just a friendly reminder that, just because slavery was formally "abolished" in the so-called united states* in 1865, enslavement itself is still ongoing in the form of incarceration, which disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous people
(*i say "so-called" because the US is a settler-colonial construction founded on greed, extraction, and white supremacy)
recommended readings/resources:
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
"How the 13th Amendment Kept Slavery Alive: Perspectives From the Prison Where Slavery Never Ended" by Daniele Selby
"So You're Thinking About Becoming an Abolitionist" by Mariame Kaba
"The Case for Prison Abolition: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on COVID-19, Racial Capitalism & Decarceration" from Democracy Now! [VIDEO]
"On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped up to the lectern at the Riverside Church in Manhattan. [...] Many of King’s strongest allies urged him to remain silent about the war or at least to soft-pedal any criticism. They knew that if he told the whole truth about the unjust and disastrous war he would be falsely labeled a Communist, suffer retaliation and severe backlash, alienate supporters and threaten the fragile progress of the civil rights movement.
King rejected all the well-meaning advice and said, 'I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. […] A time comes when silence is betrayal' and added, 'that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.'
It was a lonely, moral stance. And it cost him. But it set an example of what is required of us if we are to honor our deepest values in times of crisis, even when silence would better serve our personal interests or the communities and causes we hold most dear. It’s what I think about when I go over the excuses and rationalizations that have kept me largely silent on one of the great moral challenges of our time: the crisis in Israel-Palestine.
I have not been alone. Until very recently, the entire Congress has remained mostly silent on the human rights nightmare that has unfolded in the occupied territories. Our elected representatives, who operate in a political environment where Israel's political lobby holds well-documented power, have consistently minimized and deflected criticism of the State of Israel, even as it has grown more emboldened in its occupation of Palestinian territory and adopted some practices reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow segregation in the United States. [...]
Reading King’s speech at Riverside more than 50 years later, I am left with little doubt that his teachings and message require us to speak out passionately against the human rights crisis in Israel-Palestine, despite the risks and despite the complexity of the issues. King argued, when speaking of Vietnam, that even 'when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict,' we must not be mesmerized by uncertainty. 'We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.'
And so, if we are to honor King’s message and not merely the man, we must condemn Israel’s actions: unrelenting violations of international law, continued occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, home demolitions and land confiscations. We must cry out at the treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the routine searches of their homes and restrictions on their movements, and the severely limited access to decent housing, schools, food, hospitals and water that many of them face.
We must not tolerate Israel’s refusal even to discuss the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, as prescribed by United Nations resolutions, and we ought to question the U.S. government funds that have supported multiple hostilities and thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza, as well as the $38 billion the U.S. government has pledged in military support to Israel.
And finally, we must, with as much courage and conviction as we can muster, speak out against the system of legal discrimination that exists inside Israel, a system complete with, according to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, more than 50 laws that discriminate against Palestinians — such as the new nation-state law that says explicitly that only Jewish Israelis have the right of self-determination in Israel, ignoring the rights of the Arab minority that makes up 21 percent of the population. [...]
Indeed, King’s views may have evolved alongside many other spiritually grounded thinkers, like Rabbi Brian Walt, who has spoken publicly about the reasons that he abandoned his faith in what he viewed as political Zionism. To him, he recently explained to me, liberal Zionism meant that he believed in the creation of a Jewish state that would be a desperately needed safe haven and cultural center for Jewish people around the world, "a state that would reflect as well as honor the highest ideals of the Jewish tradition.” He said he grew up in South Africa in a family that shared those views and identified as a liberal Zionist, until his experiences in the occupied territories forever changed him.
During more than 20 visits to the West Bank and Gaza, he saw horrific human rights abuses, including Palestinian homes being bulldozed while people cried — children's toys strewn over one demolished site — and saw Palestinian lands being confiscated to make way for new illegal settlements subsidized by the Israeli government. He was forced to reckon with the reality that these demolitions, settlements and acts of violent dispossession were not rogue moves, but fully supported and enabled by the Israeli military. For him, the turning point was witnessing legalized discrimination against Palestinians — including streets for Jews only — which, he said, was worse in some ways than what he had witnessed as a boy in South Africa."
— Michelle Alexander, from her essay Time to Break the Silence on Palestine, as featured in the New York Times in 2019
* if anyone ever utters the words "america is the land of opportunities" and toots about "the american dream" i will smack them repeatedly in the head with this book
* the author more than proved the argument that while the U.S. claim to be colorblind when it comes to race and that, in very simple terms, racism isn't an issue anymore, mass incarceration has essentially created a new racial undercaste
* the majority of people incarcerated are African Americans, as a consequence of an artificially created "War on Drugs", which allowed an unreal amount of control over the people, essentially segregating them to a lower status through completely legal means
* i mean, mandatory minimum sentence of 5 to 10 years for marijuana possession??? Bro. People in other countries receive this sentence for violent crimes, what are we on about??
* the way that the system militarized police and manipulated laws and procedures to make it ridiculously easy to put people in prison - specifically minorities and more specifically African Americans, or in institutionalised control such as probation or parole, is straight up a dystopian nightmare, i can't even
* being labelled as a felon amounts to loss of fundamental rights and the inability to leave a vicious circle that perpetuates poverty and second class citizen status to millions of people
* i am just flabbergasted and straight up horrified that this is happening and that it will most likely continue to be a reality unless a groundshaking change on all levels - political, economic, societal - happens
* throughout this whole book, my one thought was just "bestie make it make sense pls what is this why is it happening"
[D]rug-law enforcement is unlike most other types of law enforcement. When a violent crime or a robbery occurs, the criminal activity usually causes harm or violates someone’s rights. But with drug crime, neither the purchaser of the drugs nor the seller has any incentive to contact law enforcement. It is consensual activity. Equally important, it is popular. The clear majority of Americans of all races have violated drug laws in their lifetime. In fact, in any given year, more than one in ten Americans violate drug laws. But due to resource constraints (and the politics of the drug war), only a small fraction
are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated. In 2002, for example, there were 19.5 million illicit drug users, compared to 1.5 million drug arrests and 175,000 people admitted to prison for a drug offense.
The ubiquity of illegal drug activity, combined with its consensual nature, requires a far more proactive approach by law enforcement than what is required to address ordinary street crime. It is impossible for law enforcement to identify and arrest everyone who commits a drug crime. Strategic choices must be made about whom to target and what tactics to employ. Police and prosecutors did not declare the War on Drugs—and some initially opposed it—but once the financial incentives for waging the war became too attractive to ignore, law enforcement agencies had to ask themselves, if we’re going to
wage this war, where should it be fought and who should be taken prisoner?
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness)
