Black History Month is coming up and I know Im early but heres some thoughts on early American slavery. Early American slavery and modern wage slavery (or, more accurately, financial slavery) should not be equated, but they only differ in scope and methodology. The same exploitative logic underlies them both. Your boss may not personally beat you and withhold food from you, but the wages he pays you determine whether or not you can afford to feed yourself and avoid the police brutality that comes with being homeless, among other things. His dominance over you may not necessarily be the result of institutional racism, but it’s certainly always the result of structural classism. Your employment may seem voluntary, but that’s only because you’ve been convinced that dying due to joblessness is an act of suicide and not the result of the structural risk of suffering the same fate it would cost others to help you. Ironic coincidence or not, the most common field of dehumanizing labor in the United States for forcibly imported African slaves leading up to the American Civil War was picking cotton; modern U.S. dollar bills, the dominant denomination in which wages are paid today, are printed on cotton paper. Of course these two forms of slavery shouldn’t be compared. One of them once lawfully oppressed a race; today, its continued legacy both lawfully oppresses prisoners who are members of that race, among other races, and unlawfully oppresses members of that race, among other races, in the form of human trafficking. The other lawfully oppresses the world and arguably incentivizes the continued legacy of the former.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 21:48:31 +0000