just a friendly reminder that, just because slavery was formally “abolished” in the so-called united states* in 1865, enslavement itself is still ongoing in the form of incarceration, which disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous people
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(*i say “so-called” because the US is a settler-colonial construction founded on greed, extraction, and white supremacy)
Clarification: Prisoners are legal slave labor and are still used by state and for profit interests.
And US interests found ways to make sure that we fail enough people to have said slaves. CIA, War on Drugs, closing and restricting public services, for profit healthcare and little to no mental health services, rising prices on housing and criminalizing homelessness…
“The story of ‘John Doe 1’ of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is tucked in a lawsuit filed five years ago against several U.S. tech companies, including Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle producer. In a country where the earth hides its treasures beneath its surface, those who chip away at its bounty pay an unfair price. As a pre-teen, his family could no longer afford to pay his $6 monthly school fee, leaving him with one option: a life working underground in a tunnel, digging for cobalt rocks. But soon after he began working for roughly two U.S. dollars per day, the child was buried alive under the rubble of a collapsed mine tunnel. His body was never recovered.
The nation, fractured by war, disease, and famine, has seen more than 6 million people die since the mid-1990s, making the conflict the deadliest since World War II. But, in recent years, the death and destruction have been aided by the growing number of electric vehicles humming down American streets. In 2022, the U.S., the world’s third-largest importer of cobalt, spent nearly $525 million on the mineral, much of which came from the Congo.
As America’s dependence on the Congo has grown, Black-led labor and environmental organizers here in the U.S. have worked to build a transnational solidarity movement. Activists also say that the inequities faced in the Congo relate to those that Black Americans experience. And thanks in part to social media, the desire to better understand what’s happening in the Congo has grown in the past 10 years. In some ways, the Black Lives Matter movement first took root in the Congo after the uprising in Ferguson in 2014, advocates say. And since the murder of George Floyd and the outrage over the Gaza war, there has been an uptick in Congolese and Black American groups working on solidarity campaigns.
Throughout it all, the inequities faced by Congolese people and Black Americans show how the supply chain highlights similar patterns of exploitation and disenfranchisement. … While the American South has picked up about two-thirds of the electric vehicle production jobs, Black workers there are more likely to work in non-unionized warehouses, receiving less pay and protections. The White House has also failed to share data that definitively proves whether Black workers are receiving these jobs, rather than them just being placed near Black communities. 'Automakers are moving their EV manufacturing and operations to the South in hopes of exploiting low labor costs and making higher profits,’ explained Yterenickia Bell, an at-large council member in Clarkston, Georgia, last year. While Georgia has been targeted for investment by the Biden administration, workers are 'refusing to stand idly by and let them repeat a cycle that harms Black communities and working families.’
… Of the 255,000 Congolese mining for cobalt, 40,000 are children. They are not only exposed to physical threats but environmental ones. Cobalt mining pollutes critical water sources, plus the air and land. It is linked to respiratory illnesses, food insecurity, and violence. Still, in March, a U.S. court ruled on the case, finding that American companies could not be held liable for child labor in the Congo, even as they helped intensify the prevalence. … Recently, the push for mining in the Congo has reached new heights because of a rift in China-U.S. relations regarding EV production. Earlier this month, the Biden administration issued a 100% tariff on Chinese-produced EVs to deter their purchase in the U.S. Currently, China owns about 80% of the legal mines in the Congo, but tens of thousands of Congolese work in 'artisanal’ mines outside these facilities, where there are no rules or regulations, and where the U.S. gets much of its cobalt imports.
'Cobalt mining is the slave farm perfected,’ wrote Siddharth Kara last year in the award-winning investigative book Cobalt Red: How The Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. 'It is a system of absolute exploitation for absolute profit.’ While it is the world’s richest country in terms of wealth from natural resources, Congo is among the poorest in terms of life outcomes. Of the 201 countries recognized by the World Bank Group, it has the 191st lowest life expectancy.”
Inmates being put to work does NOT SAVE ANYONE TAX DOLLARS you are still paying exorbitant amounts of taxes to the prison industrial complex, almost all of which goes into these corporations pockets, btw—-not spent on prisoners.
