California’s Confederate Past and Present
Most people seem to think California is a bastion of cultural pluralism and progressive policymaking, but California had more Confederate monument than any other free state.
Slavery
Slavery, Resistance, and Centuries of Global War
Slavery itself is a state of war. The only way one could subject people to the absolute will of a master is through massive amounts of violence. There is no slavery without violence and terror.
People Will Always Defend Themselves
When I talk about political violence, what I mean is protective violence. Black people have had to use violence to protect themselves. If someone was trying to capture and enslave them, they felt well within their rights to use deadly force to combat that.
The Specter of Slavery Still Stalks the Land
And we’ll always have what are euphamistically characterized as urban rebellions as long as justice is not meted out, and as long as there is an attempt to cover up the basic tragedy that was involved in the building of these United States of America.
Slave Labor in Lugansk
The context for slave labor is a war – ostensibly between eastern Ukrainian separatists and the Kyiv government, but in reality fueled by huge quantities of weaponry and volunteers that have poured over the border from Russia – that has cheapened human life and made torture, murder and forced disappearances the norm.
Capitalism, Slavery, and Resistance
“We’ve really got to reckon with these forces, these conglomerations of power that still exist, and are still driven by the legacy of slavery. That can’t be wiped away by white people having a change of heart.”
“The World We Live in Is Created by Slavery”
The Atlantic economy was qualitatively different in terms of the work that was demanded, the absolute treatment of people as chattel, the brutality, the equation of forced labor with skin color, the distances traveled, and the massive number of people who were ripped out of their homes.