As we celebrate Juneteenth Day, we should reflect on the reality that the abomination of slavery is not entirely in our collective rear view mirror.
It endures.
The United States is still having real trouble giving up its addiction and reliance on involuntary servitude, aka slavery. Like the free land we extracted from the Native Americans, it’s a footing of the foundation of our great pyramid that still stands in the 21st century.
Consider that in 1865, even as Congress was enacting the 13th amendment to the Constitution to abolish slavery, it created a loophole that it would remain legal as a punishment “within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the former Confederate states used the pretext of minor crimes, like loitering or vagrancy, codified in law as the ‘Black Codes’ to imprison thousands of Black residents who were in turn leased out to plantations. The use of the 13th Amendment loophole became so common that by 1898, close to three-quarters of Alabama’s state revenue was generated by renting out Black Americans.
Here in the U.S., which is four percent of the world’s population, we have 16 percent of the planet’s incarcerated persons, according to the Vera Institute, a social justice non-profit. The American justice system incarcerates close to two million people annually, overwhelmingly people of color that are mostly jailed for non-violent or drug-related crimes.
That’s just too large a captive...
A post claiming to list all the actions taken by the Home Minister in Kashmir in the last 10 days is going viral on social media. The posts list out 18 points, which include claims regarding citiz...