I don’t know about any of y’all, but I would so much rather my tax money go to actually rehabilitating people and finding ways to keep them out of incarceration, rather than an entire industry set up around getting people to recidivate and return to prison time and time again, just so that prison industrial complex can pocket even MORE of my tax money.
for any wondering how this affects you the not yet in prison population, slave labor takes jobs out of the economy and depresses all labors value. in real terms they are picking your pocket.
Here is the video of tens of thousands of Congolese people gathering at a cobalt mine:
If you aren’t conscious about the products you consume, you should be. Congolese people should have never had to and never have to do this enslaved labour. This is beyond hyper-exploitation, violence, and abuse of power by western imperialist entities and corporations. Until this whole system charges, boycott big tech. Don’t change your phone or lap tops every year (although that in itself is a privilege), and demand these companies like Apple be accountable for the blood they have on their hands.
“For more than a century, the Catholic Church financed its expansion and its institutions with profits made from the purchase and sale of people they enslaved. This chapter of Church history has only recently come to the attention of the public.
"Without the enslaved, the Catholic Church in the United States as we know it today would not exist,” writes author Rachel Swarns. She says the priests prayed for the salvation of the souls of the people they owned, even as they bought and sold their bodies.“
The first image shows a black man wearing a black hoodie with the word ‘free’ in capital letters sitting cross-legged next to a gravestone reading: The man fortune. Died 1798. Buried September 13, 2013. Child of God. Free at last.
The following two images show a text reading: Fortune, his wife Dinah and their 3 children were slaves of Preserved Porter, a Connecticut bone doctor. In 1798, Fortune slipped from a rock on the west bank of the Naugatuck river, broke his neck and drowned. At the time, dissecting cadavers was illegal; but not applying to slaves, Dr. Porter cut him into pieces at the riverbank. At his office, he boiled the bones so that all the flesh fell off, etched labels into them and used them as a medical training tool. Dr. Porter died 6 years later, listing the bones as worth $15 ($330 today).
Prior to his death, Dr. Porter used the bones to teach anatomy to his son; who used them to teach anatomy to his grandson; who used them to teach his daughter… 135 years of generational doctors and wealth. In 1933, his name long forgotten, the family donated the bones to the Mattatuck Museum where they were displayed next to slave tools as “Larry the slave”; a popular exhibit shown on their postcard; not taken down until 1970 when the Museum realized that it was demeaning. They stored them in the basement.
In 1999, made aware of these bones in the basement, the NAACP and museum staff enlisted anthropologists and archeologists to examine them, ultimately determining this was Fortune. Based on bone density, he was a strong man who lived and work with a broken back, hand and died of a broken neck.
On Sept. 13th, 2013, after being a slave, medical specimen, museum exhibit and archeological artifact, spanning 275 years, Fortune was finally freed…laid to rest next to White society of his time…something that wouldn’t have been allowed when he died.
This is not an isolated story. Medical usage of Black and Indigenous people in ways prohibited of Whites was not uncommon. Since I still can’t find my GG Grandfather (Ned Mills), Erica and I decided to make a donation to the Assoc for the Study of African American Life & History, as well as to make a regular pilgrimage here to leave flowers for Fortune.
Black History is American History and Black Lives Matter. If not to you, I got this. My actions will show they always have and still do…no statute of limitation. Now rest, Fortune.
Colonialism is NOT an ‘ancient’ thing from the past. Colonised nations are not beating dead horses when they ask for reparation. The 1970s. Half the bigots that like to insinuate that people of colour are making a disproportionate fuss about nothing—they were alive for this.
how dare the UK leverage other countries, other people, as capital. It’s slavery, nothing less.
Queen Elizabeth was not your uwu softie tourism grandma. The blood of communities is on her hands, and she died scot-free. She’s a human rights violator. She okayed all of this, and continued to okay it, so the next time anyone wants to argue about how acshually it was all done in Victoria’s time and this so-called figurehead was innocent, maybe zip your mouths. To say nothing of the fact that all her life she has literally grifted the wealth of the very British people that defend her, serfing, they have no right to try and temper the anger of people that have had their entire lives, entire communities destroyed.
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