“If people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love. But we need to know, you can’t erase history. So, let’s learn from it and be damned sure it doesn’t happen again.”

– Opal Lee

Opal Lee

Opal Lee was born on October 7^th, 1926, in Marshall, Texas. She was only three generations removed from her enslaved ancestors – her great grandmother on her father’s side was born into slavery.

This was a time of strict segregation and extreme racial violence from white supremacists and terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. During the 1920s at least 281 Blacks were lynched throughout the country. White supremacists burnt down Black schools, churches, businesses and houses, intimidated Black voters, enforced Jim Crow laws and much more.

When Lee was 10, the family moved to Fort Worth, Texas. Two years later, in June of 1939, at the age of 12, the family moved to Sycamore Park, a predominantly white neighborhood in Fort Worth. On June 19^th (Juneteenth), a day that was supposed to be filled with joy and celebration, Opal Lee and her family experienced a traumatic and unfortunately common event. A mob of approximately 500 white supremacists destroyed their home, all because they didn’t want a black family living in the neighborhood. Lee and her family were able to escape physically unharmed, but the emotional trauma would affect them for years to come. No one was arrested and justice was denied – a recurring theme for many Black Americans throughout this country’s history. While being interviewed for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Lee said, "The fact that it happened on the 19th day of June has spurred me to make people understand that Juneteenth is not just a festival." This event made her realize that racism was a barrier to true freedom for Black Americans, so she dedicated her life to teaching and activism.

After graduating from Wiley College in 1952 with a degree in elementary education, she dedicated her life to teaching, counseling and inspiring students. But more than education, she was dedicated to activism. She was involved in multiple community organizations like Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society, and even started her own nonprofit organization in 1994 called Unity Unlimited Inc. Their mission was “Providing educational activities and resources to people, young and old, to foster unity and harmony within the community, the city, the state, the nation and the world regardless of race, culture or denomination and regardless of the form in which the events may be presented, including but not limited to workshops, expositions, concerts, rallies and lectures.” Lee is also a board member of Transform 1012 N. Main Street, which is converting a former Ku Klux Klan auditorium into The Fred Rouse Center for Arts and Community Healing, named after Rouse who was lynched by a white mob in 1921 in Fort Worth. Lee also spent decades organizing Juneteenth celebrations in Fort Worth.

“We have simply got to make people aware that none of us are free until we’re all free, and we aren’t free yet.”

– Opal Lee

In 2016, Lee championed the cause to make Juneteenth a national holiday by walking two-and-a-half miles a day in multiple cities from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C. The two-and-a-half miles represented the years between the Emancipation Proclamation and General Orders No. 3. Lee said she thought about her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren with every step. She also started an online petition which garnered 1.6 million signatures. Her efforts gained her the nickname “grandmother of Juneteenth,” and on June 18, 2021, she sat in the White House and watched President Joe Biden sign Senate Bill 475 that made Juneteenth a federal holiday. That simple swipe of the pen would never have been possible without the dedication, determination and passion from people like Opal Lee. Because of her courageous efforts, she was voted “Texan of the Year” in 2021, nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 and awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2024 (Our nation’s highest civilian honor).

Opal Lee visits the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in 2021. Photo courtesy of Alica Reece.

Today, at least 41 states either recognize or observe Juneteenth as a state holiday. This holiday is an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of Opal Lee and all the other freedom heroes that came before her by recommitting to bring an end systemic racism and all other forms of discrimination.

Juneteenth

To understand Opal Lee’s experience and commitment to activism, you have to understand Juneteenth and her personal connection to it.

Major General Gordon Granger and 1,800 Union troops landed in Galveston, Texas on June 18, 1865. The next day, June 19, he issued General Orders No. 3, freeing over 250,000 enslaved people in Texas – 71 days after the Civil War ended and two-and-a-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. For enslaved people in Galveston and others throughout Texas, June 19^th, 1865, offered a definitive date for their freedom. A day they made their own. From 1865 forward, people like Opal Lee led the way in organizing Juneteenth celebrations in Sycamore Park and other parts of Texas.

Juneteenth became more than just a celebration of freedom. It became a celebration of Black history and culture, Black resistance and resilience and Black unity, love and joy. It became a way for families to reunite; a way for African Americans to organize politically, economically and spiritually; a way to educate and inspire future generations; and a way to show their pride, strength and resolve. And thanks to Opal Lee, Juneteenth is now a national holiday, celebrated in cities across the country. However, for Lee, Juneteenth became more than just a “festival” early on in her life.

