During my childhood, when my family visited relatives “across the river,” in Bayou Plaquemine, Bayou Goula, Caddo, the Pointe, and White Castle, my siblings and I would sometimes race up and down the levees, some distance away from the cows grazing there. At the summit of the hill, you could see the Mississippi River waters through stands of trees and brush. It never occurred to me that our “playground” was the living testimony of Black men, prisoners of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola whom the state of Louisiana had re-enslaved in the convict leasing system.

I was unaware of the horrendous, humiliating, and inhumane conditions under which these men were forced to perform the daily work of raising levees, digging canals, and laying a latticework of railroad tracks across the state.

Louisiana is home, and Angola would become familiar ground to me and my family after my brother was condemned to life imprisonment at Angola in 2000. So both the proposed 2021 U.S. Abolition Amendment – legislation to strike the “punishment clause” loophole from the Thirteenth Amendment that has perpetuated mass incarceration and allowed private and public officials to profit from the forced labor of convicted prisoners – and the unsuccessful 2022 Louisiana referendum to repeal the state’s “Slavery Clause” are important to me as a U.S. and world citizen, as a native of Louisiana, and as a sister whose brother has been “taken up” and imprisoned for life.

As Rep. Edmond Jordan of Louisiana proposed the amendment to abolish legalized slavery “in all cases,” U.S Rep. Nikema Williams proclaimed that the federal Abolition Amendment would take us “one step closer to achieving true justice and equality for all.”

So far, the Abolition Amendment has been read into the record and referred to the Senate Judiciary committee while its sponsors build support to end the slavery loophole at the federal level. And though the referendum failed in Louisiana, it passed in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont, Colorado, Nebraska and Utah — where the slavery clause is now erased from state constitutions.

Legislators in the states of California and Nevada are also addressing the issue of the criminal-exception clause in their state constitutions. They have proposed amendments, for the November 2024 ballot, to remove from their constitutions the criminal punishment loophole that continues to sanction slavery and involuntary servitude. 

“States are amending their constitutions to finally abolish slavery in all forms, and Congress will lead the way and finally abolish involuntary servitude in America,” Williams assures us. “We are in a period of reckoning with our country’s history and a lot of that history is marked with racism and systems of oppression. Eliminating the loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment that allows for slavery is another opportunity to do that.”

If America is “in a period of reckoning with our country’s history,” as Congresswoman Williams states, if we are at a tipping point and poised for a shift into a more perfect union, then it behooves us to inquire into the contending ideologies that have resulted in a house that remains divided. Supposedly, the Civil War dismantled the politics that pitted “slave states” against “free states.” And yet the effect of the punishment-exception clause in the Thirteenth Amendment was to not only sanction the preservation of slavery and involuntary servitude, but also to extend it nationwide.

“Indisputably racist” is how Williams and her co-sponsor, Sen. Jeffrey Merkley, describe the Thirteenth Amendment’s Punishment Clause, which is also dubbed the Slavery Clause. This exception clause in federal and state constitutions is also indisputably antidemocratic, elitist, and patriarchal. In addition to the practice of racism, the clause allows for the other -isms that Williams broadly identifies as “systems of oppression.” 

My book, Of Greed and Glory: In Pursuit of Freedom for All, published earlier this year, looks at the apparent and concealed systems of oppression that are inherent in the Slavery Clause of our Constitution. Through my brother’s letters about his experiences of arrest, detention, and eventual incarceration at the Angola prison, Of Greed and Glory addresses the indisputable system of racial oppression. In context of the history of Angola prison and my brother’s lived experience there, this work explores the increasingly more apparent intersecting system of economic oppression.

Less apparent but fundamental to both racial and economic oppression is patriarchal oppression. The system of American patriarchy has as much to do with the police killing and over-incarceration of Black men and boys as it has to do with sexism, heterosexism, the repression and subjugation of women and girls, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Along with the historian Kenneth Stampp, in his classic work The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, many bemoan the fact that “we are still working to abolish slavery more than 155 years after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.” One of the reasons that the movement to abolish slavery is ongoing is that slavery in America is associated with Black people. And the post-Civil War political and social constructions of Black people as inferior, uncivilized, brutish, and innately criminal served to justify our incarceration.

Like the so-called Peculiar Institution of Slavery, penal institutions are seen as a fit environment for a purportedly dangerous and unruly people. Indeed, the discourse of generations of scholars and historians has served to justify, and thus normalize, racial slavery.

The trafficking in Africans and continued exploitation of people of African descent within America’s Peculiar Institution has long been justified by historians and economists as necessary. And such spurious claims in history books  about how the land needed “development,” thus prompting a “demand for cheap labor,” and how “the demands of the sugar crop” required slave gang labor provide a refrain for the historical and contemporary justifications for reducing millions of Black human beings to chattel (i.e. cattle). So, no less than slavery, itself, the mass incarceration of Black people is perceived as neither cruel nor unusual, but necessary. And if a profit can be made from their imprisonment, all the better.

Certainly, the politics of extracting the labor, intelligence, creativity, and resources of Black people has remained a key element in the political economy of America. Thus, in addition to the Slavery Clause in the Thirteenth Amendment that permitted the convict-leasing system, African Americans were forced into the oppressive system of sharecropping, tenant farming, and debt peonage – some of slavery’s other names.

Scholars, over time, have detailed how America’s practice of enslavement became race-based and how racialized social and economic disparities and inequities became systemic and structural across institutions. However, though racism became integral to the institution of enslavement, nationally, globally, and historically, racism was not an essential aspect of slavery as an enterprise.

And even as the Reconstruction era ushered in neo-slavery economics and the Jim Crow era spoke to “the nadir of the Negro’s status in American society,” both eras also bespoke the brutality of the social system of Western patriarchy.

The badges of slavery that subjugate, exploit, and humiliate are anathema to the creed of freedom and justice for all. Injustice is not “a Black thing,” and locking up (white) police officers, celebrities, corrupt and misogynistic politicians, and corporate moguls/tycoons — female and male alike — doesn’t make America’s corrupted justice system less corrupt, nor does it make the country’s carceral status more acceptable. Making orange the new black doesn’t make any of it right.

So, basically, even though those of us who suffer the direct impacts of the criminal-punishment loophole are “disproportionately Black Americans and people of color,” this fact accounts, only in part, for the slow pace of things. And yet America – and Louisiana – must wake up to the fact that slavery and involuntary servitude, in any form, have no place in a democratic republic.

Far from being past history, the belief that Black people should be enslaved ad vitam, for life, informs the harsh and excessive sentencing of Black people and people of color in the modern era of mass incarceration.

The life of my “duly convicted” brother and the consequent enthrallment of our family are a testament to James Baldwin’s insight that we have yet to fully appreciate the nature and function of history:

“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read,” Baldwin wrote. “And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”

To effectively end slavery once and for all, it is necessary that we identify, deconstruct, and abolish the incidents and badges that continue to bind us to the past of slavery. This entails that we must also have the courage to identify, deconstruct, and abolish the incidents and badges that empower the continued reign of the “master class” in modern American society.

For it stands to reason that when the Thirteenth Amendment preserved slavery, it also preserved the enslaver. We must all account for the history that we carry within us.

Deborah G. Plant is an independent scholar and writer. This piece is excerpted with permission from her book, Of Greed and Glory.