[ By: Peter Birkenhead ]
The menu at the Cabin was long, one of those unwieldy, laminated mega-menus that grace the tables of roadside diners and chalets everywhere, and reflected a classic attention to theme (gumbo burger, gumbo omelet, gumbo). If the menu had been covered in tinfoil, I would’ve had a late-summer tan by the time I reached the dessert page. When our waiter approached, I asked — in what I imagined was a small act of clever, Yankee defiance — if the gumbo was any good.

My friend Gabbie and I had come directly from a tour of a former sugar plantation down the road, in Vacherie, La., called Oak Alley, and I had a crook in my neck. Up until that morning, whenever I heard the word “plantation,” I’d thought “slavery.” When I’d booked the tour, I had done so in the spirit of a visitor to Dachau or Wounded Knee. But the tour itself was given in the spirit of a visit to the home of a tasteful, Southern movie star. Our guide, in a tone equal parts admiring and envious, devoted 90 minutes to the armoires, linens and chamber pots of the home, but almost no time to the people who built, creased and cleaned them. The words “slave” and “slavery” were never mentioned.

“I guess the white people in antebellum drag getting misty about ‘the Golden Age of the South’ might have been our first clue,” Gabbie observed.

We did hear the word “servant” on the tour, two or three times, in the telling of what were meant to be amusing anecdotes about the idiosyncrasies of the servants’ owners. Our guide was dressed in an elaborate, sky-blue ball gown, and chirped about what fun it was for her to “go back in time and live like Scarlett O’Hara for a day.”

As Gabbie read from the menu in her best Vivien Leigh, her eyes began to widen. She dropped the drawl and informed me that the Cabin had been serving busloads of visitors to Louisiana’s plantation country for more than 30 years on the strength of its reputation for authenticity, which the menu explained thusly: “Our goal is to preserve some of the local farming history, serve meals typical of the River Road tradition, and make your visit a relaxed and memorable one. The Cabin Restaurant began as one of the 10 original slave dwellings of the Monroe Plantation. Through the efforts, ideas, the love, sweat and patience of friends and family, you are able to enjoy a small sampling of Southern Louisiana history.”

The love, sweat and patience of actual participants in the “local farming history,” the original builders and tenants of the Cabin, were not dwelt upon or mentioned in the menu’s text, but their contribution to the restaurant’s ambience was subtly alluded to. As the waiter brought our food I read: “In the grand dining room, the roof is supported by four massive beams ? placed so that the room resembles a Garconnier (the visiting bachelor’s quarters on a river road plantation.)”

And we put our menus down. I’ve enjoyed almost every spoonful of gumbo I’ve had over the years, whether in expensive restaurants, coffee shops or train stations, but I might have had my last one contemplating the events witnessed by the roof beams of a “visiting bachelor’s quarters” on a 19th-century sugar plantation.

When the Civil War ended, there were no truth and reconciliation commissions formed to process memories, no Nuremberg Trials to enable reflection, no Great Emancipator to free the future from the past — only ghosts and the ravenous politics of memory. The need for national reckoning was quickly subordinated to the political imperative of reunification, and on both sides of the Mason Dixon line, forgetting became more valuable than remembering.

Southern apologists earned sudden fortunes in a gold rush of nostalgic forgetting. Within a year of the war’s end, a Virginia journalist named Edward Pollard published a novel called “The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates,” a breathless, self-pitying fantasy, and the first of many to recast the conflict as a tragedy of fraternal strife and regional repression, to blame the Confederate defeat on the overwhelming resources and underhanded tactics of the North, exalt the Confederacy’s most ruthless generals as paragons of honor, revel in stories of freed people run amok, wallow in tearful, postwar family reunions, and pine for the “Golden Age” of hoop- skirts and happy-go-lucky chattel. It depicted slavery as a benign if not beneficial institution, and relegated further discussion on the topic to the offstage realm of “touchy” subjects, where, for perpetual Northern fear of offending delicate Southern sensibilities, it has languished ever since.

