Some people that fought in the civil war where alive in 1950, and your grandparents where likely to have met someone that fought in that war and or a former US slave.
We have had 2 descendants of slaves serving on our nation's highest court, a handful of Congressmen, and not much else. In terms of the legacy of slavery, you really can't count Obama.
No matter what the talking heads on the media say, I still think if you put Al Sharpton, Clarence Thomas, Jesse Jackson, and Ben Carson in a room and ask for consensus and ask them for suggestions to fix the race problem, they will come up with better answers faster than if you put Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid in a room.
Given that, at the time, slaves were legally considered property, and not entirely people, I would have to respectfully disagree. You can't get much more powerless than being classified as livestock or furniture.
Yes, everything follows from the fact that slaves didn;t own productive property and then were forced into a wage labor system where they still didn't. But the narrative of racial progress I don't think follows the nice slope we'd like to think so we can pat ourselves on the back and say how far we've come.
The fact is, prison labor is a new form of slavery in its dimensions and the fact that it is increasingly for corporate profit. We are headed right back to where we were 150 years ago if we aren't careful.
But it's not that slaves were forced into a 'wage labor system' and didn't own property. Slaves were in many cases property. How can property "own" anything? Can the table in front of me own the things I put on it? Does a cow have any right to dispute being sent to the slaughterhouse? It would have been absurd to even consider in the South at the time.
No matter how exploitative the welfare and even prison systems are, it's still not in the same league. Although I would agree with you that prisons are about as close to slavery as we can probably get. But even then, everyone involved is legally 100% human in all 50 states.
> But it's not that slaves were forced into a 'wage labor system' and didn't own property.
Sorry, I was unclear. I am talking about the end of the Civil War and that the wage labor system was billed as the way forward for former slaves, instead of the land reform that Gen. Sherman and others pushed for.
> No matter how exploitative the welfare and even prison systems are, it's still not in the same league.
Define slavery for me. I think the best definition is when someone is compelled under force of law to labor for the profit of another. In this regard having prisoners work on jobs that generate profit for private companies, and penalizing those who refuse with longer sentences is slavery. There is no other real word for it. Additionally, as long as convicted felons are then exiled from the polity (unable to vote, discriminated against in private employment, etc), then you have something while, not as harsh as American slavery before the civil war, is quite a bit worse, in terms of denying whole demographics political and economic power, than Roman slavery was.
Now, now that no doubt we have thoroughly learned our lesson, certainly we'd never try or even want to do that again, gee, never, would we. I mean, we learned our lesson the first time, right? An identifiable laboring underclass, who would want that one again, right? We've been trying for 100+ years to get this pot to "melt", and we're still stirring, and stirring, and stirring.
Yes, this observation is not totally accurate and has several loose ends, and maybe we can get by with it this time, and hopefully with the orientals we got for the railroads and otherwise since we have, but, while I believe I see the intention, I can't be sure I can see the situation in another 50, oh, heck, 100, years.
However it comes out, and if we are going to do it, then I hope it does work out, I have to suspect that in some places the intentions are not good.
Or the joke goes, "The Republicans want the immigrants to work [laboring class] and not vote, and the Democrats want the immigrants to vote [underclass needing welfare] but not work [take jobs from the existing underclass].", not that I hear a lot of laughing. Ah, no one would think this way, right? And anyone who suggests such, call it, manipulative intentions can get some pejorative labels.
There's a cute Disney movie for children that has a song "Why Can't We Be Friends"; guess that song is a bit too advanced for much of the US power elite.