The first time I taught a US History class, I had my students study the wording of the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution and debate whether or not slavery had actually been abolished or had it simply been reconstructed:
“Section 1. 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.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
By the time master filmmaker Ava DuVernay finished her documentary 13th, I was salivating with anticipation. She did not and never does disappoint. She traced the origins of that loophole in the 13th Amendment that allowed for servitude to be imposed for crimes well into the 21st century.
Slavery had/has gone away in some form. Yet, one of my favorite Black judges, the late New York Supreme Court Judge Bruce M. Wright noted the awful way Black and Brown defendants were treated. Wright earned the nickname “Turn ‘Em Loose Bruce” because he had witnessed one too many Black men and women end up in court because they stole something trying to feed their families only to be sentenced to anywhere from 10 to 20 years in prison. So, Wright gave them some minimal punishment, but he often turned them loose.
I remember his description of a case where a Black man had an extremely sick wife. Neither he nor his wife could afford her medicine. So, in desperation, the man stole a television set from the hotel where he worked. He pawned the television to purchase his wife’s medications. This man had never committed a crime before in his life, but he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Now here’s the next rub. For people old enough to remember, the only thing we knew for sure about prisoners when we were growing up was that prisoners pressed license plates. Well, folks that isn’t true anymore. Now American prisoners make…Clothing, Computers, Electronics, Furniture, and all that discounted stuff you find at Walmart and Target. US prisons generate anywhere from 2 to 5 billion a year in profit while prisoners who do the work never earn the standard minimum wage.
So, as you rightly fight for and ponder the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an American citizen who sits unlawfully in a jail in El Salvador, think about Felon 47 and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele giving each other a high-five and talking about not returning individuals who are wrongfully detained while they also discuss building more prisons in El Salvador. I’m going to leave it right there.
In the past week or two there have been doctors saying how healthy Felon 47 is, along with Fund Managers openly wondering if he is insane. I have another hypothesis.
I don’t really think Felon 47 is insane, I think he is evil and crazy (there is a difference). I still remember when the late Dr. Frances Cress Welsing wrote that we have never scientifically studied “Evil.” She noted that at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazis where they were tried for “Crimes Against Humanity,” where they exterminated millions of Jews, Gypsies, Afro-Germans, LGBTQIA, and the Disabled, those Nazis were ruled to be perfectly sane by the world’s leading psychologists.
Now, I don’t want to make light of anyone’s mental health or this nation’s severe mental health crisis. Yet, every time some man does something horrible, particularly if he’s a white man, people speculate about his mental health instead of calling him the evil son-of-a-bitch that he is. I feel the same way about these school shooters who are overwhelmingly white and male who try to kill everybody they can, all because they can’t get a girlfriend.
Felon 47 is trying his best to get rid of every brown skinned person who migrated to the USA without giving any of them due process as he shreds all the basic tenets of our Constitution. He’s sending a majority of people who are not criminals off to other countries while his sycophants explain these actions as a part of keeping America safe. Short of putting them all into ovens to get rid of them the way Nazis would, he has ordered them all to an uncertain fate somewhere else in the world.
Everything Felon 47 is doing to immigrants and legal citizens, who happen to not be white, is going to make this nation a hundred times less safe. Go piss off the world and you will find out that the world is not majority white; it never has been.
People who voted for Felon 47 are also crazy and evil too—and dumb. Did this previous italicized sentence upset you a bit? Did it sound like I was unfairly vilifying an entire segment of the US population without giving them an opportunity to explain their choices or even redeem themselves? Well, I don’t give a damn because that is exactly what Felon 47 and his supporters are doing to immigrants, women, Black folks, Latinos, LGBTQIA, and the Disabled.
Felon 47 supporters voted for this; and even if some of them can prove they didn’t think Felon 47 would do all of this harm, no self-respecting Black or Brown person with half a brain is going to try to weed out who might be on their side from those who would kill or harm us. We have never had that kind of time to deal with anyone or anything that normalizes evil.
This essay is a revisit and an edit to a memory I wrote about 10 years ago, but a memory I hope might help someone else, particularly a Black or Brown woman.
Most of my encounters with police have been rare and routine. Most of the police officers I have dealt with have been courteous and helpful. I have made the occasional phone call about the neighbor whose dog has been running around the neighborhood terrorizing a few people. The police come out, speak with the offender, and the matter is resolved. Yet, I remember this incident…
A police officer discovered I had a “First Insurance Cancellation Suspension” on my driver’s license. For those of you born late in the 20th century, let me explain. An insurance cancellation suspension was common if you changed cars or changed insurance companies. You used to get a form in the mail from the Department of Motor Vehicles instructing you to record your new insurance or your new car. Occasionally, however, you might not receive the form by mail, and you could easily forget about it.