Call to Action

Opal Lee’s call to action was fighting against racism and making Juneteenth a federal holiday. She accomplished her goals through courage, cooperation and perseverance. Her story and actions are an inspiration to us all.

What’s your call to action?

Resources

• Opal’s Walk: The Life and Works of Opal Flake Roland Lee by Renetta T. Womack Howard (Adult)
• Opal Lee and What It Means to Be Free: The True Story of the Grandmother of Juneteenth by Alice Faye Duncan (Children)
• Juneteenth 101 Popular Myths and Forgotten Facts by D. J. Norman-Cox

References

• https://www.npr.org/2021/06/17/1007498876/how-juneteenth-became-national-holiday
• https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/2022/01/02/opal-lee-our-2021-texan-of-the-year/
• https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/ku-klux-klan-hall-fort-worth-arts-community-healing/
• https://crbb.tcu.edu/clips/56/organizing-the-tarrant-county-black-historical-and-genealogical-society
• https://abcnews.go.com/US/video/opal-lee-reflects-racist-mob-burning-home-1939-108406070
• https://www.cbsnews.com/video/grandmother-of-juneteenth-opal-lee-reflects-on-her-journey-to-secure-a-national-holiday/
• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/classroom/classroom-voices/educator-voices/2023/07/book-qa-opal-lee-and-what-it-means-to-be-free-a-conversation-with-author-alice-faye-duncan
• https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/juneteenth-texas-opal-lee-wfaa-holiday-what-does-juneteenth-mean/287-8d4a484f-1d87-4076-be48-5244c73d2f60
• https://www.opalswalk2dc.com/
• Juneteenth 101 Popular Myths and Forgotten Facts by D. J. Norman-Cox

Photo: Tony Webster

Is there an enduring legacy 19th century white abolitionists offer for white anti-racism today? In recent months, I have revisited the life and writings of Angelina Grimké, the white Southern abolitionist and advocate for women’s rights. I am researching the differences among anti-slavery positions, differences that often get glossed over when “anti-slavery” is remembered only as a single position in opposition to slavery.

Returning to figures such as Angelina Grimké is tricky.  If the outcome is just a reassertion of standard interpretations of the triumph of white heroes over the power of “bad white people,” then we white folks haven’t really challenged ourselves in sufficiently meaningful ways. To access the full meaning of her legacy, I start from the belief that Grimké’s and my time have too much in common. The abolition of slavery did not open onto a wide expanse for the unfurling of Black freedom but rather to a condition that Canadian scholar Rinaldo Walcott poignantly names “the long emancipation.” Walcott’s work is not simply an argument about how slow progress is, but how devastating and unrelenting white domination continues to be. What does emancipation even mean when Black lives do not yet matter? In far too many ways, the ethical stakes and charge of the current moment resemble that of Grimké's time.

Learning from the Limits of White Anti-Slavery

While the terminology of anti-racism and structural racism are contemporary, their underlying meanings are not. And this is where Angelina Grimké stands out amongst her white anti-slavery peers. Over the course of her life, she came to understand that the moral argument against slavery had implications far beyond the abolition of slavery. That is, the moral argument against the system that converted “man into a thing” was also an argument for Black humanity. This more expansive understanding meant that Grimké also was against racial prejudice and the white superiority that rationalized it -- both of which were prominent in anti-slavery organizations. For example, historians including Shirley Yee and Manisha Sinha illuminate how racism within organized anti-slavery organizations treated Black abolitionists as “secondary,” maintaining separate seating areas and prohibiting them from speaking. 

Image from National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum

Moreover, over-emphasis placed on white leadership and organizations today repeats the side-lining of the free and enslaved African Americans who have always been on the frontline of freedom, forging their survival and communities in the face of unrelenting white prejudice and violence far beyond the border of the Mason-Dixon line. And yet, the names of only a few Black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman are well-known or taught in schools, while the lives and contributions of Frances E.W. Harper, Elizabeth Freeman, Sarah Parker Redmond, Grace Douglass, Charlotte Forten (who married into the Grimké family) among others, are far less known. Returning to Grimké, thus, is a reminder of the reality that anti-slavery was not anti-racist by design: this should prompt a continued reckoning with how “good white people” harbor and reproduce the very systems we declare opposition to. 