“Have you ever dreamed of waking up to an antebellum room that would be the envy of Scarlett O’Hara? The fulfillment of just such a dream is the essence of the Edgewood experience. Hosts Dot and Julian Boulware offer eight luxurious and charming guest rooms; six in the main house and two in the former slave’s quarters.”

— Country Collections Magazine.

The scores of histories and plantation novels that followed Pollard’s, many produced by members of what came to be known as the Dunning School (after its founder, Columbia history professor William Archer Dunning), an influential movement of celebrity, revisionist scholars — a sort of mutton-chopped Heritage Foundation — helped concoct a broad, new Southern culture of perpetual grievance and nostalgia for a reimagined, antebellum idyll. The primary focus of most Dunning School stories was not the war itself, but Reconstruction, a period that Claude Bowers, an early-20th-century successor to Pollard (and given to similarly Glenn Beck-ian flights of tearful, dissociative rage) called “The Tragic Era.” It was a decade, as he saw it, marked by unrestrained Yankee corruption and sadism, which punished the South for secession and forced black suffrage on an already politically neutered white population. Bowers’ books demonized “fanatic” abolitionists and Ulysses S. Grant, exalted the Ku Klux Klan and Andrew Johnson, and sold hundreds of of thousands of copies.

“When a nigger died they let his folks come out the fields to see him afore he died. They buried him the same day, take a big plank and bust it with a ax in the middle enough to bend it back, and put the dead nigger in betwixt it. They’d cart them down to the graveyard on the place and not bury them deep enough that buzzards wouldn’t come circlin’ round. Niggers mourns now, but in them days they wasn’t no time for mournin’.

— Mary Reynolds, former slave, 1936

By 1932, and the publication of “Gone With the Wind” — the ultimate Lost Cause novel and still the most popular book in America, after the Bible — Lost Cause literature succeeded in sacrificing the very meaning of the Civil War to the demands of myth-making. (The 1939 movie sealed the deal.) The culture of forgetting had become a national religion.

Seventy years later, movies like “The Help” — the latest in a long line of tributes to the unsung white heroes of black history, and a gauzy rendering of the civil rights era as a triumph of the human spirit over mean people — have taken up where “Gone With the Wind” left off. A direct descendant of Lost Cause culture, modern nostalgia is souvenir nostalgia, a taxidermical, preservation-fetish that isolates parts from wholes, pulls symbols out of context, and shrinks cultural memories to the size of a 9/11 commemorative coin. (Never Forget!) It’s woven into every corner of the culture, high and low, North and South, as pervasive as sleep. And it is a black hole of memory, the place where memory goes to die.

“One woman thought all the slave houses (now guest rooms) should be torn down, because it was an insult and exploiting slavery and so forth. And I replied, very nicely, that I think she would be destroying history.”

— Mary Hill Caperton, manager of the Quarters, a bed and breakfast in Charlottesville, Va.

The Cabin is only one of dozens of former slave quarters around the country that have been gussied-up into hotel rooms or restaurants. It was exceedingly pleasant and brightly lit, full of cheerful, laughing patrons. Astonishingly tall, wholesome-looking children in middle-school basketball jerseys pointed ketchup-dipped fries at their dad’s brows and made gentle jokes about their hairlines. The Doobie Brothers’ “China Grove” bubbled down from speakers in the rafters.

A man with a wide smile appeared next to our table, seemingly out of nowhere, and introduced himself as the restaurant’s manager. We chatted about the proper pronunciation of “crawfish,” and the differences between the gumbos made on the bayou and in New Orleans, and when the subject turned to the Cabin, I asked him how it felt to run a place that used to house slaves. “It’s history, and that’s all there is to it,” he said. “It’s not something we dwell on, or push out there for people to see. It is a touchy subject. We just want people to have a nice time when they come here, and to enjoy the food and the history. This is a place where everybody feels welcome.”

