Currently reading The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. It draws the link between slavery, Jim Crow, and the current criminal justice system marked by ballooning population consisting disproportionately of black and brown men. It seeks to prove that this system is nothing less than a new, racially motivated caste system.
I've just started the first chapter, and this quote jumped out to me as perfectly summing up the hypocrisy that went into the creation of this country. This is the reason I and so many others are skeptical of the notion we need to "make America great again", and the reason we must continue to say "Black Lives Matter".
“By the mid-1770s, the system of bond labor had been thoroughly transformed into a racial caste system predicated on slavery. The degraded status of Africans was justified on the ground that Negros, like the Indians, were an uncivilized lesser race, perhaps even more lacking in intelligence and laudable human qualities than the red-skinned natives. The notion of white supremacy rationalized the enslavement of Africans, even as whites endeavored to form a new nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty and justice for all. Before democracy, chattel slavery in America was born.”