Over the past two weeks, continued mass protests over police violence targeting Black Americans has sparked a conversation around everyday, culturally embedded racism. It has also coincided with this year’s Juneteenth, causing an out-of-the-blue, warp-speed recognition by white Americans of this historically black holiday. Many are pointing out and decrying the fact that they had never heard about this holiday, celebrating the last slaves in the South being freed two years after emancipation, until this week. Even many Black Americans are just now learning about the holiday.
Having grown up in Texas, where the June Nineteenth celebration of emancipation originates, I knew about this holiday from a young age. It has been a recognized state holiday in Texas since 1980 (one hundred and seventeen years after the day of emancipation) and is taught in Texas history classes across the state. Still the holiday was not widely celebrated in my community. Perhaps it was because I was white, although my schools and neighborhood was relatively diverse. It might be because the holiday is less a celebration of emancipation, but a reminder of how it has been withheld.
The origin for Juneteenth comes from June 19th in 1865. On that day, union troops arrived in Galveston Texas and brought the news of emancipation from slavery to the black slaves, still being held and worked by their masters in the state. This was two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation become official on January 1st in 1863. Of course the proclamation was not recognized by rebellious confederate Texas. But rumors also spread about why it took so long for emancipation to spread to the South, from masters lying to their slaves to maintain labor, to the Union actually intentionally withholding emancipation so the Southern states could see profits from a final harvest season. These rumors, true or not, show the early mistrust the freed Black people held towards former masters, Southern elites and even the federal government.
That mistrust, it turns out, was justified. Federal Reconstruction efforts fundamentally failed to protect Black citizenry from undergoing discrimination, being denied basic rights and in many cases falling back into near slave-like conditions. Southern Reconstruction was swiftly and thoroughly undone by “Southern Redemption“. This period saw Jim Crow laws passed in the South, and more systemic economic restrictions in the North, prevented Black people from voting, owning land or property and finding gainful employment. They were easy targets for both white supremacy groups such as the Klu Klux Klan, which included many local politicians and elites, and law enforcement. Through law enforcement, this country saw the preservation of slavery and racial disenfranchisement to this day.
In celebrating Juneteenth today, we must recognize those that are still suffering at the hands of modern day slavery. For many Americans across the country, Black or Brown or white, but almost entirely poor, slavery is still a reality. The 13th amendment did not completely abolish slavery, only limited it. The text of the amendment abolishes slavery “except as punishment of crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” which opens up a loophole for slavery through a systemically discriminatory criminal justice system.
The history of how this loophole led to origins of today’s criminal justice system, intentionally designed to disenfranchise and re-enslave Black Americans, is thoroughly and artfully explored in Ava Duvernay’s documentary “13th” which is available on Netflix. This is perhaps the most important and educational piece for any American to watch on Juneteenth. It shows why this day cannot just be a day for celebration, but must be a call to action to end modern slavery.
This post cannot possibly hope to explain the rise of the industrial prison complex, how it preys on black communities and creates a new slave labor force, as clearly and succinctly as “13th” does. It is necessary to hear from Black voices how their communities are targeted, how a history of racism informs their struggle today. But it is still important for all of us to point out key mechanisms that allow racism and slavery to operate today.
One reason the prison industrial complex has escaped wider public scrutiny is the economic incentive behind it. A majority of the nation’s largest corporations profit off of cheap prison labor. From Walmart to Starbucks, these companies use prison labor, sometimes in literal sweatshops, to keep maintain high profits while expanding products and services. Most of the prisoners working for these companies receive less than a dollar an hour, and none of the benefits that come with traditional employment.
This is all while shouldering the significant personal costs of incarceration. Many activities or necessities for incarcerated Americans come with a high price. Expensive phone calls and visits drain prisoners of what little money they make from their labor, and directly profit third-party companies that provide these services. Prisoners also have to pay for basic commissary goods that can include necessities from headache medicine to tampons. All of this means that prisoners are being milked from profit on both ends, by extorting cheap labor at slave-like wages, while directly taking money from them and their families by sheer means of incarceration.
Perhaps more insidious, though, than the corporate slavery the industrial prison complex provides, is the political hegemony it reinforces. Mass incarceration does not only provide a new slave labor force, but it also creates slave states that see political benefits from more incarceration. This is also achieved in a two-fold manner: by denying prisoners voting rights, and by using prison populations for electoral representation.
Incarcerated people are denied the right to vote in every state except Maine and Vermont. Additionally many states put roadblocks that prevent felons from voting after they are released, depending on their crime, outstanding court fees or other procedural details. In some of those states felons also have to apply to have their voting rights restored, rather than granted them automatically.
While incarcerated people are denied votes, they are being counted in the states and counties in which they are incarcerated for purposes of electoral votes and economic resources. Despite the fact that prisoners are often incarcerated outside of their state of residence, and moved around frequently between prisons, the census counts them as local population in most cases. This leads to an artificial inflation of legislative representation for states and districts that house more prisoners.
This policy is referred to as prison gerrymandering, and it tends to benefit the mostly rural and conservative areas that house large prison populations. Most prisoners come from densely populated urban areas, yet are being counted in the rural, mostly conservative areas they are incarcerated. Fourteen of the top fifteen states with the highest incarcerated populations are majority Republican states. These states deny votes to these prisoners while gaining more electoral college votes by counting them. In some cases there are entire districts where anywhere from a quarter to over half of the population is made of prisoners, or “Phantom Constituents”. In these districts the electoral power of prison populations is decided by the non-incarcerated voters, essentially stealing the votes the prisoners are denied.
This policy has become a revised version of the “three-fifths compromise” which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of electoral votes and federal taxes. Except now the slaves are incarcerated people, and they are counted as whole people, while being denied any of the rights a whole person should be afforded under the constitution. In effect this creates a new brand of slave states, that provide slave labor and reap the benefits of political representation that are denied to their slaves. As much as Republicans enjoy claiming they are the party of Lincoln, it is largely Republicans who support this practice and vehemently oppose and potential reform.
Despite increased scrutiny around mass incarceration in recent years, this practice of Prison Gerrymandering has gone largely unnoticed and unopposed. Yet there are some states making strides to rectify it. Earlier this year Virginia became the ninth state to pass laws that would allow its prisoner population to be counted in their original place of residence. It joins states such as California, Tennessee, Massachusetts and Colorado in ending the practice of Prison Gerrymandering. Notably, most of these states are majority Democratic, but a few are reliably Republican or somewhat purple, such as Tennessee and Nevada.
All of this demonstrates how political and economic disenfranchisement has perpetuated the sin of slavery into the modern day, and continues to perpetuate itself. With the knowledge that the police force targets over-incarcerates Black people, handing down higher rates of conviction and harsher sentences for Black people, we see how Black America has never been allowed to escape slavery, and how the country continues to profit off of their labor and political suppression. So if you are celebrating this Juneteenth, spend some time to think about how abolition has not been completed, how freedom and representation continues to be denied, and the many levels we all must continue to fight on before we achieve true freedom.
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