He had a point. Gabbie and I seemed to be the only ones in the room not smiling, and for a moment the queasiness of chronic self-doubt, the familiar nausea of the self-ostracized, the vegetarian in the steakhouse, made me wonder if it was us. Were we the ones not seeing straight, arching our eyebrows through a life on the wrong side of the looking glass? And then I wondered why I was flattering myself.

Dead-eyed nostalgia, whether practiced by Tea Partyers, advertising directors or me, in my “heritage” running shoes, typing away on a computer built by indentured servants, can be invisible to us. As invisible as the whip — the very old, well-used buggy whip — hanging on the Cabin’s wall must have been to whoever decided it was a good idea to hang it there.

Back then, black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds, and went to different restaurants, bars, theaters, and soda fountains. But we shared a country and a culture. We were one nation. We were Americans.”

— Pat Buchanan

Don’t get me wrong — I like nostalgia, I miss nostalgia. The kind that involves remembering, anyway: mostly private, typically accidental, not always rosy. When my great-uncle told stories about flying bomber missions over Germany, he didn’t merely recall events — experiences that he had a complicated affection for — he wondered about them. His eyes grew pained and befuddled; his chest rose and fell with a fullness no amount of time could diminish. He wasn’t running from himself to an imagined past, he was finding himself in his story, sorting it out, trying to see it clearly.

House (now Speaker) John Boehner recently complained that Barack Obama and congressional Democrats “are snuffing out the America that I grew up in.”

— Think Progress, July 1, 2010 [ REPUBLICAN JOHN BOEHNER: DEMOCRATS ARE SNUFFING OUT THE 'JIM CROW? AMERICA I GREW UP IN; STUPID, GOD-DELUDED SHARRON ANGLE ]

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Of course childhood nostalgia — the kind of remembering you do when remembering is new, when memories are full and dramatic because they’re few, and weightless — is different. Mourning hamsters. Idealizing grandparents. Chronicling summers like they’re centuries. When I had 12 years to look back on, they were eons. When I had 20 I said, “my whole life” and meant it.

But the past I remembered then wasn’t even my own. I sported a ridiculous ’50s trench coat and well-thumbed copies of “On the Road” in the ’80s the way 20-year-olds in ancient Rome probably carried Euripides in their vintage Greek togas. When you’re young, nostalgia isn’t about the past, but the future. It’s a train in the distance, a sound from the old days hinting at the new. When your own past is too frightening to look at, and the future is terrifyingly unknown, you fake your way through the present. I spent my days wanting something I couldn’t name, and because I didn’t have memories to attach to that yearning, I yearned for a time before me. I conjured a past and missed it and bought an overcoat I prayed I’d grow into.

Lincoln’s famous “house divided” analogy was a perfect one for a country in crisis, acknowledging as it did the psychic architecture of the nation, a collection of rooms under one roof. But his deep commitment to an authentic, family-like, postwar reconciliation was not matched by his successors. The North’s implementation of Reconstruction, in its moderate and radical forms, amounted to first coddling, then humiliating, a wayward sibling.

After Lincoln’s assassination, Republicans struck an implicit deal with the South, a sort of economic/cultural tradeoff, in which the South was allowed to construct the edifice of the Lost Cause culture in return for letting Northern investors exploit the South’s resources. For decades after the war, at cemetery and monument dedications, Blue-Gray reunions and Veterans Day parades, Northern politicians and former generals made a point of describing the conflict in the language of the Lost Cause, praising the chivalry of once-estranged brothers, lauding their former enemy’s fierce dedication to their mission, and rarely acknowledging what that mission had been. The relative postwar silence of the North on the issue of slavery, and the flagrant corruption of newly established Union military governments, helped stoke already flourishing Southern resentment and denial. Instead of beginning a period of reflection, the South spent the late 19th century dressing up in old uniforms and comforting itself with revisionist stories. [ DISGUISING HATE AS HERITAGE: THE NEO-CONFEDERATE TRADITION OF REFIGHTING THE CIVIL WAR ]

