Noam Chomsky: Reagan was an ‘extreme racist’ who re-enslaved African-Americans

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http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/noam-chomsky-reagan-was-an-extreme-racist-who-re-enslaved-african-americans/
In an interview with GRITtv’s Laura Flanders, linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky discussed how the events in Ferguson, Missouri and the protests that followed demonstrate just how little race relations in the United States have advanced since the end of the Civil War.

“This is a very racist society,” Chomsky said, “it’s pretty shocking. What’s happened to African-Americans in the last 30 years is similar to what [Douglas Blackmon in Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II] describes happening in the late 19th Century.”

Blackmon’s book describes what he calls the “Age of Neoslavery,” in which newly freed slaves found themselves entangled in a legal system built upon involuntary servitude — which included the selling of black men convicted of crimes like vagrancy and changing employers without receiving permission.


“The constitutional amendments that were supposed to free African-American slaves did something for about 10 years, then there was a North-South compact that granted the former the slave-owning states the right to do whatever they wanted,” he explained. “And what they did was criminalize black life, and that created a kind of slave force. It threw mostly black males into jail, where they became a perfect labor force, much better than slaves.”

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1. Well, he'll be even more of a hero to the baggers after hearing this...

I still say that most--if not all--of our nation's problems today started with Reagan. The most heinous were the upwards redistribution of wealth, demonizing the unions, and getting in bed with the Religious Right. Catastrophic. That Happy Horror will haunt us for a long time to come.