Grimké spoke directly to this reality in her well-known epistle “An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States” (1837) where she disquiets the complacency of white folks placated by their opposition to slavery from the distance of the North. She saw not the difference but the deep connections between the North and South:

The interests of the North, you must know, my friends, are very closely combined with those of the South. The Northern merchants and manufacturers are making their fortunes out of the produce of slave labour, the grocer is selling your rice and sugar; how then can these men bear a testimony against slavery without condemning themselves?”

Grimké grasped how racial capitalism widely benefited all of white society; she was equally concerned with reaching white audiences in the “nominally free” states as in the unfree South. Moreover, this awareness was linked to the realization that the North was no haven for free Blacks. Looking back to white abolitionists today, the enduring legacy lies more in the differences among them than in their “unified” opposition to slavery.

Thus, Grimké’s legacy resides not only in her individual views, but in how she related to Black abolitionists and their broader cause for dignity. For instance, Sarah Mapps Douglass was an important influence on Angelina Grimké, including her views on colonization -- the idea that free Blacks should emigrate to Africa to build a new permanent home. Through their letters and friendship, Grimké awakened to the racism that was prominent amongst white abolitionists in their anti-slavery and religious organizations. While the issue of colonization divided abolitionists Black and white, over time it became associated with racist whites (pro and anti-slavery alike) who did not want to live alongside free Blacks. Grimké listened to and was moved by Black abolitionists who decried the rampant anti-Black prejudice in the North. In a letter to Catherine Beecher she wrote:

“It is because I love the colored Americans that I want them to stay in this country; and in order to make it a happy home to them, I am trying to talk down, and write down, and live down this horrible prejudice.”  

Grimké’s friendship with Sarah Mapps Douglass is a legacy white anti-racists can draw from because it illuminates why it is paramount that white anti-racism follow the leadership and knowledge of those most affected by racism. We can and should applaud Grimké for the deep personal reflections that led to her anti-slavery convictions, but we should not mistake that self-reflection as the totality of the work of anti-racism. Ultimately, anti-racism is not about the feelings and needs of white folks even as we need to take responsibility for our role in perpetuating structural and interpersonal racism. Grimké started from that personal place, the daughter of a South Carolina slaver, and allowed it to grow out past the horizon of her personal views and experiences.

Art by Kaitlynn Radloff Justseeds

Finally, in looking for an enduring legacy in the life and relations of Angelina Grimké, she reminds us white folks that anti-racism by necessity is not easy or popular; if it were, white domination would not persist and persevere so easily. Having wrested herself from Southern culture and her heritage, Grimké was well aware of the sacrifices that anti-slavery required. She famously wrote in a letter to William Lloyd Garrison on the event of the violent pro-slavery riot in Boston in 1835 that she believed anti-slavery “is a cause worth dying for.”  The work of anti-racism has always meant grasping that racism is literally a life or death issue for people of color. White domination creates an existential crisis for Black, Indigenous and people of color. The dismantling of that is not easy. As Grimké experienced in her life, anti-racism is not popular, it runs against the grain, strains relationships, ruffles feathers; it has to come at a cost. For white folks, there is no dismantling of racism without giving something up and the first thing we need to give up is whiteness and white privilege. Writing in her recent book We Want To Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom, Dr. Bettina Love explains that for white folks to be anti-racist, “means you are ready to lose something, you are ready to let go of your privilege, you are ready to be in solidarity with dark people by recognizing your Whiteness in dark spaces, recognizing how it can take up space if unchecked, using your Whiteness in White spaces to advocate for and with dark people.” 

Angela Davis wrote in her classic text Women, Race & Class that the Grimké sisters, more than any other white women in the campaign against slavery, understood that “women could never achieve their freedom independently of Black people.” It appears that the protests against police brutality over the spring and summer of 2020 shook more white Americans awake, but being awakened (or “woke”) is not a state of being but rather a constant struggle. If there is an enduring legacy to claim from white abolitionists like Grimké, it is not a single view but a life lived in struggle in the long emancipation.

The above quote crystalizes the idea that, while racial slavery was abolished in the 19^th century, many aspects of that system continue to shape our economy if not also persist under different names. In this second blog post for Human Trafficking Awareness Month, I emphasize the importance of explicitly connecting the past and present when it comes to worker’s rights and the persistence of unfree labor.

