Is American Chattel Slavery Intact Today?

Issue: Is the United States still a racial hierarchy/caste system?

Rules:

The General Welfare Clause: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”[1]

The Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” [2]

Facts:

When the confederacy of states that would join to become the United States of America declared their independence from Great Britain, a new system of governance was formed. This system called for freedom, justice and equality, but in a calculated manner so as not to upset the slaveholding class who comprised most of those at the Second Continental Congress. Years later, the Constitutional Convention similarly spoke of liberty and justice without upsetting the sizable proportion of slaveholders at the Constitutional Convention. As a race-based hierarchy remained intact despite these egalitarian proclamations, does a racial caste system remain intact today, despite legislation and court rulings that say otherwise?

Analysis:

A system is defined as a consistently interactive or codependent group of pieces that form a unified whole.[i] Systems analysis is a methodology that regards systems as goal-seeking and as having one or more purposes; therefore, it evaluates the outputs of a system to uncover that system’s actual goals.[ii] When utilizing a systems analysis to evaluate a system, it is not enough for a system to state its goals. Instead, one must look at the system’s function as well as the internal structures of that system, along with any subsystems and their functions.[iii] As law professor Tanya Asim Cooper explains, “Under systems analysis, the true purpose is not the system’s own rhetoric about its purpose or mission but rather how it behaves over time. If there is a consistent behavior over time, quite likely some feedback loop exists or some mechanism is creating that consistent behavior.”[iv]

There are two possible methods of identifying the goals of a system. A positive analysis finds the goals of a system to be the results that the system actually produces, whereas a normative analysis finds the goals of a system to be the results that are believed by the analyst to be the desirable outcomes.[v] Although systems may bring about “latent functions,” results that were not intended or anticipated, these results are still treated as intended. [vi] Systems analysis also evaluates whether the system being explored is a subsystem of a larger system and, if so, what that larger system is and how those systems relate to one another.[vii]

In the case of the government of the United States of America, which includes the federal bureaucracies as well as 50 states and 14 territories, all having governing structures separately but still operating within the parameters of the federal establishment, we can ascertain that the United States government is in itself a system that encompasses numerous other systems. The stated goals of the United States government for its citizens may be thought to be those delineated in two foundational documents, both recognized as birthing the nation, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” [3] In addition, the Constitution of the United States proclaims, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”[4]

If one were to accept these pronouncements as the goals of the United States government, an obvious conflict would arise. That is because “Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness” could not have been intended for Africans at that time they were written, as most Africans were encapsulated in the system of American Chattel slavery. “We the People” should, thus, be understood to refer to a very specific demographic, those who were represented at these conventions. The signers of both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were all white, male, wealthy property owners, and many owned slaves. As stated by Mark Maloy of the American Battlefield Trust,  “A majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and nearly half of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention owned slaves.  Four of the first five presidents of the United States were slaveowners.”[5] 

However, America has changed, many would say. Chattel slavery no longer exists, and many Africans enjoy the same freedoms and privileges whites enjoy. Today there are Black professionals in every field, including Black politicians, celebrities and entertainers. There is also no system of race-based formalized separation and subjugation. However, what is often forgotten is the system has always allowed for exceptions, so long as the centralized purpose was still met.

During the years of American chattel slavery, there were Africans who for various reasons became emancipated. Many of these Africans lived a life of relative success, wealth and prosperity. Some even participated in the very institution that kept their fellow kinsmen enslaved. According to Carter G. Woodson, in 1830, 3,775 former slaves owned 12,100 enslaved Africans.[6]

A fraction of formerly enslaved Africans owning slaves does not negate the fact that America was a racial hierarchy. Similarly today, the fact most Africans in America are not in poverty, and many own homes and have college degrees, does not mean a racial hierarchy does not exist.

The caste system has not ended, rather it shifted, as was argued extensively by Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow. Africans in America disproportionately represent the population in the American system of mass incarceration, the largest mass incarceration system in the world.[7] Of the 1.2 million people in prison in the United States, 37% of them are African, despite Africans only comprising 13 percent of the population.[8]

Incarceration in the United States creates a reality not unlike the 1960s Jim Crow South where prisoners are stripped of their rights and forced into a system of mass surveillance. Time in prison means the state controls where you live, whether you can enjoy basic fundamental rights such as the right to vote or the right to bear arms, and are severely limited on where you can work.[9]

Prisoners also work low-wage jobs while incarcerated, which they are forced to do to establish an employment record for parole boards. This low-wage labor has proven extremely profitable for prison work contractors. As reported by the Guardian, prison labor is now an $11 billion industry in the United States:

More than 80% of incarcerated laborers do general prison maintenance, including cleaning, cooking, repair work, laundry and other essential services. For paid non-industry jobs, workers make an average of 13 cents to 52 cents an hour, according to the report. Seven states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas – pay nothing for the vast majority of prison work.[10]

Thus, while equal rights may apply to Africans in America facially, we see exploitive labor needs being met by a disproportionately African underclass. Systems analysis tells us this outcome is the hidden goal of mass incarceration. The system of government created to be the United States, thus, continuously depletes the labor a servile underclass to feed the overseer class, allowing them to achieve “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This is achieved today not through chattel slavery, but through the Prison Industrial Complex.

Conclusion:

The United States still maintains the racial caste of American chattel slavery through the Prison Industrial Complex.

[1] U.S. Const. pmbl.

[2] The Declaration of Independence (U.S. 1776).

[3] Id.

[4] Supra, note 1.

[5] Mark Maloy, The Founding Fathers Views of Slavery, The American Battlefield Trust, (Dec. 8, 2020) https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/founding-fathers-views-slavery#:~:text=A%20majority%20of%20the%20signers,the%20United%20States%20were%20slaveowners.

[6] D.G. Hewitt,  10 Black Slaveowners That Will Tear Apart Historical Perception, History Collection, (May 17, 2018) https://historycollection.com/10-black-slaveowners-that-will-tear-apart-historical-perception/#marie-therese-metoyer.

[7] See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, the News Press, 2021.

[8] Prison Policy Initiative, Race and ethnicity

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/research/race_and_ethnicity/ (last visited Apr. 25, 2024)

[9] See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, the News Press, 2021.

[10] Dani Anguiano, US prison workers produce $11bn worth of goods and services a year for pittance, The Guardian, June 15, 2022,  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-workers-low-wages-exploited.

[i] Lynn M. LoPucki, The Systems Approach to Law, 82 Cornell L. Rev. 479, 482 (March 1997).

[ii] Id. at 485.

[iii] Id. at 482.

[iv] Cooper, supra note 13, at 250–251

[v] LoPucki, supra note 60, at 486.

[vi] Id. at 502–503.

[vii] Id. at 505.