9-5ers anthem by Aesop rock is another good song. Slavery lives not just through the exception in the 13th, but also our required dependency on employment to get table scraps from our "lovely" rich overlords.
I was making the point in the opposite direction. American slave labor is rarely broached in media, yet my government tells me that China is not to be trusted because the west claims they're using slave labor in Xinjiang.
This Black Myths Pod episode in turn does a great job of deconstructing that documentary, acknowledging its strengths, and pointing out where it misleads or leaves out information.
Prison labor as a continuation of chattel slavery is seriously flawed. You may be arguing "prisons are worse than you think", but you're implying is that "slavery wasn't all that bad".
Prisons aren't profitable, they cost States and the Feds billions. It's true that private companies profit from prisons, but the vast majority of that profit comes from the prisoners and their families (often coercively) buying products/services.
White prisoners make up ~50% of the populations. Are you really going to argue that the Union's victory introduced white slavery to the US?
Prisoners have rights.
Incarceration isn't inherited.
The prison system is awful, racist, exploitive, senseless and unjust. But equating it with chattel slavery minimizes the abominable cruelty of that institution and serves white supremacy.
I'd argue that ignoring that any forced, unpaid labor under threat of violence is slavery is worse than "minimizing chattel slavery," full stop.
This is unintentionally drinking the corporate prison Kool Aid at best, and actively sanitizing our prison's cruel labor system at worst.
Accurately calling prison labor slavery isn't a knock on chattel slavery, it's an acknowledgement that it's changed. Say it's not as bad all you want, but it's still the same forces at work.
There's just so much there. You dance around a ton of things and beg like three different questions. Why are 50 percent of prisoners minorities? What happens if you refuse to work? It may not be inherited at birth but is the system setup to capture successive generations of prisoners from the same families?
What you typed is the bullshit prison labor corporations use to argue in bad faith and it doesn't stand up to the slightest examination. Slavery is bad. Period.
Because the system is racist and bad and minorities are disproportionately imprisoned. Nobody here is arguing against that. They are just pointing out that if 50% of the "enslaved" are white, that is a different sort of thing than the race-specific enslavement of black people. Things can be not-literal-slavery while still being bad.
What happens if you refuse to work?
I assume you can't refuse without a medical exception of some kind. These are imprisoned people, they also can't leave. Not trying to excuse everything about prison labor but as a society we have decided the state has the capacity to remove rights from people as a punishment after due process has been afforded to them. We can argue that it's not right or humane to force labor on an imprisoned population without saying it's literally slavery. "It's not literally slavery" is not a defense of the system.
We're not arguing "well prisoners can't be sold to other prisons so that proves it's not slavery" because that one difference doesn't prove anything, just like one similarity doesn't prove anything.
It may not be inherited at birth but is the system setup to capture successive generations of prisoners from the same families?
...no? Even if you include Capitalism and wealth inequality and racist policing as part of "the system" maybe members of the same family are disproportionately likely to be imprisoned because they are the same race and likely similar economic status, that isn't because a parent was imprisoned. There's nothing targeting children of imprisoned people. And even then, you're trying to compare disproportionate odds to be imprisoned to literal 100% ownership of slaves' children by slave masters? What are we talking about here?
White prisoners make up ~50% of the populations. Are you really going to argue that the Union’s victory introduced white slavery to the US?
Yes, that's exactly what happened. The fact that white people make up 50% of the prison population while being 60% of the general population means that minorities are still getting hit harder than white people, but white people did get swept up in this.
Lmfao nah, slavery of any kind is one of those moral absolutes that humanity accepts for good reason. There is NO case where it's acceptable. Literally NONE. 🤦
It's also time-bound for the length of the sentence. So like sure it's slavery...temporarily, non-inherited, non-race-specific, as a punishment for a crime, at least sometimes paid.
Which is just a lot of caveats.
Similarly, having a job is just temporary, non-inherited, non-race-specific paid slavery where you get to pick your slave master. Sure you can make that argument but it's not a very good one.
A lot of stuff about the US prison system is really bad, including this part, it's just not literally slavery, and it doesn't have to be slavery to be really bad and need changing.