Why does this connection matter? When human trafficking is treated as a new (and distinctly different) problem from historical slavery, we can lose touch with how the demise of slavery continues to shape economic and social relations. As a result, we move further away from reckoning with the living legacies of slavery as central to contemporary social justice struggles. The reality is we are still very much living in a world shaped by the African slave trade and European colonialism.

While much has changed since the 16^th and even the 19^th centuries, there continues to be an enduring and evolving reliance on unfree and low-wage labor. This is particularly obvious in the legacy industries of plantation slavery like the agricultural sector. In the U.S., this reliance started in the slave-based economies of the past and transformed as the institution of chattel slavery was formally abolished. While it became illegal to trade and own people, it was not illegal to expect that certain forms of labor be done for very little pay and under a certain degree of coercion. For example, Southern white land-owners in particular did not want to give up the economic benefits of unfree labor, although industry in the north also was dependent on repressed commodity prices made possible by that same labor. The challenge was how to rebrand unfree labor as something other than slavery. Consequently, new categories of labor and labor contracts emerged in order to feed the demand for unfree and low-wage labor. It is crucial we remember that the continued under-valuing and de-valuing of the racialized labor once performed by Black slaves is a legacy of African slavery.

New Systems, Similar Results

An example of a new labor category was the convict lease system used by local governments, white farmers and corporations. The system essentially replicated a slave labor force by using so-called Black Codes (in effect anti-Black codes) to incriminate newly freed African Americans for anything from walking on the “wrong” side of the train tracks to vagrancy and unemployment. Many are familiar with the impact of the Black Codes on the ongoing criminalization of Black life in America, especially in regard to policing and sentencing.

When we consider how anti-Black racism has contributed to the over-incarceration of African Americans in the U.S. prison system, it is not hard to see how a form of convict leasing still operates today. Prison labor is a multi-billion dollar industry, and while different from the convict leasing system in important ways, it is still the one loop-hole in the 13^th Amendment that technically allows for slave labor. Incarcerated workers can receive important training and job skills, but they are one of the most vulnerable and exploitable work forces in our system. They are asked to fight fires, make PPE during a pandemic, and recycle waste yet are frequently unable to set the terms of their labor contracts. Furthermore, the impact of incarceration on someone’s prospects for work once they are released is still highly detrimental, from wage decreases to outright refusal to be hired. Some businesses and municipalities are “banning the box” as a way to advance the rights of formerly incarcerated people.

Convict Leasing of Children, 1903, Library of Congress, Source: Wikimedia Commons

Yet, another dimension of that legacy is the ongoing racialization (and criminalization) of select laborers including non-white and migrant workers. U.S. immigration law has a long history of racism and abuse that is relevant to understanding the enduring legacies of slavery here and globally. While systems of migrant labor contracts existed before slavery was outlawed, our dependance on migrant and immigrant labor significantly deepened after emancipation.

Along with increased demand for cheap labor, there were shifting rationalizations for why certain ethnic groups were “better” able to perform certain jobs. These rationalizations were used to validate migrant labor contract systems (such as the Bracero program) which also gave legitimacy to repressing wages. It was harder to reduce the wages of white farmworkers than non-white and non-U.S. citizen workers. Thus, it benefited the farm owners and corporations to have low-wage migrant laborers. At the same time, migrant and immigrant workers were subject to virulent racist backlash both in their local communities and from the federal government. The Chinese Exclusion Act is an early example of that backlash and its impact is still evident today with examples of anti-Asian racism. Another example is the criminalization of immigrants, migrants and refugees from Central and Latin America and Mexico.

The struggle for farmworker’s rights has a long and vibrant history in the United States that intersects with other civil rights movements, including Black freedom struggles and Indigenous rights movements. While recent attention to human trafficking has increased awareness of the essential yet often vulnerable labor of farmworkers, it is important to contextualize these more recent anti-trafficking efforts in this broader history because migrant farmworker activism is and has been the primary engine behind advancing worker’s rights in the agricultural sector. From the coalition of Mexican and Filipino American workers who led a nation-wide strike of grape growers in Delano, California in 1965 and birthed the modern farmworker movement, to the recent Fair Food boycott of fast food chains who refuse to ensure migrant farmworker rights on tomato farms, farmworker-led organizations are essential to abolishing unfree labor. This context also is important because as attention has grown in the U.S  for what is called “domestic trafficking” (a term used to describe sex trafficking of U.S. citizens and legal residents) and cast as “modern day slavery” “in our own backyard” attention has turned away from an injustice that has long been in our own backyards – the exploitation of migrant and immigrant labor.

