APOSTROPHE OF BLACK LIFE IN AMERICA IN DECEMBER 2016

APOSTROPHE OF BLACK LIFE IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IN DECEMBER 2016 Indentured servitude Chattel slavery Fugitives or manumitted Contrabands of war Soldiers/Sailors Freedmen Phantom Citizenship Second class citizenship Taking first-class citizenship Except for that very brief period of time after the Civil War, and that period of time which has been variously experienced since the Civil Rights Movement 100 years later, the bulk of black people in the United States of America have all lived under a kind of apostrophe; besides a civil rights asterisk, that was always present; that somehow, in someway, subordinated our folks respecting the exercise of that same first-class, unadulterated, American citizenship of "whites." "Apostrophe," as used above, is a "figure of speech," that involves the literary, imaginary usage of the word. Therein and yet thereby, we African Americans, in virtue of this resilient American apostrophe, have been treated as, viewed as bestial, fictional characters, targets, political foils, enemies. or stereotypical abstractions. We have been counted as fractions, i.e., "3/5's persons" for representation purposes only in the Constitution, being more than zero but less than whole under law from the founding of the nation, until war, blood, and ameliorating civil rights Amendments erased the "de jure" designation, yet later replaced it by "de facto" emasculation. We are still mass-incarcerated; economically deprived; treated as social pariahs who have been parenthetical to that principally "white" narrative of American life, yet the redolent basis of that life. Yet, still inexorably we become real. http://literarydevices.net/apostrophe/