Commemorating 150 Years of Treason: The Glamorization and Sanitization of The Confederacy

Confederate Nostalgia: ‘Racists’ Attend $100 Per Head Secession Ball To Whitewash Slavery

Nullification & Secession: Treasonous Confederate Themes Back in Fashion

The Reconstruction-era South didn’t invent dishonesty, but its response to America’s defining trauma has become a foundational lie, supporting an ever-growing edifice of false history. It’s a lie so big no one will forcefully challenge it, a lie that’s too big to fail. In the sesquicentennial year of the Civil War, the “stars and bars” fly over state capitals, proclamations are issued that honor the Confederacy without mentioning slavery, and commuters drive to work on highways named after white supremacists. And appeals to wounded pride and the lost values of imagined pasts are an everyday part of our political culture.

Just like Pollard and Bowers before them, modern-day, Lost Cause-ers like Pat Buchanan reversed the tide of postwar popular opinion about a conflict, this time in Vietnam, by pining loudly for a law-and-order Eden that had been despoiled by protesters. And now the wholly invented fiction of hippies spitting on soldiers returning from Southeast Asia is believed by more Americans than remember what My Lai was.

The same pattern has repeated itself many times, from Morning in America to WMD, from the Swift Boaters to the Tea Party. The decade following the Civil War amounted to a tragic, missed opportunity for the South to engage in a different kind of remembering. Even a little grown-up nostalgia could have gone a good, long way. The illness implied in its suffix, the sickness of the heart that a powerful longing produces, can be as necessary and cleansing as a storm. But of course that’s what the Lost Causers were afraid of, are afraid of still, and have always been quick to nip in the bud.

WASHINGTON — President Reagan said Thursday that he has decided not to visit the site of a Nazi concentration camp during his trip to Europe next month because he wants to focus on peace rather than the past. He added that he believes West Germany’s present sense of collective guilt for the Holocaust of World War II, in which millions of Jews were killed, is “unnecessary.”

— The Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1985

During a tour of Houmas House, another Louisiana River Road plantation, as our guide told a story about the acquisition of a particularly expensive set of silver by the proprietors of the estate, we wandered to a window, and noticed a ramshackle structure in the distance, maybe 70 yards away. Unmarked, unrenovated, unattended, a dilapidated cottage with a small front porch, half reclaimed by grass. A former slave cabin? Our guide said yes, and that plans to renovate the structure were in the works. She added that we were free to go out and take a look, once the tour was over.

Later that day, at Destrehan, a former sugar plantation a few miles down, the guide neglected to mention that it was the site of the largest slave revolt in American history.

When I asked Angela da Silva, a professor of black history at Lindenwood University, and owner of the St. Louis-based National Black Tourism Network, for her thoughts, she said, “Jesus coming down off the cross couldn’t get me to stay in some gentrified slave cabin with a jacuzzi in it. The misery and pain that happened in those cabins ? This is about shame. People who own these places want the history to go away. But it won’t go away. And until we as black people insist on the story being told, no one has any incentive to change their business model.”

Da Silva grew up just a few miles from the Baker plantation in Missouri, where her family worked as slaves from 1837 until the end of the war. She learned almost nothing in school about slavery, she says, but her grandmother told her stories that she remembers to this day. As she spoke about sleeping in the same bed with her grandmother until she was 10, and waking up in the middle of the night to ask questions about her ancestors and life on the plantation, her voice softened, and she cleared her throat. I could hear her slow, full breathing over the phone.

“Once you got here, we were all the same. Isn’t that remarkable? But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”

— U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann

Founding Fathers’ Owned Slaves; The ‘Evils of Slavery’ & Michele Bachmann’s Lies

Slavery is rarely mentioned on any private plantation tour. Proprietors typically insist that innovative architecture and interesting design justify their focus on the “Big Houses,” but that argument can be awfully hard to fathom. Leaving aside obvious exceptions like Monticello, surely the most notable thing about most plantations is not who lived there, who designed them or what they look like. A beautiful home made beautiful by slaves is not important for its beauty. To elevate aesthetic elements over history in the public presentation of slave estates is to demote people once inventoried like candlesticks to a status even lower than that of things. It’s an obscenity.

