Slavery Was Never Abolished

I hope everyone is doing well as we approach the Spring Equinox, a time that, for many, represents balance between light and dark—harmony through the dynamic tension of opposites. It is a time to align ourselves with each other and nature, and to explore the interplay of reason and intuition.

Our social order is perilously out of balance, and one of the most striking examples of the asymmetries that poison it is the enduring reality of race-based slavery in our country. In my latest article for CounterPunch, I discuss the myth that slavery was abolished here in the soi-disant Land of the Free. There are hundreds of thousands of Americans enslaved in the country’s prisons and jails today, the vast majority of whom are Black. American Slavery is among the most egregious human rights crises in the world today. I hope you’ll check out my piece. Here is an excerpt:

Proper maintenance of the prison labor pool has become a major public policy priority, and it is often the rationale for avoiding measurable improvements to prison conditions. As a 2023 note in the Harvard Law Review pointed out, then-Attorney General of California Kamala Harris “met heavy criticism” for advancing this kind of reasoning as a way to fight in court against the enforcement of the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Plata. Against all of the available evidence, California argued that overcrowding was not in fact the source of the constitutional violation. As Justice Kennedy pointed out at oral argument, “Overcrowding is of course always the cause.” While prisoners were sitting in their own feces and dying in record numbers, Harris and her office were insistent that extreme levels of overcrowding in the country’s largest (by population and economy) and richest state should not be directly addressed. California prisoners were commiting suicide at a rate twice that of the national average.​