Source: Coalition for Immokalee Workers

It is vitally important that anti-trafficking efforts recognize the connections between unfree labor and the history of slave economies and racist immigration laws. When human trafficking is treated as a contemporary aberration rather than as intertwined in the legacies and endurance of old systems, then efforts to advance human rights may in fact undermine them. As we learned from Silvia Perez and Uriel Zelaya-Perez of the Coalition for Immokalee Workers during our webinar on January 22, human trafficking and slave-like conditions exist on a spectrum of labor exploitation including wage theft and gender-based violence. We must address the entire spectrum in order to create a more just and equitable food system and one that does not operate in the long shadow of African slavery. This is relevant more than ever as we depend on farmworkers as essential workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. They risk their lives in order to ensure food stays on our tables. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers as well as the Ohio-based Justice for Migrant Women have COVID-relief campaigns for farmworkers. Supporting farmworker-led organizations is one of the most important ways to fight human trafficking.

Read Human Trafficking Awareness Month: Making Connections to Social Justice Part I

On the eve of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 2010, President Barack Obama issued his own proclamation declaring the month of January “National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month.” President Obama’s speech, quoted above, crystallized a rhetorical and ethical link between transatlantic slavery and “modern day slavery.” He also connected the history of abolishing chattel slavery with the contemporary fight against human trafficking. These are powerful connections, and they illustrate how the historical struggle to abolish slavery is called on to amplify political and public concern for human trafficking today.

Connections or Tensions?

However, drawing equivalence between historical slavery and human trafficking can be problematic too. The comparison implies that the historical enslavement of Africans is only relevant today as an analogy for something else. Moreover, the growth in attention and resources to combat human trafficking have not brought greater awareness to the enduring and evolving legacies of chattel slavery, including cultural and institutionalized forms of anti-Black racism on African Americans. Yet, the historical fight to abolish slavery is often used to give ethical gravitas to the work of anti-trafficking. This unevenness begs the question, “What are the connections between human trafficking and the legacies of slavery?”

There is an urgency to that question because of unremitting anti-Black violence perpetuated by routine police shootings, the criminalization of Black life, and the system-wide failure of the criminal “justice” system. The struggles against that violence reached a fever pitch this past summer and the outrage continues as white supremacy is validated even at the highest levels of political office. What connections are there between these struggles and the issue of human trafficking?

Source: Nicole Baster via Unsplash

In the spirit of human trafficking awareness month, I delve into two connections that raise the important if not also thorny issues for aligning the struggle against human trafficking and the ongoing struggles for racial justice. In Part I of this series, I address the problematic issue of how anti-trafficking efforts often align with, rather than challenge, racial violence. In Part II, I discuss the legacy of slave economies on unfree and exploited agricultural labor. These topics also are the focus of two virtual conversations organized by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and for which I will be a guest host. Join us for these live conversations!

• Human Trafficking: Who’s at Risk? - January 13 at 2:00 pm
• Human Rights: Fair Food at the Kitchen Table - January 22 at 2:00 pm

Carceral Human Rights

There has long been a human rights deficit at the center of anti-trafficking. The problem is that the criminal legal system is used as the primary mechanism for combating human trafficking. While human trafficking should be against the law, anti-trafficking strategies are narrowly focused on what scholars and activists call a “carceral” approach to human rights. A carceral approach heavily relies on policing and the criminal legal system to promote human rights. As a result, a carceral approach brings considerable collateral damage because “human rights” are marshalled to reinforce and intensify the policing, surveillance, and arresting of populations who are already over-policed, surveilled and incarcerated – Black folks, Indigenous people, people of color, immigrants, and folks facing financial and housing insecurity. Moreover, carceral human rights assume that justice for the victim/survivor hinges primarily on adjudicating the harm of trafficking and not also addressing systemic racism, poverty, heteropatriarchy, transphobia and white supremacy.

