Without that veneer, U.S. society still looks very much like slavery would look if it were continued by other means: For example, the U.S. prison rates for black men (about 25%) today are exactly the same as they were in Mississippi, Georgia, Florida and Alabama, in the aftermath of reconstruction, when they were thrown in jail on almost any pretext. The difference today is that they are put there now mostly due to the draconian 100-1 cocaine law. The unemployment rate for blacks has been constant as twice that of whites since 1910. Despite all of the lavish claims of black progress, Black family income has remained stuck at around 55% of that of whites since after World War-II. School integration was resisted for 30 years, and then whites simply moved to the suburbs to avoid it altogether, now black inner city schools are much worse than the black segregated school were in the Jim Crow South.
Put simply, when one looks carefully just beneath the glossy surface veneer, and across the American psychological landscape, at what lies beneath, at the subtext of the society: at the devastation of the inner cities, the schools, etc. instead of on the surface, that is instead of at the tokens, it is impossible to distinguish this new "soft form of self-imposed slavery," consisting of a combination of benign neglect, involuntary political, social, and economic Apartheid, from the old harder more brutal form. Looking back with 20-20 hindsight, it is easy enough to see that the real horror of slavery was not the bodily harm done to the slaves, but the psychological brutality the whole system of slavery represented, and the havoc it wreaked in morally undermining American humanity and ushering in a much more diminished and uncaring way of life. That legacy is a cross-generational poison that can no longer be contained within strict racial boundaries.
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