Diary (January 9, 2021)
Online diary of Karl Jones for Saturday January 9, 2021.
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Slavery by Another Name
Douglas Blackmon. is a Wall Street Journal reporter. He grew up in Washington County, Mississippi, where as a seventh grader he was encouraged by his teacher and his mother to research a local racist incident, despite the opposition of some citizens. The experience began a lifelong interest in the history of American race relations.
In 2003, Blackmon wrote a story on the use of black convict labor in the coal mines of U.S. Steel. The story generated a large response, and was later anthologized in Best Business Stories. Blackmon began to research the subject more widely, visiting various southern county courthouses to obtain records on arrest, conviction, and sentences.
He later stated:
...as I began to research, even I, as someone who had been paying attention to some of these sorts of things for a long time and was open to alternative explanations, even I was fairly astonished when I put it together, basically by going county by county and finding the criminal arrest records and the jail records in county after county after county from this period of time and seeing that if there had been crime waves, there had to have been records of crimes and people being arrested for crimes. And in reality, it's just not there.
"There's no evidence that that ever happened. In fact, it's the opposite. The crime waves that occurred by and large were the aftermath of the war and whites coming back from fighting in the Civil War and settling scores with people and all sorts of renegade activity that didn't involve black people at all, but they were blamed for it, and that was then used as a kind of ruse for why these incredibly brutal new legal measures then began to be put in place.
The resulting book, Slavery by Another Name, was published by Anchor Books in 2008.
- Slavery by another name @ Wikipedia
Incantation
Pickaninny Fix an Inning
Diamond Show
Play the Numbers
... Grow
Take another little piece of my heart
Take another little piece of my heart, America.
Adorable laundry varmit
Oh, my God—! So adorable—!
I laughed so hard that I temporarily transitioned from a mathematical function to a corporeal being.
But enough. I return to wave function space, where everyone looks the same at a glance, yet everyone is uniquely identifiable with effort.
- Post @ Twitter