A fate worse than slavery, unearthed in Sugar Land

[pnwmom]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/opinion/sugar-land-texas-graves-slavery.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

The blood-drenched history that gave the city of Sugar Land, Tex., its name showed its face earlier this year, when a school construction crew discovered the remains of 95 African-Americans whose unmarked graves date back more than a century. The dead — some of whom may have been born in slavery — are victims of the infamous convict leasing system that arose after Emancipation. Southerners sought to replace slave labor by jailing African-Americans on trumped-up charges and turning them over to, among others, sugar cane plantations in the region once known as the Sugar Bowl of Texas.

snip

Bone-tired slaves — who fed the cane stalks into the mechanical rollers that pressed them into juice — lost hands or were pulled into the rollers and dismembered. This outcome was common enough that a slave was often stationed nearby with a sword to sever the mill feeder’s arm before she could be pulled to her death in the rollers. The death rates on such plantations were compounded by malnutrition and disease, and were so obscenely high that the ranks of the enslaved needed constant replenishment.

SNIP

The Texas sugar plantations were profitable because they depended on slave labor. Abolition crushed the industry, but the convict leasing system resurrected it in a form that can legitimately be seen as more pernicious than slavery: Slave masters had at least a nominal interest in keeping alive people whom they owned and in whom they held an economic stake.

By contrast, when a leased inmate died in the fields, managers who had contracted with the prison system for a specific number of bodies could demand a replacement. Beyond that, as Michael Hardy wrote last year in Texas Monthly, the working conditions on the plantations in Fort Bend County, where the Sugar Land dead were discovered, were “as bad or worse than they had been on the slave plantations. Mosquito-born epidemics, frequent beatings and a lack of medical care resulted in a 3 percent annual mortality rate.”

[PaulX2]

1. Affirmative Action

The only thing we can do now.

Free college for African Americans.

All of them.

[byronius]

2. That's intense, and new information to me.

A poster reminded me the other day about the LaLaurie mansion in Louisiana, where slaves were horribly tortured.

Sometimes I think it's deeply-buried and paved-over guilt that drives that kind of psychotic hatred. I've seen it up close, people that could not discuss the issue without a certain itchy irritation creeping in because of the effort required to fake compassion. Imagine the imagery and inner world of someone who slowly lets themselves become that kind of hater, and how it grows and concentrates -- it's absolute dysfunction in the modern world. There may be brain circuitry to support this primitive tribalistic Other thing -- it's such an ancient subroutine, but it's a curse in the future. An expensive blight.

The 'soft' but deeply-felt racism of Trumpanzees is driven to flare up by their own sense that it's all so wrong. Part of each and every one of these primates senses it's wrong, I believe that. They suppress the feeling but it leaks up into the conscious mind and drives them further down into that horribly dark hole mindspace they all inhabit.

No easy solution as long as one party continues to deride and destroy education. Huge existential challenge.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

3. "trumped-up charges"

Today, we've added trumped-up murder and trumped-up hysteria to trumped-up charges.

Today, we've increased trumped-up toxins from trumped-up deregulated industries to kill, disproportionately, POC living near those industries.