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“I feel that that assertion by Mr. Barr was probably the most ridiculous, tone-deaf, God-awful factor I’ve ever heard,” Clyburn, long-time Black chief from South Carolina, mentioned on Thursday. “It’s unbelievable, as chief regulation enforcement officer on this nation, to equate human bondage to knowledgeable recommendation to avoid wasting lives. Slavery was not about saving lives. It was about devaluing lives.”
Slavery was not about saving lives. It was about devaluing lives. For a whole bunch of years, enslaved Africans had been overwhelmed, tortured, raped and handled as property.
Or because the creator Isabel Wilkerson places it in her new guide, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”: “The establishment of slavery was, for 1 / 4 of a millennium, the conversion of human beings into foreign money, into machines who existed solely for the revenue of their homeowners, to be labored so long as the homeowners desired, who had no rights over their our bodies or family members.”
On this system, African captives “could possibly be mortgaged, bred, received in a guess, given as wedding ceremony presents, bequeathed to heirs, bought away from spouses or youngsters to cowl an proprietor’s debt or to spite a rival or to settle an property,” Wilkerson writes.
That Barr painted just a few months of being informed — or actually, in lots of instances, requested — to remain residence throughout a world pandemic as even remotely in the identical class because the follow of enslavement is ridiculous. (To say nothing of the truth that he ignored, amongst different issues, Jim Crow, Japanese internment throughout World Struggle II, and the slaughter of Native Individuals.)
However even throughout a summer time that is in any other case been seized by a racial reckoning, the legal professional basic’s feedback are the furthest factor from stunning.
“No, I do not assume there are two justice techniques. You already know, I feel the narrative that the police are on some, you already know, epidemic of capturing unarmed Black males is solely a false narrative and in addition the narrative that that is based mostly on race,” Barr mentioned earlier this month to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, of the police shootings of Black Individuals.
In an identical vein, in August, Lynda Williams, the president of the Nationwide Group of Black Legislation Enforcement Executives, confronted Barr throughout a closed-door gathering of nationwide regulation enforcement leaders over his denial of systemic racism.
Individuals on the appropriate typically toss round “slavery” as a way to power a political argument. However that does not make the false equivalency any much less, nicely, false.
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