There is a small museum on the site of the I.G. Farben Building in Germany (a building that, it should be noted, is considered an architectural masterpiece), the former headquarters of the company responsible for enslaving hundreds of thousands of prisoners at its notorious “factories.” It’s dedicated to the memory of a former prisoner, and exhibits photos and documents from Farben’s disgraceful past. Tour guides at Auschwitz itself do not include the commandant’s extravagant house on their schedule. The point isn’t that American slavery is the exact moral or material equivalent of the Holocaust, but that our country’s “original sin” has not been fully, culturally processed.

If America is a family, it’s a family that has tacitly agreed to never speak again — not with much honesty, anyway — about the terrible things that went on in its divided house. Slavery has been taught, it has been written about. There can’t be many subjects that rival it as an academic ink-guzzler. But the culture has not digested slavery in a meaningful way, hasn’t absorbed it the way it has World War II or the Kennedy assassination. We don’t feel the connections to it in our bones. It’s hard enough these days to connect with what happened 15 minutes ago, let alone 15 decades, given the endless layers of “classic,” “heirloom,” “traditional” “collectible,” “old school” comfort we’re swaddled in. But isn’t it the least we could do? What is the willful forgetting of slavery if not the coverup of a crime, an abdication of responsibility to its victims and to ourselves?

If it’s true that we’re all breathing Caesar’s breath — that because of the finite amount of perpetually moving molecules on Earth, one or two that he breathed are in each of our exhalations — then we don’t need to dress up in his clothes to connect ourselves to the past, we’re already wearing them. The past is with us always, but we need to live with it, open our eyes and poke around in it, take it all in: the good, the bad and the mythic, if we want to stay connected to the ever-changing present.

Multi–Award winning documentary makers Kate Blewett and Brian Woods saw this terrible exploitation with their own eyes. The result is an utterly devastating film.

The global system of white supremacy is the major political and economic philosophy that dominates worldwide. It is a system that is refined over time to expand it, maintain it, and keep its victims, and to some very small degree its perpetrators from recognizing it. It is a basic equation of whites power over non-whites, where non white make up 90% of the worlds population.

This in human terms makes White supremacy the most oppressive system in the world, and strengthens speciesism in addition is more expansive than sexism or classism. There are many collaborators with the system but sadly they too are in the end, are just victims. Capitalism is the main economic arm of global white supremacy, Slavery is its fist.

The language used in this film eludes to this system’s existence but does not out–rightly point it out. The documentary is done by two suspected racists, who do try to expose some aspects of the system. They speak of a more just trade with “third world nations” (non–whites), though it is advised to be weary of terms like “FAIR“(White) trade… .

Reference: First World Greed and Third World Debt — excerpted from the book “If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Save the Earth (Revised and updated) (See all Environmental Science Books),” — by Helen Caldicott

Slavery is officially banned internationally by all countries, yet despite this, in the world today there are more slaves now than ever before. In the 400 years of the slave trade, around 13 million people were shipped from Africa. Today there are an estimated 27 million slaves — people paid no money, locked away and controlled by violence.

PLAYLIST: Slavery … A Global Investment

Huffington Post: Republican presidential contenders Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum have lined up behind a new pledge focused on social issues put forth by Bob Vander Plaats, a former candidate for governor who now reigns as a conservative kingmaker in the Hawkeye State. [ READ MORE ]

‘Porn’ Pledge: Republicans Santorum & Bachmann Sign Marriage, Anti-Sharia, Anti-Pornography Vow

Republican Candidates Court ‘Crackpot‘ Constituency; Klansman David Duke To Explore 2012 Bid

Current TV: Michele Bachmann signed a conservative Iowa group’s “Family Leader” pledge, but did she read the part that implies children born into slavery had some advantages over children born after the election of Barack Obama? Or does she actually agree with that? Keith discusses her latest adventure in ridiculous thinking with Faiz Shakir of the Center for American Progress.