If your new car/new insurance data had not arrived at the Department of Motor Vehicles when you bought a new car or changed your car insurance, you could end up with this particular type of suspension. You typically had to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, show them your new purchase, along with your new insurance card.
In what appeared to be a routine road check for driver’s license and insurance, the Decatur, Georgia Police held me for three hours only a few months after I purchased a car from my elderly uncle. This happened in the spring of 1998 when I was back in college to complete my Bachelor’s degree at Agnes Scott College.
After checking my Driver’s License number the officer stated that I had a “First Insurance Cancellation Suspension” on the car I previously owned. I showed him my new insurance card on the car I was driving. I knew I would have to straighten out the suspension before I drove any car again. Since I was about a mile from the campus, I asked him if he could radio the Agnes Scott College Police and have someone from that police department drive down the street, and pick me (and the car) up.
I explained that I would have my Mama come pick me up at Agnes Scott and we would go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and get the suspension problem cleared up.
“I’m not calling anybody,” he yelled. I pulled out my student ID. He said, “I don’t need that. Girl, get out of the car.” I was a grown woman then in my thirties; and while I might not have looked as old as my birth certificate said I was, I was nobody’s “girl.” I kept my mouth closed, but I am sure he sensed my displeasure.
I got out of the car and he instructed me to lie down in the street. When I asked why are you doing this? He told me to shut up. While I lay down in the street for over 30 minutes, he and another two officers pulled the back seat out of my car. They searched the trunk. If it had not been for the little old man that came out of his house to watch, I do not know what else might have happened. I was terrified, but I suffer from something my Mama used to call, “Your Daddy’s Disease.”
She said my father never showed fear when under pressure. I don’t show it either. Daddy always looked fearless, even menacing, when some horrible event was going on. Then later when everything was all over, he would fall apart, shaking and reaching for a good stiff drink. “That kind of thing can get you killed, Joy,” Mama said, “When someone expects you to be afraid, sometimes the worst thing you can do is look like you have no fear.”
This event was before everyone had a cellphone. A female police officer appeared and asked me if I wanted to call my Mama using her phone. The first police officer decided to write me a simple ticket for driving with a suspended license and he left me standing there in the street. He drove off.
That sweet little old man stood there and talked with me until Mama arrived. He told me he thought the Decatur police were doing some kind of sweep. “They’re looking for somebody that’s up to no good, and they’re tryin’ to find ‘em in these road blocks,” he said. Mama arrived in about 30 minutes and picked me up. My new best friend—that sweet observant little old Black man told me to leave my car where it was until the suspension problem was straightened out.
“Them SOBs are probably waiting somewhere watching and waiting for you to drive off so they can give you another ticket or take you to jail. I’ll watch your car until you get back,” he said.
Mama asked me how my clothes got so dirty. I lied and told her I slipped and fell. She would have had a heart attack if I told her what really happened to her only child. We headed to the Department of Motor Vehicles. The clerk handed me a simple form that I filled out citing that I no longer owned the previous vehicle and therefore had no insurance on that vehicle.
I had to write down the serial number and model of my current car and provide my proof of insurance. The clerk recorded my data and lifted my “First Insurance Cancellation Suspension.” All of this took about 20 minutes.
I did argue my case in traffic court. The police officer rolled his eyes at me as I explained in detail his refusal to call the Agnes Scott College police even after I showed him my student ID. I told the judge every detail and showed him my insurance card, the purchase of my car, and the statement from the Department of Motor Vehicles that lifted my insurance cancellation suspension.
To add as much injury as I could, I said, “I missed my Latin Class because of this!” The judge dismissed my case. I paid no fine. I was lucky. Yet, I sensed that what happened to me was not rare. This kind of treatment happens to women, and particularly Black women and women of color, with a frequency that many people do not want to admit.
Black women encounter more than our share of rudeness and physical intimidation from male police. This offending officer was Black. It’s easy to talk about racist cops, but it is not so easy to talk about SEXIST ones. And for the record, I don’t like Black men who are cops anymore than I like White men who are cops. Here’s the rub…
I consider myself to be an average size woman. By the time I was 50 years old, I managed to gain enough weight to make it to a whopping 135 pounds at 5 feet, 5 inches tall. At the time of this incident, I weighed only about 115 pounds. That police officer was at least 6’ 2” tall and weighed well over 200 pounds. He called me a girl. He told me to shut up. He did not throw me to the ground, Thank God. Yet, just imagine how easy it would have been for him to do so.
When I was a small girl in Atlanta, Grandma’s lap and bedroom remained my soft landing if I had misbehaved and Mama was patiently waiting to give me that lecture about my behavior.
