https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/ ... had-slavesQuote:
Predictably, when people started to mention how disturbing it was that the Clintons had kept slaves, a few especially committed online Hillary fans began to issue impossibly contorted defenses, including blaming “DudeBros” for bringing the matter up and explaining that Hillary had tried to empathize with the convicts. (To see why the defenses fail, simply imagine how laughable they would seem if applied to any other situation of unpaid black labor, e.g. if a 19th century Southerner offered them.)
But let’s also be clear: the issue of prison labor isn’t just about the Clintons. I believe the Clintons have an indefensible record of behavior toward black people. But the story of the Clintons in the Arkansas governor’s mansion also just illustrates how ubiquitous and taken-for-granted situations of slavery are. It’s very easy to think “But that couldn’t possibly be slavery, the state is just assigning inmates to an interesting work detail.” Yet if we examine the facts critically, it’s hard to see how it could be anything else. Prison labor doesn’t seem like slavery because it no longer displays some of the imagery associated with slavery in our minds, such as the whippings and the auction blocks. But we’re still dealing with a situation in which people are working by compulsion rather than choice, and are threatened with violence if they leave. They are leased to corporations, as if they are property. The auction block may be gone, but the core aspect of slavery is not that people are bought and sold. Rather, it’s about the kind of dominance that is asserted over them. (After all, slavery can exist even if one party has a monopoly on slaveowning. It’s the forced labor and the experience of the slave that counts, not the trading element.)
Of course, one could draw a distinction between “slavery” (in which a person asserts all rights over a human being, including the right to sell them and their children and to take their life) and “involuntary servitude” (in which a person is simply forced to work), a distinction such as the Thirteenth Amendment contemplates. But “involuntary servitude” immediately begins to sound like little more than a euphemism for slavery, and many of the situations that modern anti-slavery advocates would consider to be slavery—such as that perpetrated by Alex Tizon‘s family—do not necessarily include people being murdered and having their children sold. (Though they sometimes do.) It is important never to minimize the distinct horrors of early American slavery, but the term also applies to situations in which the victims are treated comparatively “well,” and which are not characterized by all of the worst features of the pre-Civil War South. Thus I do think it’s fair to classify prison labor as a form of enslavement. Degrees of force obviously vary, but since the Angola prison plantation today looks exactly the same as it did in the 19th century, I believe the word helps us appreciate the evils of mass incarceration rather than diminishing the evils of the antebellum era.
The Clinton slavery controversy should not really be about the Clintons. It’s the prison labor system as a whole that is rotten, and they were only two especially amoral beneficiaries of it. Today, our attention should be focused on the cotton-pickers of Louisiana and the scores of other modern-day slaves. This is not a mere pathology of the Clintons, but a pathology of the country we all inhabit. And it is not just a single noxious political family that is complicit. We all are.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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