Does Bachmann Believe Slavery Had Advantages?

Bradlee Dean Rants: Michele Bachmann-Linked Preacher’s Bigoted Tirades

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Bonus
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1. Rupert Murdoch’s Watergate Unravels:

MMFA: Does Rupert Murdoch now know the panic Richard Nixon must have felt when the Washington Post broke the story in 1972 that a $25,000 cashier’s check earmarked for the Nixon campaign wound up in the bank account of a Watergate burglar. Or when it was revealed that Nixon’s Oval Office had a taping system that recorded all his conversations. Or when John Dean told investigators he had discussed the Watergate cover-up with President Nixon three dozen times? [ READ MORE ]

Media Matters’ Hogue On MSNBC News Live: We Need To Start Asking “Whether American Citizens Have Been Spied On As Well”

2. Mike Huckabee (The Man Who Wished Obama Got Shot) Likens Obama Economic Policies To Dropping “A Lit Match” Into “A Can Of Gasoline.“

3. Osama Bin O’Reilly Ignores Millions Of Jobs Created To Call Stimulus “Two And A Half Years Of Failure“

4. Mr. Syphilis Sean Hannity To Sharron Angle: “Did Harry Reid Steal This Election?” “I Wanted Him Beaten So Bad“

References:

1. ‘God Has Created You for Heterosexuality‘: Clinics Owned by Michele Bachmann’s Husband Practice Ex-Gay Therapy

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“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,“ Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library IN March 2011, the first of many jarring points she made in a riveting presentation. Alexander, currently a law professor at Ohio State, had been brought in to discuss her year-old bestseller, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly: Contrary to the rosy picture of race embodied in Barack Obama’s political success and Oprah Winfrey’s financial success, legal scholar Alexander argues vigorously and persuasively that [w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as a system of social control (More African Americans are under correctional control today… than were enslaved in 1850). Alexander reviews American racial history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating its transformation into the war on drugs. She offers an acute analysis of the effect of this mass incarceration upon former inmates who will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives, denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move toward colorblindness and affirmative action may blur our vision of injustice: most Americans know and don’t know the truth about mass incarceration–but her carefully researched, deeply engaging, and thoroughly readable book should change that. ——————————– “Explosive debut…alarming, provocative and convincing.” –Kirkus Reviews    [ Michelle Alexander ][ Enlarge ] “Michelle Alexander’s brave and bold new book paints a haunting picture in which dreary felon garb, post-prison joblessness, and loss of voting rights now do the stigmatizing work once done by colored-only water fountains and legally segregated schools. With dazzling candor, Alexander argues that we all pay the cost of the new Jim Crow.” –Lani Guinier, professor at Harvard Law School and author of “Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice” and “The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Nathan I.Huggins Lectures)” “For every century there is a crisis in our democracy, the response to which defines how future generations view those who were alive at the time. In the 18th century it was the transatlantic slave trade, in the 19th century it was slavery, in the 20th century it was Jim Crow. Today it is mass incarceration. Alexander’s book offers a timely and original framework for understanding mass incarceration, its roots to Jim Crow, our modern caste system, and what must be done to eliminate it. This book is a call to action.” –Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO, NAACP “With imprisonment now the principal instrument of our social policy directed toward poorly educated black men, Michelle Alexander argues convincingly that the huge racial disparity of punishment in America is not the mere result of neutral state action. She sees the rise of mass incarceration as opening up a new front in the historic struggle for racial justice. And, she’s right. If you care about justice in America, you need to read this book!” –Glenn C. Loury, economist at Brown University and author of “The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures).” “After reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s stunning work of scholarship, one gains the terrible realization that, for people of color, the American criminal justice system resembles the Soviet Union’s gulag—the latter punished ideas, the former punishes a condition.” –David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer-prize winning historian at NYU and author of “W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919-1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century” “We need to pay attention to Michelle Alexander’s contention that mass imprisonment in the U.S. constitutes a racial caste system. Her analysis reflects the passion of an advocate and the intellect of a scholar.” –Marc Mauer, Executive Director, The Sentencing Project, author of “Race to Incarcerate (Revised and Updated Edition)” “A powerful analysis of why and how mass incarceration is happening in America, The New Jim Crow should be required reading for anyone working for real change in the criminal justice system.” –Ronald E. Hampton, Executive Director, National Black Police Association See All Editorial Reviews