Grandma’s bed had a ton of blankets where I couldn’t move if I got in it, but the visit was worth the trip because Grandma had a sweet tooth. There was candy I wasn’t supposed to have in her nightstand and her pockets.
Before I began going to school and even after I started school, Grandma and I had a daily routine of debate and opinions and arguments that could only be had between a 78-year-old woman and her 4-year-old granddaughter whose job was to help sort home grown tomatoes, snap beans, squash and peas from the garden except when I stopped to make mud pies from the rich red Georgia clay after a rain.
We spent hours discussing everything like two old women, but I was a midget version of an old woman. Grandma insisted on me having a reason and an explanation for why I believed certain things, nurturing propositions and hypotheses from my diminutive brain before I knew what a proposition or a hypothesis was.
It can be argued that tariffs helped fuel the US Civil War. By the mid-1800s, the northern economy was based on manufacturing and was in direct competition with an agricultural, slave-based southern economy. Tariffs on imported goods were great for the Northern states as they provided a huge amount of revenue. Tariffs also protected American businesses from foreign competitors and provided revenue for the federal government. In the South, tariffs were a big negative.
In 1828, a tariff that southerners called the Tariff of Abominations became law. This tariff protected Northern manufacturers, but it penalized Southern slaveholders who relied on exporting their agricultural products (cotton) that were produced by Black slave labor. These same Southerners imported goods from Europe.
The Morrill Tariff passed in 1861 around the time several Southern states had seceded from the Union because tariffs placed a heavy economic burden on the South. The big issue was, however, the expansion of slavery.
The American South sought to transplant slavery in newly acquired western territory due to its own self-produced ecological disaster, namely soil exhaustion. Yet, it was often difficult to transplant slavery in the western portion of what is now the United States due to the fact that laws differed in these newly acquired regions. California became a state in 1850, but it had abolished slavery. The Compromise of 1850 granted statehood to California as a free state with the expectation that California would uphold the Fugitive Slave Act.
Once the Mexican-American War was over in 1848 and the Treaty of Guadalupe was signed, Mexico ceded over 500,000 square miles of its territory to the United States. Those square miles included modern-day Utah, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, California, and large portions of Arizona, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Kansas. So, do not think that Felon 47’s desire for extra territory is something new. And for Goddess sake don’t think the USA had or has any respect for actual geographic boundaries.
(Arlington Cemetery, c. 1865, Library of Congress)
Tariffs in the United States only waned after this country’s “protectionist” period ended roughly in the early 1930s. By the end of World War II, the United States entered full swing into a period of open markets and greater engagement with markets in other countries.
But here’s the thing. What Felon 47 is doing is not new. In the mid-1800s while Northern industrialists reminded poorly paid white factory workers that they had privileges and supremacy over Black folks who were slaves, Southern slaveholders were selling the exact same argument to poor whites and middling white yeoman farmers.
The white oligarchy didn’t fight in the Civil War on either side. They used poor whites to do it for them. And the South lost—Thank You Jesus! Yet, what most folks forget is that Black folks in the South were its property and its wealth. Setting them free WAS NOT the initial aim of the war. It was not until Black abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass pushed at President Abraham Lincoln to make ending slavery a war objective.
Douglass made it plain. If Lincoln wanted to end the war, and force the South back into the Union, the simplest way to do it was to free the slaves. After all, Black slaves were one third of the population of the entire South, and Black bodies were the primary source of wealth of a minority of white southern oligarchs. That strategy worked.
Yet, here’s something to contemplate on a more personal level. After he was around the age of 6, abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass never saw his mother again and never learned what happened to her. After he escaped from his owner, he remained a fugitive for years. Eventually his freedom was purchased by Quakers in the UK for $711.66 (around $30K today) in 1846. After the Civil War ended, roughly two generations of white southern women who hoped to marry and have children never did so in certain areas of the South because there simply were not enough men to go around. A majority of the men they might have married were killed during the Civil War.
As a Black woman historian, nothing that Felon 47 is doing is new to me. Although I must admit he seems to be an old American history lesson on steroids. The American North tore up the Slaveholding South, imposed tariffs that favored their industries and never lost a wink of sleep; and never once worried about the personal costs of doing any of it.
So, while there are plenty of Black fools out there (trust me, I know many of them), a majority of us Black folks know that there is no limit to how oligarchs will play with our lives, crush economies, steal from us, and attempt to throw our Black asses on the frontlines of military interventions and sacrifice us on an assortment of altars. They have done all of this to us for centuries. What is different now is that white folks are finding out that they too will be placed in these same untenable positions.
Leslye Joy Allen 