make the punishment for Crack cocaine much more severe than powdered. (What's the difference between the two? Powder is the salt form of Cocaine, meaning when solid HCl, commonly, is attached to it.) These new laws enacted mandatory minimum sentencing laws for 100x less Crack than Powder, 5g Crack = 500g Powder. They didn't stop there, simple possession was made illegal as well. To give these laws added teeth the entire weight of the product is measured even if only a trace amount of cocaine is detected. Thus someone on the street holding 1g Crack mixed with 5g flour will be treated (and entered into evidence) as holding 6g crack, which automatically enacts mandatory felony prison time. All of a sudden someone on the street carrying a small quantity of Crack was being treated like dealers and hardcore criminals.(Let this be a reminder whenever hearing news stories about large drug busts, sometimes the weight of containers and even dirt are added to the final reported drug weight.) Just to let everyone know they were serious these laws finished up with the ability to put drug traffickers to death.
Combined with other tough on "crime" laws, mostly poor black men found themselves in a system where they were labeled a criminal felon, which not only allowed employers to discriminate against them but activated newly formed three strikes laws, that could turn a minor drug offense into a mandatory life sentence.
Re: Slavery in the U.S.?
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