We are being inundated with news about barbaric practices going on around the world. Beheadings, rapes, murders of infants, the elderly, and the disabled. Bombings of residential buildings and attacks on refugee convoys. Americans tend to shake their heads about these horrible things that could never happen here, ignoring a past (and present) that includes just this sort of activity and worse.
I’m not talking about the isolated acts of individuals that we now attribute to mental health issues but legal practices America adopted, usually to control the Black, red, and brown people that reached our shores. In 1729, in Maryland, special laws were passed applying to Black people convicted of treason or murder, including cutting off the right hand, beheading them, and cutting the body into quarters because those above weren’t enough.
“That when any Negroe, or other Slave, shall
be convict, by Confession or Verdict of a Jury, of any Petit-Treason,
or Murder, or wilfully burning of Dwelling-Houses; it shall and
may be lawful for the Justices before whom such Conviction shall
be, to give Judgment against such Negroe, or other Slave, to have
the right Hand cut off, to be hang’d in the usual Manner, the Head
severed from the Body, the Body divided into Four Quarters.”
In 1740, South Carolina felt the need to restrict common practices by imposing civil fines on slaveowners who “cut out the tongue, put out the eye, castrated, cruelly scalded or burned someone or cut off a limb.” It was still allowable to whip and beat enslaved people along with imprisonment without trial.
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Article XIII, February 1, 1865
The 13th Amendment ended slavery except for prisoners. One of the tools used to enforce the subsequent Black Codes and Jim Crow laws was mass incarceration, which is still in use. These laws were used then to return former enslaved people to similar conditions and often the same plantations where they once served as slaves. These prisoners helped build America’s railways and highways and fought wildfires. The practice allegedly ended in 1941, yet like slavery, it continued under new names. I have seen prisoners working on roads with guards carrying guns. Do you suppose they were free?
Rape and forced breeding of slaves wasn’t something that occasionally happened in America; it was a formalized practice though historians and Florida textbooks call the resulting births “natural increase” or “natural reproduction.”
There are many more examples, old and new. We have the Casual Killing Act of 1669, making it okay to kill one’s slaves. This evolved into today’s qualified immunity-making police brutality and killings harder to receive civil punishment. It’s much harder to convict a police officer for criminal conduct, especially when the victim is of color. America has bombed Black people in Philadelphia and Oklahoma. Native Americans were uprooted during the Trail of Tears and faced multiple massacres; no treaty with them was ever kept. Brown immigrants were caged and separated from their families, some with little chance of being reunited, which is an ongoing issue.
We are often horrified in America by what we see in the Middle East, Africa, and other nations worldwide. We point fingers at human rights abuses of other countries but never acknowledge our own. It is right to condemn human rights abuses when they occur elsewhere; it would also be right to focus on those within our borders—addressing those in the present and not writing past excesses out of history books. All the behavior we accuse Hamas of has happened in America, including beheadings after the German Coast Rebellion and Nat Turner’s Revolt. We really should remove the planks from our eyes before condemning others.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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