It also should be noted that prosecuting trafficking is very difficult. Arrest rates for trafficking may go up with awareness, but prosecution rates remain relatively low. Ultimately, while a difficult truth to swallow, anti-trafficking agendas today implicitly support systems of oppression and violence endemic to policing, border control, prisons, and detention centers.

Criminalizing Survivors

The incarceration of survivors of gender and sexual violence is routinely ignored if not silenced in mainstream anti-trafficking organizations. Yet, it is evident from the struggle to free Joanne Little in the 1970s to the recent mobilization for Bresha Meadows that women, girls and femmes who are Black, Indigenous, immigrant or people of color are more likely to be criminalized for having defended themselves from gender-based violence. This is especially the case for queer, non-binary, and trans folks whose experiences often are erased in mainstream social justice efforts. Organizations such as Survived & Punished, a national coalition of survivors, organizers, victim advocates experts and formerly incarcerated people are advocating for the decriminalization of “efforts to survive domestic and sexual violence, support and free criminalized survivors, and abolish gender violence, policing, prisons, and deportations.” Anti-trafficking organizations are often silent about the incarceration of survivors, yet their work reinforces a policing and legal system that criminalizes BIPOC women and girls. Thus, connecting anti-trafficking to the decarceration of self-defense and survival is a critical way that advocates can re-focus their attention to forge a racial justice mission in the work of combating human trafficking.

The recent granting of clemency to Alexis Martin in Ohio is an example of how anti-trafficking organizations can re-direct. Ms. Martin was charged in a murder at the age of 17 and was only 15 when the events occurred. Her attorney did not seek protection under Ohio’s Safe Harbor Law (a law that grants protection for juveniles involved in potential sex trafficking). The fact that she was treated as an adult in the case illustrates the insidious power of racialized gender biases that contribute to higher rates of incarceration for girls of color. In particular, Black girls are treated as adults and thus not given the “benefit of the doubt” of being innocent. This case is an example of why anti-trafficking organizations should advocate for criminalized survivors. Beyond that, anti-trafficking strategies need to more directly take-on anti-racism and anti-oppression work as central to trafficking prevention which includes a broad agenda for the decarceration of survival strategies including consensual sexual labor.

Artwork by Amanda Maisel (#FreeSurvivors: Make Art for Abolition)

Re-evaluating Risk

It is often remarked that anyone can be a victim of trafficking but that some groups are more “at risk” than others. Yet, this understanding of risk treats the problem of trafficking as something that is best (or primarily) addressed at the individual rather than structural level. This is glaringly evident in the case of trafficking and sexual and gender violence against Indigenous women and girls. Indeed, treating Indigenous women and girls as a “high risk” group does little to address the root causes of oppression including the ongoing effects of U.S. colonialism on Indigenous and Native tribes and peoples.  According to legal scholar and advocate Sarah Deer, colonialism introduced rape as a war tactic against Indigenous peoples. For example, the Sioux Uprising in 1862 was related to the failure of the encroaching white settler state to investigate the sexual mistreatment of Indian women by white men. That history finds a contemporary manifestation in the fact that tribal courts do not have full jurisdiction to prosecute or enact tribal-centric resolutions to gender and sexual violence on tribal lands when non-Natives are the perpetrators. This means that non-Native perpetrators do not answer for their crimes.

Source: aaron.resist.ca

Anti-trafficking agendas should align more directly with Indigenous-centered approaches to gender violence that seek to restore and protect tribal sovereignty as the best protection from/remedy for human trafficking. That means that the problem of trafficking cannot be disentangled from the problem of colonial sexual violence. Similarly, the risk factors for exploitation are connected to structural forms of oppression that have roots in historical slavery and colonialism. But there is much that anti-trafficking agendas can do to be in the service of social justice including looking beyond carceral human rights.

Read Human Trafficking Awareness Month: Making Connections to Social Justice Part II

There are many dates that school children learn when they are taught U.S. history. Notable among them are 1863, when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and 1865, when the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed and formally outlawed slavery. While important, the dates alone do not convey the foundational significance and living legacies of slavery. The problem is not with the dates, but with the interpretation of history that they are asked to convey. 

Interpretation is what museum professionals call “the practice of communicating their collections to the public.” It is a process that broadly speaks to the importance of how we grapple with the personal and cultural relevance of any story, art object, or historical record. During my residency at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, I engage this question of interpretation to untangle the power and problem of drawing comparisons between the history of Black enslavement in the U.S. and the use of the phrase “modern day slavery” to refer to human trafficking. In a series of blog posts and public conversations, I will grapple with these tensions and reflect upon the multiple meanings of abolition today. 