Playlist: The New Jim Crow — Modern Slavery in America

Playlist: Slavery – The African American Holocaust & Genocide

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   By: Bill Quigley
The biggest crime in the US criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.

Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that. Below, I set out numerous examples of these facts.

The question is – are these facts the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as intended? Is the US criminal justice system operated to marginalize and control millions of African-Americans?

Information on race is available for each step of the criminal justice system – from the use of drugs, police stops, arrests, getting out on bail, legal representation, jury selection, trial, sentencing, prison, parole and freedom. Look what these facts show.

One.   The US has seen a surge in arrests and putting people in jail over the last four decades. Most of the reason is the war on drugs. Yet, whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales at roughly comparable rates – according to a report on race and drug enforcement published by Human Rights Watch in May 2008. While African-Americans comprise 13 percent of the US population and 14 percent of monthly drug users, they are 37 percent of the people arrested for drug offenses – according to 2009 Congressional testimony by Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project.

Two.   The police stop blacks and Latinos at rates that are much higher than whites. In New York City, where people of color make up about half of the population, 80 percent of the New York Police Department (NYPD) stops were of blacks and Latinos. When whites were stopped, only 8 percent were frisked. When blacks and Latinos are stopped, 85 percent were frisked, according to information provided by the NYPD. The same is true most other places as well. In a California study, the American Civil Liberties Union found blacks are three times more likely to be stopped than whites.

Three.   Since 1970, drug arrests have skyrocketed, rising from 320,000 to close to 1.6 million, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the US Department of Justice.

African-Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates two to 11 times higher than the rate for whites – according to a May 2009 report on disparity in drug arrests by Human Rights Watch.

Four.   Once arrested, blacks are more likely to remain in prison awaiting trial than whites. For example, the New York state division of criminal justice did a 1995 review of disparities in processing felony arrests and found that, in some parts of New York, blacks are 33 percent more likely to be detained awaiting felony trials than whites facing felony trials.

Five.   Once arrested, 80 percent of the people in the criminal justice system get a public defender for their lawyer. Race plays a big role here as well. Stop in any urban courtroom and look a the color of the people who are waiting for public defenders. Despite often heroic efforts by public defenders, the system gives them much more work and much less money than the prosecution. The American Bar Association, not a radical bunch, reviewed the US public defender system in 2004 and concluded “All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring … The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US.”

Six.   African-Americans are frequently illegally excluded from criminal jury service according to a June 2010 study released by the Equal Justice Initiative. For example, in Houston County, Alabama, eight out of ten African-Americans qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors from serving on death penalty cases.

Seven.   Trials are rare. Only 3 to 5 percent of criminal cases go to trial – the rest are plea bargained. Most African-Americans defendants never get a trial. Most plea bargains consist of a promise of a longer sentence if a person exercises their constitutional right to trial. As a result, people caught up in the system, as the American Bar Association points out, plead guilty even when innocent. Why? As one young man told me recently, “Who wouldn’t rather do three years for a crime they didn’t commit than risk twenty-five years for a crime they didn’t do?”

Eight.   The US Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that, in the federal system, black offenders receive sentences that are 10 percent longer than white offenders for the same crimes. Mauer of the Sentencing Project reports African-Americans are 21 percent more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences than white defendants and 20 percent more like to be sentenced to prison than white drug defendants.

