The documentary “Slavery By Another Name” chronicled the social brutalities yet fiendishly rational economic sensibilities of slavery, and why it continued until the 1960s.
Based on Douglass Blackmon’s book, the crucial issue that permitted the continuation of slavery – although by another name – was the central issue of the economics crunch faced by the South, who beforehand had all this labor for free, but now was being forced to pay for it. Although common knowledge of this particular model of slavery existed amongst Southerners, the federal government was slow to act, initially believing this was an exceptional circumstance, as opposed to the norm.
In this practice, the landowners and “justice administrators” would collaborate on the jobs that needed to be done in the community, after which black men and women were systemically prosecuted and, for their “crimes,” were sentenced to perform the work that was previously identified.
The brutality of this part of our history was all about profit (which is still our legacy). As the saying goes, “If it makes dollars, it makes sense.” Erroneously, we attribute certain failures to moral values, when actually it can be explained more easily with money. Where there is the potential for profit, the incentive for dealing justly is diminished.
According to Blackmon, we are so unoriginal in the ways we destroy each other. If the “socially conscious” community member had felt compelled to deal with black Americans on equitable terms, that would have changed everything. However, no one found it odd that this particular population could be so heinously and systemically violated, which answers the question of how we become desensitized to injustices.
One final note that was an awakening for me was evaluating the contemporary prison population. According to Blackmon, the current prison system of incarcerating disproportionate numbers of black men is not a derivative of the “slavery by another name” practice. In the current system, you commit a crime and then are prosecuted and sentenced for that crime, regardless if the prisons are privately run or not. But in the system of “slavery by another name,” the jobs were identified first, and then the “justice administrators” rounded up the “lawbreakers” to work in the jobs as long as they were needed. The last known case of this form of slavery was prosecuted in Texas in 1962.
(“Slavery By Another Name” will air on PBS February 13, 2012, 9:00 p.m.)