SLAVERY STILL EXISTS

AMERICAN SLAVERY STILL EXISTS Focusing on substance, not forms; upon facts, not fantasies or fiction, I do state that slavery still exists in the United States of America under forms in which its debilitating legal presence is cleverly dissembled. If there is any good news to be gleaned from this fact it is that it now is mainly hitting migrants under President Donald Trump, primarily, rather than African Americans. Even so, this latter class of people, my own, still must deal with the residual consequences of the 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Report sociology predictions that preceded the black urban 1960s riots, after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. murder in 1968, in whose wake many black families were destroyed to a great extent with job losses, jails, school dropouts, school bussing, welfare state regulators and regulations; tough on crime policies, and a plethora of others. In partial support of my "slavery still exists" premise, I cite and quote Harriet Beecher Stowe . She wrote: "Slavery is despotism... "The object of it has been distinctly stated in one sentence by Judge Ruffin,--'The end is the profit of the master, his security , and the public safety.' "Slavery, then, is absolute despotism, of the most unmitigated form. "It would, however, be doing injustice to the absolutism of any 'civilized ' country to liken American slavery to it. The absolute governments of Europe none of them pretend to be founded on a 'property' right of the governor to the persons and entire capabilities of the governed. "This is a form of despotism which exists only in some of the most savage countries of the world; as, for example, in Dahomey." P. 120-121, A KEY TO UNCLE TOM'S CABIN (1853) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, author "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852) A regally clad male ambassador from Benin, formerly known as Dahomey, speaking in fluent French, via a translator, apologized profusely to a throng of us in Howard University's Cramton Auditorium in the early 1970s, for his nation's own extensively complicit participation in the slave trade that had brought thousands of Africans to America over years. I was struck by the theater of it all, and by his seemingly, genuinely felt sincerity. But what was done was done. And very few people who were sitting there in the rapt audience of African Studies and History scholars in the early 1970s, were inclined to trade their present American places with any native of Benin, whose ancestors had been, fortunate enough, blessed to avoid the bloody trauma of the Dahomey enslavers' nets, coffles, spears, bullets, beheadings, barracoons . So while it might seem strange to some that in discussing "despotism of slavery" that Harriet Beecher Stowe would mention the nation of Dahomey, it was not so to me . The Benin ambassador affirmed what Stowe had written in 1853. So had Frank Yerby in his epic 1970s novel, THE DAHOMEAN, which affirmed Stowe's statement about savagery. It seems to me that we have the same kind of Dahomean savagery loose in the inner cities of America in the form of white, tax-paid police & black criminal gangs, who both stalk and prey upon the same folks, vulnerable, often gullible, blacks. When they kill, disable or injure, the law enables the police to get away with pay, and the black criminals are seldom caught, or, if caught, seldom seriously charged or prosecuted, given the victim's race. We cannot be too indelicate in facing the facts of the miracle of our survival as a people from forces on the right and left who mean us no good, though they may look like us, are citizens like us, profess to be Christians (or another faith) like us. Two million black men and women in jail in 2018 are leaving as many children behind to fend for themselves or perish ! Slavery is despotism and slavery still exists in the United States of America, whatever the law or Constitution or courts may ever say. 'The end is the profit of the master, his security and the public safety,' said Judge Ruffin. We have all three present now in 2018, alive and also well !https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Yerby