Dehumanization

I am reading a difficult book right now, so I will read a section, and then read in a different book, and working my way through gradually.

The book, Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackmon, is difficult for a few reasons. It is both verbally sophisticated and information dense, so there's that, but it is also difficult emotionally.

It tells about the re-enslavement of African Americans after the Civil War. People would swear out false charges, then pay the arrest and court fees, and have an indentured servant against whom you could easily bring charges when they were getting close to the end of their term. Getting sent to work on a farm was bad; getting sent to the mines was generally worse.

So, there is ugliness there, and it is discouraging that at just halfway through the book there are federal investigations and trials happening in 1903, but based on the introduction the practice isn't really going to stop until 1940.

(And, with privatized prisons getting occupancy guarantees, it seems to have just assumed a new form: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/09/19/are-governments-incentivizing-longer-prison-terms/)

One thing that struck me was an increase in the death rates by year for one of the mines. It could be that as the operation grew, there were more people at risk of death, or that people had been there longer. After all, just because some people survived their first and second year does not mean that no damage was done.

My first thought, though, was that maybe the people in charge became more comfortable with the disposability of their victims. Do they really need that much food? Can't we drive them a little harder?

I will finish the book, probably later this week, and then I have a couple of other books to read before I start writing on that. The connected issue, and I have been thinking about it a lot lately, is how we get to where we can treat people like garbage.

This is where I am going to kick myself for not making it to see The Act of Killing, which interviews former Indonesian death squad leaders, but I kind of already know. When you consider someone inferior, it is easy to treat them badly. When you treat someone badly, it is easy to think less of them. The hate loop feeds on itself.

There were different factors at play of course. Money was a huge one. If I may reference Sinclair again, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Increase that income, and the comprehension gap gets even wider.

And there were profit opportunities for a lot of people here. Before the war a slave cost hundreds of dollars. Under the new system, you could get a good one for about $70. I know that a focus on monetary gain corrupts people and hardens them. There are no surprises there.

I get mad at people who profit from the inequality built into the system, and the more gleeful they are about it, the madder I get. What really frustrates me though is the people who support them without any clear gain from it.

There does tend to be a gain in a feeling of superiority, but that is a pretty poor aspiration. Even if you call that a good gain, it tends to be off-set by all of the ills that go along with a system based on the abuse of others.

Obviously, what ticks me off the most is when it becomes a core part of someone's religious beliefs to look down on others. I feel like I keep harping on that, but maybe if I keep approaching it from different directions, it will hit different spots. So, I'll get back on it tomorrow.