by PAUL STREET
Riots erupt in Tampa, Florida, after police kill unarmed black teen in 1967 PHOTO/Equal Justice Initiative
A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them – make them things …
— Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967
Black lives have always mattered to white America primarily as a source of economic exploitation. And white American authorities have never been particularly squeamish about killing and maiming Black Americans in defense and advance of that exploitation. Untold millions of Black slaves were tortured and murdered so that Southern tobacco, rice, sugar and cotton planters could extract vast quantities of surplus value from them. As the historian Edward Baptist has recently shown, the violence that was systematically inflicted on Blacks in the forced labor camps of U.S. cotton slavery generated much of the economic surplus that drove the United States’ emergence as a modern capitalist and industrial state before the U.S. Civil War.
After reformist experiments under northern Union Army occupation during the Reconstruction era (1866-1877), Black cotton servitude was resurrected across what became known as the Jim Crow South. The last thing that Black ex-slaves wanted to do after slavery was go back to work under white rule in Southern cotton fields. But, as the historical sociologist Stephen Steinberg noted thirty-four years ago,
“Though the Civil War had ended slavery, the underlying economic functions that slavery had served were unchanged, and a surrogate system of compulsory paid labor developed in its place…ex-slaves…were forced to struggle for survival as wage laborers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers in southern agriculture. Once again, black paid the price and carried the burden of the nation’s need for cheap and abundant cotton.”
Many thousands of Black Americans died at the hands of white terrorists and authorities, both private and public, to keep Black lives yoked to cotton toiling for a pittance or worse under white owners during the long Jim Crow era.
…
Between the late 1960s and 2000, the number of prisoners in the U.S. rose from roughly 300,000 to more than 2 million with non-violent drug offenders making up most of the enormous new U.S. inmate population. The nation that proclaimed itself the homeland and headquarters of global liberty contained 5 percent of the world’s population but now kept more than 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. To confine this giant new captive population generated by the so-called War on Drugs, the U.S. built more than 3200 prisons at a cost of $27 billion during the 1990s alone. On top of those behind bars, by the turn of the millennium, more than four and half million Americans were on parole or probation, “doing time on the outside.”’ Twelve percent of the nation’s adult population now possessed a felony record – a major barrier to employment and to numerous other “opportunities,” including the right to vote (for what that’s really worth anymore under the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money) in many states.
Beyond sheer magnitude, the most striking thing about the new U.S. prison state was its heavily racialized nature. By 2001, Blacks comprised 12 percent of the U.S. population but nearly half of its 2 million prisoners. Between 1980 and 2002, the number of Black men in U.S. jails and prisons (mainly for nonviolent drug crimes) grew five-fold. Consider the following comparative incarceration rates at the turn of the millennium: Japan (40 per 100,000), Sweden (60 per 100,000), England (125), South Africa (400), Russia (675), U.S. (690), and Black adult U.S. men (4,848 per 100,000). More than a tenth of all prisoners on Earth is a Black U.S. “citizen” (ex-citizen). There are more black men behind bars than enrolled in colleges or universities in the U.S. By 2007 there were more Black under criminal supervision – in prison or jail, on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War. A shocking 1 in every 3 Black adult males is now branded by the lifelong stigma of a felony record. That’s no small white-supremacist “law and order” payback for the great Black U.S. urban uprisings of the 19[6]0s.
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