Every part of this country, north south east and west, owes its origin and wealth to our “peculiar institution” as well as other less notorious programs of government sanctioned/ignored exploitation and murder of the poor, immigrants, women.
Only in the U.S.A. does a large section of the population think owning an assault weapon is a sacred right, but wearing a mask in a pandemic is a restriction on liberty.
Recent Black Lives Matter protests have sparked conversations about how to act in better solidarity with the Black struggle. How to move beyond rhetorical statements? How to address anti-Blackness among non-Black Arab communities?
Plantation owners were determined to extract every last bit of labor they could get from enslaved workers, meticulously tracking, documenting, and analyzing their every move in order to maximize productivity and profit.
Charting the ironies of freedom won and lost during and after the Civil War, Eric Foner, the American historian, has also helped us better understand the ambiguous consequences of what were almost always only partial victories.
Think today's lack of congressional comity is bizarre? It's nothing (or not yet something) compared to the physical violence prevalent on the floor of the House and Senate in the period leading up to the Civil War.
This book, which won the American Book Award last month, aims to reorient our thinking about slavery, by focusing on "slave-breeding," a practice that helped ensure the institution's survival after the Constitutional ban on the transatlantic trade went into effect in 1808. In this review, Malcolm Harris discusses the implications of the practice, by outlining just how central slavery was to the production of U.S. wealth.
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