Saturday, April 02, 2016

"Slavery By Another Name"

In 2008, Douglas Blackmon, who was at the time the Atlanta, Georgia, Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, became famous for writing Slavery By Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, a book that describes in great detail exactly how the peculiar institution of slavery morphed into the practice of locking up Black men in America with fairly reckless abandon. It shocked a lot of people, but it was indisputable, which was why a book about such a topic could win the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

Four years later, the book was turned into a 90-minute film by the same name. Though a film cannot possibly cover all the material that is in the book, I thought it would be a good next step in our symposium about the business of incarceration in the United States.




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2 comments:

  1. veganelder6:43 AM

    I have to go back and re-read this book. My local library actually has a copy of it and it was one of the first I read when I began to grapple with extracting myself from the warping of comprehension that whiteness requires. I remember that the book spooked and disturbed me deeply.

    I've found that, as my viewpoint and perspective shifts, I notice, comprehend and understand things differently and that means that each time I re-read something that resists the zeitgeist of whiteness...if my perspective has changed...I grasp/comprehend things I missed or overlooked previously. It has been quite some time since I first read this book...time to revisit it.

    Thanks for the reminder and thank you for the video...I was unaware of it...I'll put off watching it until I re-read the book.

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