How the Amendment to End Slavery Was Damaged by Racism
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/8709-how-the-amendment-to-end-slavery-was-crippled-by-racism
The Constitution of the United States of America was created to enable the founding ideals and principles of the Declaration of Independence. Yet something went terribly wrong. It failed to recognize, defend and enable those ideals. The tragedy of such a gargantuan failure is still with us today in the form of institutionalized and systemic racism and a deeply embedded exploitation of labor. Both are still given constitutional sanction. Such sanction resides in the very constitutional amendment that was supposed to free the slaves and end the exploitation of labor in America forever: the 13th Amendment.
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.
"Except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." The reality of emancipation and racial equality cannot be fulfilled until the collective mindset of the nation is firmly turned away from the idea that slavery or involuntary servitude has any place within the constitutional fabric of the United States. Until the notion is gotten rid of that a person who is convicted of a crime is something less than other citizens, or is something less than human, there cannot be the necessary transformation of the American law enforcement and judicial system from one that is based upon vengeance and negative punishment to one that is focused on 21st-century restorative justice.
So, why does the Constitution of the United States of America still allow for the existence of servitude in America that can be triggered as a punishment for crime?
What America got in the 13th Amendment was a mindset reflected in legislation, law and customary practice best described in 1845 by Frederick Douglass in his "Narrative of the Life of a Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself": "To be accused was to be convicted, and to be convicted was to be punished; the one always following the other with immutable certainty. To escape punishment was to escape accusation ... " Think, please, of a young, black boy - Trayvon Martin - wearing a hoodie, who only wanted some Skittles and iced tea when he was shot to death on February 26, 2012, by a neighborhood vigilante because he looked "suspicious."
As Douglas A. Blackmon has pointed out in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Slavery By Another Name," those so-called crimes have run the gamut from the actually nonexistent or fictional to relatively minor offenses that would have been handled with non-penal consequences had the offender not been black, but the objective was to procure cheap, nearly free black labor for white farms, other businesses, state and local governments and large American corporations. And the 13th Amendment facilitated this via its language, which empowered law enforcement and the courts to traffic in African Americans for the purpose of rendering them into a post-Emancipation iteration of slavery and involuntary servitude. It is therefore no accident that there exists a great disparity in the way the American criminal justice system deals with African Americans versus whites. Until the connection between the criminal justice system and slavery and involuntary servitude is condemned and forever severed, America will remain a nation plagued by a criminal justice system, the essence of which is racial inequality...
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