Nine.   The longer the sentence, the more likely it is that nonwhite people will be the ones getting it. A July 2009 report by the Sentencing Project found that two-thirds of the people in the US with life sentences are nonwhite. In New York, it is 83 percent.

Ten.   As a result, African-Americans, who are 13 percent of the population and 14 percent of drug users, are not only 37 percent of the people arrested for drugs, but 56 percent of the people in state prisons for drug offenses. (Mauer May 2009 Congressional Testimony for The Sentencing Project.)

Eleven.   The US Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 going to jail is 32 percent, or one in three. Latino males have a 17 percent chance and white males have a 6 percent chance. Thus, black boys are five times and Latino boys nearly three times as likely as white boys to go to jail.

Twelve.   So, while African-American juvenile youth is but 16 percent of the population, they are 28 percent of juvenile arrests, 37 percent of the youth in juvenile jails and 58 percent of the youth sent to adult prisons. (2009 Criminal Justice Primer, The Sentencing Project.)

Thirteen.   Remember that the US leads the world in putting our own people into jail and prison. The New York Times reported in 2008 that the US has five percent of the world’s population, but a quarter of the world’s prisoners, over 2.3 million people behind bars, dwarfing other nations. The US rate of incarceration is five to eight times higher than other highly developed countries, and black males are the largest percentage of inmates according to ABC News.

Fourteen.   Even when released from prison, race continues to dominate. A study by Professor Devah Pager of the University of Wisconsin found that 17 percent of white job applicants with criminal records received call backs from employers, while only 5 percent of black job applicants with criminal records received call backs. Race is so prominent in that study that whites with criminal records actually received better treatment than blacks without criminal records!

So, what conclusions do these facts lead to? The criminal justice system, from start to finish, is seriously racist.

Professor Michelle Alexander concludes that it is no coincidence that the criminal justice system ramped up its processing of African-Americans just as the Jim Crow laws enforced since the age of slavery ended. Her book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” sees these facts as evidence of the new way the US has decided to control African-Americans – a racialized system of social control. The stigma of criminality functions in much the same way as Jim Crow – creating legal boundaries between them and us, allowing legal discrimination against them, removing the right to vote from millions and essentially warehousing a disposable population of unwanted people. She calls it a new caste system.

Poor whites and poor people of other ethnicity are also subjected to this system of social control. Because if poor whites or others poor people get out of line, they will be given the worst possible treatment, they will be treated just like poor blacks.

Other critics, like Professor Dylan Rodriguez, see the criminal justice system as a key part of what he calls the domestic war on the marginalized. Because of globalization, he argues in his book “Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime,” there is an excess of people in the US and elsewhere. “These people,” whether they are in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib or US jails and prisons, are not productive, are not needed, are not wanted and are not really entitled to the same human rights as the productive ones. They must be controlled and dominated for the safety of the productive. They must be intimidated into accepting their inferiority or they must be removed from the society of the productive.

This domestic war relies on the same technology that the US uses internationally. More and more we see the militarization of this country’s police. Likewise, the goals of the US justice system are the same as the US war on terror – domination and control by capture, immobilization, punishment and liquidation.

What to do?

Martin Luther King Jr. said we, as a nation, must undergo a radical revolution of values.

A radical approach to the US criminal justice system means we must go to the root of the problem. Not reform. Not better beds in better prisons. We are not called to only trim the leaves or prune the branches, but rip up this unjust system by its roots.

We are all entitled to safety. That is a human right everyone has a right to expect. But do we really think that continuing with a deeply racist system leading the world in incarcerating our children is making us safer?

It is time for every person interested in justice and safety to join in and dismantle this racist system. Should the US decriminalize drugs like marijuana? Should prisons be abolished? Should we expand the use of restorative justice? Can we create fair educational, medical and employment systems? All these questions and many more have to be seriously explored. Join a group like INCITE, Critical Resistance, the Center for Community Alternatives, Thousand Kites or the California Prison Moratorium and work on it. As Professor Alexander says, “Nothing short of a major social movement can dismantle this new caste system.”

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