02/01/23
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, February 1st.
Decorating with Candy Day!
No no… I mean, it is. But it’s also the first day of Black History Month, as well as the day that Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment.
The 13th Amendment was passed after the end of the Civil War and abolish slavery with a single sentence: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
However, as I often do, today is a great day to direct you to six words in that sentence… “except as a punishment for crime…”
Nineteen states still have slavery, as punishment for crime, written into their state’s constitution. And obviously, through the 13th, we have it in our Constitution.
As punishment for a crime…
So, let’s talk about prison stats through the Prison Policy Initiative, which uses the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates data to break it down:
First of all, while they make up 62% of the national population, white people only make up 32% of the prison population. Black people make up 12% of the national population and 34% of the prison population. Those two groups have the largest margin of difference between national population and prison population.
However, only white and Asian folks are underrepresented in prison populations.
Every other group is overrepresented, with Black Americans seeing the largest difference in representation.
And it’s everything, right? It’s wage disparity and red-lining and folks with a Black sounding name STILL getting called 10% less for a job than a white sounding name. Every single part of this is a part of a bigger picture of inequality that this country has built itself on since 1619 and before that even.
And we HAVE seen progress. But we’re talking about 404 years versus 58 years since the voting rights act was passed, which has seen significant eroding since white Senators saw a Black man elected president and decided they wanted to do everything they could to prevent they progress they were seeing. And so, even though the VRA was reaffirmed in 2006, 2013’s Shelby County v Holder case began the break down the VRA and let states disenfranchise voters all over again. Just because they wanted to. Just because study after study shows that all these laws disenfranchise nonwhite voters at higher rates than white voters.
It's all tied together.
I put a link in show notes about all of this. Besides voting, rethinking our abhorrent prison system is the thing I think about the most. Please take some time today to read over the stats, there’s just not enough time in this episode, and ask yourself… how big of a part do those six words in the 13th Amendment play in the way our prison system was designed?
And now, the news.
Actually, you know what? Change of plans… because I started to write about George Santos stepping down from his committees and a few other things that I’ll talk about tomorrow, but actually I want to talk more about what I was going into in the opening.
This is a real time, unplanned, change.
I’m not going to do the news at all.
Instead, I’m going to ask you to go back to that opening and really take some time today to consider the part that “except as a punishment for crime…” plays in our prison and policing system.
“Hey Kim, we’ve always had prisons.”
Sure, but also… before slavery, there was no prison system here in the states, not to the extent that we know it. Because, while the model was created in 1817, it really didn’t take hold in the states until after the Civil War.
So April 8th 1865, the Civil War ends and, in theory, so does slavery. Except it takes until June 19th when around 2000 union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas and VERY surprised to see over 250,000 enslaved Black people there.
They read the Emancipation Proclamation and thus a quarter million Black people, who were free but their enslavers never told them (or allowed them access to the information, or education to read the information), are actually freed.
Reconstruction follows from 1865 to 1877, during which 1,500 Black Americans were voted into different political offices in the country.
1865 and 1866 also see the implementation of the Black Codes, a wide variety of laws specifically meant to punish Black Americans. These laws had way less scrutiny, so much so that historians are still unable to understand the full scope of them.
But they were meant specifically to ensure that free Black Americans would still be forced into slavery by those six words. “except as a punishment for crime…”
Reconstruction followed from 1865 to 1877, during which 1,500 Black Americans were voted into different political offices in the country. So naturally, in 1877, we see the beginning of Jim Crow laws and poll taxes and literacy tests, specifically designed to keep Black Americans (mostly, although really anyone except for non-poor white people was treated to these laws) from casting a ballot.
By 1965, the Jim Crow laws were technically off the books but really just… in name only.
Because Tyre Nichols was killed last month, and while we know what happened after police approached him, we still don’t know why they pulled him over to begin with.
I have this thing I like to say about things like this. Because everyone wants to say that the system is broken.
But it’s not. The system isn’t broken. It’s working – it’s working exactly as designed.
What we need is a new, better, system.
And so today, 158 years after the 13th Amendment was passed, really ask yourself – what would a new system look like? And what we can do now, to work towards that better system?
And that’s it. That’s the episode.
I’m proud of every single person who doesn’t need to be reminded that Black Lives Matter. Who says it with their chest and with their actions – who looks at the brands saying BLM this month and asks – what does you board look like? What do your hiring practices look like? Can you show proof of pay equity?
Who knows it’s about more than a month, but it’s also an important month.
And so, if you’re here, if you made it through the end of this episode, I have to assume you feel the same way. And so, given all of that, how could I ever be anything other than… proud of you.