Slavery by Another Name

Having been educated in the U.S., I knew my education was lacking but I had no idea how bad things were until I listened to a podcast by Bill Moyers about the above referenced book. I suspected that I learned a disproportionate amount about Reconstruction (the at the time revisionist version (it might have been revised again) that Reconstruction was really really bad) but I thought I had a general idea of the whole slavery thing. The author of the book was interviewed by Moyers and said something about the criminalization of black life through the post civil war Southern black codes. The first thing I thought was like, "Oh, hey, kind of like our criminal codes now." The next thing I thought was that the author was talking about Jim Crow laws. Oom, no. Apparently we spent to much time on how horrid the Reconstruction era was for the white folks to get to the subject of the reenslavement of black folks through widespread imprisonment and slave labor. I mean, I knew that there were efforts to sort of reenslave freed slaves but I didn't think it was very widespread. And I certainly didn't know that it continued in some places until until WW II! I am going to have to read more about this whole neoslavery thing.

This is not the subject of my post, however. The more interesting (to me, at least) part of my reaction to the podcast was my initial thought that our modern penal code (and criminal justice system in general) is also an effort* to "criminalize black life." A successful one at that. According to the Washington Post (February 29, 2008) 1 in 9 black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars! Surely not even the Ku Klux Klan dreamed of that kind of success back in the antebellum day. Or white South Africans during the heady days of apartheid.

So we could call our modern laws "black codes" too.

*Admittedly, there might be a few other social goals behind modern criminal statutes.