My place of departure for the blog series starts from the observation made by Dr. Saidiya Hartman that “we” are living in the future created by slavery. Taken from her magnificent book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, the sentence resonates beyond its complex implications for the descendants of slaves. Hartman interprets slavery as part of  both the past and present. She treats slavery as an inheritance, not only a chronology of events that fatefully ends with its demise. It is still difficult for many Americans, particularly white Americans, to grasp the many ways that we and our society continue to be structured by slave economies, colonialism, and the gravitational force of racism and anti-Blackness. In fact, many white Americans are unable to or refuse to connect slavery’s past to contemporary social justice issues.

The living legacies of slavery and colonialism are not hidden to Black, Indigenous, and people of color in the United States - it is white America that struggles to collectively reckon with our national DNA. For any significant grappling with the past as an inheritance, we white folks need to face the reality that slavery and colonialism continues to be in the DNA of us and our present moment. Yet, there continues to be strong, even virulent resistance to and fatigue about reckoning with that inheritance.

For many there is intense discomfort with the idea that white supremacy still has a structural hold on society. The refusal to see that stems, in part, from the long tradition of allowing guilt and shame to orchestrate white folks’ moral response to the living legacies of slavery and colonialism. When guilt and shame rule white consciousness about the past, we do not actually divest from white supremacy, but rather re-invest in the flimsy distinction between “good” versus “bad” white people. This is insufficient and actually perpetuates white supremacy, rendering it a matter of individual choices and acts. Like the material of genetic DNA, however, white supremacy self-replicates over time, although it may not look identical to earlier generations. And, like DNA, white supremacy is a trait we can not simply refuse: it requires active mitigation. The problem at the center of structural racism is the inability to dismantle white supremacy. 

In 1964, James Baldwin travelled to San Francisco to witness Black American life in what was and continues to be regarded as a liberal and cosmopolitan city. That trip is documented in the film Take This Hammer and is as piercing today as it was then in its depiction of the structural undermining of Black communities through the denial of employment and housing. At the start, Baldwin, in his quintessentially eloquent and biting way, muses that people can only pay their dues if they realize that is what they need to do. He often spoke of debts in relation to white America as he accurately saw how white superiority operates at the expense of others. Interpreting slavery as an inheritance possessed by white Americans requires ways of thinking and living that are not yet normalized or perhaps even really grapsed. As white Americans, we do not need to make a spectacle of guilt or shame or to just accurately identify the “bad guys.” We need to be willing to scrutinize our lives with humility and vulnerability and to be willing to interpret history as an inheritance that is alive in small and big ways, today.  

As I scrutinize my place in a society made by slavery, I have become wary of the moniker “modern day slavery.”  I understand that for many, naming human trafficking as “modern day slavery” is an expression of concern and ethical outrage. The phrase immediately conveys a message about injustice that perhaps is missed with the technical term “human trafficking.” Yet, the rhetorical usefulness of “modern day slavery” to convey the existence of human trafficking also has problematic material effects. That is to say, the problem with “modern day slavery” is more than a semantic issue. 

For example, while there is increased political concern for victims of trafficking, that concern has not translated into addressing the remaining debt that society still owes to the formerly enslaved and their descendants. The claim that slavery has a modern form suggests that there is an equivalency between chattel slavery and trafficking. While the idea that trafficking is modern slavery relies upon the metaphorical and moral power of the abolition of chattel slavery, that idea displaces and even conceals our responsibility to the living legacies of slavery.  As such, the term also clouds the fact that we are still operating within racial capitalism, a system produced by slaving economies. Furthermore, it is alarming that with the expansion of the anti-trafficking field, different social justice claims appear to compete rather than intersect. This tension is most apparent in regards to the role of the criminal legal system. While most anti-trafficking efforts validate and center the role of policing, courts, and incarceration these same institutions are viewed by a growing majority as the source of injustice.  

What would change if we sought out the intersections between the living legacies of slavery and colonialism and human trafficking? Likewise, how would our understanding of human trafficking change if we saw chattel slavery as not a metaphor for the present but as in the DNA of the present? Leading up to Human Trafficking Awareness Month (January) I will engage these and other questions.