Contemporary American Society: as a Slave System Continued by Other Means
As the events following slavery were to demonstrate, the Emancipation Proclamation proved to be little more than a legal technicality, a legal device designed primarily to end slavery as a "state sanctioned enterprise," and little more. It remained mute on all of the important follow up issues of the day: What alternative social arrangements were to follow it? What was to fill in the social and political vacuum left in its wake? How was the nation was to undo the psychological damage slavery had done to both sides of the racial divide?
As the very timid attempts to assist the newly freed slaves fizzled out, and Reconstruction ended, a new dark age at least as brutal as slavery, descended upon the nation. And in hindsight, some 150 years down the road, we now know that the Emancipation Proclamation did very little indeed to diminish, not to mention reverse, the psychological effects of slavery on either side of the racial divide. In fact, as the Southern "forces of Redemption" rushed in to fill the psychological and political vacuum created after Reconstruction was dismantled, it safely can be said that slavery returned in its fullest glory. And that its psychological effects were reinforced instead of diminished or eliminated.
The reinstallation of extra-legal slavery parallel with the legal version, was just slavery continued by other more traditional means – sharecropping, prison work-release farms, a return to indentured service, etc. Certainly on the psychological level, this informal brand of slavery was at least as brutal as the legal form before it had been. Only this time it had the added advantage of being able to operate under both the legal and the moral radar. But more importantly, it was also now forever enshrined in, and given the stamp of approval (in the aftermath of the 1876 election of Rutherford B Hayes), of the new "United States of White America."
For the first time, the whole nation, both north and south came together under one unified banner, the banner of a "white" nation. The conscience of the abolitionists, which in large measure had been responsible for placing the issue of slavery on the nation's agenda, had finally been stilled. Thus, DW Griffith's 1910 movie, "Birth of a Nation, was more than just a symbol of the redeemed South, in was (and to some still remains) the birth of a new white (only) nation.
Since then, nothing has changed at the psychological level for American society. With smoke and mirrors alone it has simply seamlessly morphed from one form of psychological slavery to another, with the instruments and sentimentalities of the media and the rest of society following quickly in its wake. All that has been needed to continue justifying this semi-slave social existence of black Americans is the proper rationalizations at the right time, a few tokens blacks thrown in at high places here and there, and the fake language of tolerance and political correctness. QED.
In less than 150 years we have seen the nation repeatedly transformed and then quickly regress from legalized slavery, to soft slavery: To wit, from a brief decade of freedom during Reconstruction, which was quickly snuffed out by the "Southern Redemption," to a century of Jim Crow and rigid Apartheid, to a brief period of fresh air during the hectic sixties and the Civil Rights Revolution, only to be undone by Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy; to today's "new coalition of radical religious right fundamentalists and the "so-called" cultural conservatives," who have installed their own new brand of racial and social intolerance and inequality; to the revocation and nullification of the famous Brown Decision.
And while it is true, that on the surface of American society, there is a veneer of "paper" or "technical" equality -- all carefully decorated like birthday candles with tokens like Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell and Barack Obama, the sad truth is that just beneath that surface, the psychological structure of slavery remains very much intact.
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