I remember learning about sharecropping after slavery ended and it being exploitative, but I was never taught about this in school. The brutality people can inflict upon other people is horrifying.
I remember learning about sharecropping after slavery ended and it being exploitative, but I was never taught about this in school. The brutality people can inflict upon other people is horrifying.
So the convicts were entirely replaceable chattel that could be worked to death without even a significant economic cost to the slave master? Horrifying.
The Texas sugar plantations were profitable because they depended on slave labor. Abolition crushed the industry, but the convict leasing system resurrected it in a form that can legitimately be seen as more pernicious than slavery: Slave masters had at least a nominal interest in keeping alive people whom they owned and in whom they held an economic stake.
By contrast, when a leased inmate died in the fields, managers who had contracted with the prison system for a specific number of bodies could demand a replacement. Beyond that, as Michael Hardy wrote last year in Texas Monthly, the working conditions on the plantations in Fort Bend County, where the Sugar Land dead were discovered, were “as bad or worse than they had been on the slave plantations. Mosquito-born epidemics, frequent beatings and a lack of medical care resulted in a 3 percent annual mortality rate.
So the convicts were entirely replaceable chattel that could be worked to death without even a significant economic cost to the slave master? Horrifying.
Because it's still going on. Doing so would shed light on the privatized prison industry and the blatant violation of human rights that is the drug war. Relevant meme.
It boggles my mind that we are not taught more of the history of the US weaponizing the police and justice system against minorities.
Because it's still going on. Doing so would shed light on the privatized prison industry and the blatant violation of human rights that is the drug war.
I read an article on Reddit yesterday called "America’s Collapsing Into Fascism Because Americans Still Don’t Understand Fascism". I don't know if you saw it, but what you're saying here echoes...
I remember learning about sharecropping after slavery ended and it being exploitative, but I was never taught about this in school. The brutality people can inflict upon other people is horrifying.
So the convicts were entirely replaceable chattel that could be worked to death without even a significant economic cost to the slave master? Horrifying.
Because it's still going on. Doing so would shed light on the privatized prison industry and the blatant violation of human rights that is the drug war.
Relevant meme.
I read an article on Reddit yesterday called "America’s Collapsing Into Fascism Because Americans Still Don’t Understand Fascism". I don't know if you saw it, but what you're saying here echoes the points made in that article.