Are we really enlightened? Or is normal just painted over?

In todays America we see this picture as offensive and wrong

And this picture is NOT offensive.

Hypocritical, isn’t it?

Three Questions

1. If we say that we care about justice and are the land of the free, then why is is OK for 1 in 4 Black men to end up on the wrong side of the law and no one sees anything wrong with that or views it with enough disgust to do something?
2. Could it be that we are saying that something is inherently wrong with Black Men such that they need to be controlled and caged so everyone else can be safe?

I’ll get to the third question at the end.

Black people sometimes internally refer to a “slave” mentality. I think that this conversation needs to expanded and everyone of ALL races needs to ask ourselves this: Have we rid ourselves of the “slave era” mentality?

That means that the beliefs of both the slave AND the slave master has been passed down to their descendants. I call it part of our “cultural DNA”.

I am already going to stipulate that black folks are infected with it heavily. We cannot even have a conversation with each other without calling ourselves what the slavemasters called us.

If you are deluded to think that we have overcome that, then you need to stop watching and don’t preach to me the “I have a Dream Speech” and answer my first two questions.

Why is it part of a cultural DNA? Because we all KNOW that 1 in 4 black men will be incarcerated during their lifetime and we accept that as “normal” and are not totally offended by it. Some think it is necessary.

Bottom Line: The prison industrial industry is the modern day equivalent of the old slave industry. If slavery were still legal, it would be traded on Wall Street.

Its good business really, I mean you can extract men by the millions from one place, transport them to another place and they can work for years for low wages benefitting both the system itself and even for private for profit companies. Then because they cannot vote or get a decent job because of past crimes you get to keep their cell open for them because they may have to do something illegal to survive and feed their kids so they are coming back. And you can even pass a law that says if you commit three crimes you are habitual and then they got you until you are dead. Even if the third strike was a non-violent crime!

Oh and because he is not around to slap his son upside the head for the stupid stuff he is doing, the kid repeats the process, so now you have another generation of workers for your system.

To show you how valuable locking people up is to this country, the studies I have run across show:

• Nationwide we spend about $12,756 annually per child to educate our kids (K-12)
• But it runs anywhere from $45,000 to $50,000 a year to house a each prisoner

Other studies differ, but all of them show that we spend WAY more per inmate that we do per K – 12 student, some would argue that the cost to send a student to college is the same amount we spend for inmates in prison.

It also keeps a lot of people employed with good paying jobs. The US prison industry employs approximately 415,000 people with a median wage of $49k. So the economic benefit is clear, since the 1980’s prisons are arguably a “growth” industry in rural America. This is really returning to its roots, isn’t it? Not even trying to hide it!

Side note here for fiscal conservative people: Wouldn’t it be a good investment to put some extra money behind programs that keep young black men out of prison. Seems that they would be of more value to society and not a budget drain for them to be out of prison working and paying taxes than in prison where the taxpayers pay to house them. But perhaps it is the fear of them that makes them being not around so valuable.

But I guess to some “conservatives”, the answer is NO!

I’ll move on….

The Department of Homeland Security accurately defines human trafficking as involving the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act. The US Justice Department agrees.

With that in mind…..Lets say you have a 18 year old poor inner city kid who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was innocent of any crime in front of a seasoned detective or prosecutor telling him that he is charged with multiple crimes and is facing decades in prison, but if he confesses NOW he can get it down to ONLY 10 years. And, the detective can legally lie and use extreme deceitful methods to extract those confessions. Doesn’t that fit Human Trafficking too? Remember the “coercion” and “labor” part of the definition.

Oh: But that never happens..apologies. I’ll move on.

We are still invested in locking people up by the millions and still somehow call this a free nation, but freedom for who? Not that kid I was talking about. He just went to the store for his mom and now he will be 40 before he next sees the outside.

In todays world, some leaders reverentially call this “Law and Order“. Which is “a strategy for reaching suburban voters without having to say the ugly and racist part out loud” and allows for deniability of the protected because it does not specifically say we are protecting you from Black Men. But that is what they are saying. Which allows for mass incarceration. The more people locked up, the safer some people feel.

The attitude behind “Law and Order” feeds the current prison system. Without that construct, there is no need for it to exist.

You see, slavery was not just an economic system, it was a complex social system where one group of men had to work to dehumanize another group to maintain the social order. This is what the Civil War was about, not States Rights, hundreds of thousands of Americans died over that!

Slavery had benefits both economic and social to the patriarchy. Which made it tough to totally dismantle and it still is not.

It is not too far of a stretch to draw the lines from Slavery, to Share-Cropping, to the Chain gangs to the modern prison industry.

Which means even today we need to keep some men under our thumb so that others can be made to have that false sense of being safe, secure and important. This may be why they vote against their self interest all the time keeping leaders in power that work mainly to keep the social order alive and ignore stupid stuff like healthcare, livable wages and affordable college. LBJ defined that phenomena 100% accurately.

Oh and also the prisoners are also counted as part of the district in which they are imprisoned and NOT the district where they come from, this impacts how resources are given to communities AND legislative representation. So gerrymandering runs a whole lot deeper than ya’ll thought. Basically some communities have people who are counted as residents of their district who cannot vote or decide who will represent them.

Third Question:

Can you yourself imagine what it would be like to be totally clear that in some areas of this country you always need to moderate your behavior so as to appear to be non threatening? And even THAT may not save you….Well, even in 2020: I can!

So: After seeing this I am not so convinced we are enlightened at ALL. What we have managed to do is to put some icing on all of it and call it a cake. Slice it open and it will still stink and taste bad.

Brought to you by the 13th Amendment

And this is the result

And the message from Wall Street: Buy