#slavery usa

[diaryofaphilosopher]

"The shift from the Afro-Caribbean zombie to the U.S. zombie is clear: in Caribbean folklore, people are scared of becoming zombies, whereas in U.S. narratives people are scared of zombies. This shift is significant because it maps the movement from the zombie as victim (Caribbean) to the zombie as an aggressive and terrifying monster who consumes human flesh (U.S.). In Haitian folklore, for instance, zombies do not physically threaten people; rather, the threat comes from the voduon practice whereby the sorcerer (master) subjugates the individual by robbing the victim of free will, language and cognition. The zombie is enslaved."

— Justin D. Edwards, "Mapping Tropical Gothic in the Americas" in Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture.

Follow Diary of a Philosopher for more quotes!

[nando161mando]

[kemetic-dreams]

Anti-literacy laws in many slave states before and during the American Civil War affected slaves, freedmen, and in some cases all people of color. Some laws arose from concerns that literate slaves could forge the documents required to escape to a free state. According to William M. Banks, "Many slaves who learned to write did indeed achieve freedom by this method. The wanted posters for runaways often mentioned whether the escapee could write." Anti-literacy laws also arose from fears of slave insurrection, particularly around the time of abolitionist David Walker's 1829 publication of Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which openly advocated rebellion, and Nat Turner's Rebellion of 1831.

The United States is the only country known to have had anti-literacy laws.

Significant anti-African laws include:

1829, Georgia: Prohibited teaching Africans to read, punished by fine and imprisonment

1830, Louisiana, North Carolina: passes law punishing anyone teaching Africans to read with fines, imprisonment or floggings 

1832, Alabama and Virginia: Prohibited Europeans from teaching Africans to read or write, punished by fines and floggings

1833, Georgia: Prohibited Africans from working in reading or writing jobs (via an employment law), and prohibited teaching Africans, punished by fines and whippings (via an anti-literacy law)

1847, Missouri: Prohibited assembling or teaching slaves to read or write

Mississippi state law required a white person to serve up to a year in prison as "penalty for teaching a slave to read."

A 19th-century Virginia law specified: "[E]very assemblage of negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing, or in the night time for any purpose, shall be an unlawful assembly. Any justice may issue his warrant to any office or other person, requiring him to enter any place where such assemblage may be, and seize any negro therein; and he, or any other justice, may order such negro to be punished with stripes."

In North Carolina, African people who disobeyed the law were sentenced to whipping while whites received a fine, jail time, or both.

AME Bishop William Henry Heard remembered from his enslaved childhood in Georgia that any slave caught writing "suffered the penalty of having his forefinger cut from his right hand." Other formerly enslaved people had similar memories of disfigurement and severe punishments for reading and writing.

Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee were the only three slave states that did not enact a legal prohibition on educating slaves.

It is estimated that only 5% to 10% of enslaved African Americans became literate, to some degree, before the American Civil War

[typhlonectes]

[thoughtportal]

undefined

Cop city in Atlanta

https://www.transitionus.org

https://defendtheatlantaforest.org/

http://www.savetheoldatlantaprisonfarm.org/

[relevant-interactions]

There Was Just Something About This Joke I Found Simply Delightful

[victusinveritas]

Just a reminder, if anyone says that the US doesn't need to celebrate Juneteenth...

They are horrifically wrong and racist to boot (or so naive/ignorant that they really shouldn't be voicing opinions until they learn [not that they can learn from school anymore, but there was a time when they almost could, at least part way, learn a bit--never enough, but a bit] something about the country they are in and its brutal history of being perfectly fine with owning and selling people for a good while of its existence).

[fuckingstupidbracket]

reminder that slavery is still legal in the US

[romanarose]

Boomers do this wild thing where you give them a verifiable, well known fact and they call it your opinion.

[nando161mando]

Nobody wants to work anymore

[tonya-the-chicken]

Every time I read a review of "Global South" country politics it's always "We are defying the US by doing this and this. And "This and this" is being friends with authoritarian regimes and not giving a fuck about victims of genocide. But hey! International leftist solidarity against the victims of American imperialism :) If you're a victim of any other imperialism then fuck you. We are building stronger relationships with "Usa's rivals" (regimes that are the reason you are suffering rn)

[anarchistin]

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

— Frederick Douglass, What to a Slave is the 4th of July?

[ptseti]

The 5 tribes that enslaved black People. What are your thoughts on this?

[thoughtportal]

undefined

compensating British slave owners

United Kingdom finished paying off debts to slave-owning families in 2015

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/30/fact-check-u-k-paid-off-debts-slave-owning-families-2015/3283908001/

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/details/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/27/britain-slave-trade

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/01/cost-compensating-british-slave-owners

https://reparationscomm.org/reparations-news/britains-colonial-shame-slave-owners-given-huge-payouts-after-abolition/