A CALL TO SUPPORT ACTION FOR JUSTICE NOW 

FOR ALL OF US, 

NOT JUST SOME OF US!

In the year 1865, a great deception was sold to the American people: that the slavery of Africans and their descendants was abolished in the United States. However, the writers of the 13th Amendment allegedly abolishing slavery included a loophole known as the exception clause which states “except as a punishment for crime.” The exception clause was crafted for the express purpose of appeasing those who fought for the Confederacy, and more generally to ensure the elite white land-owning class would not lose access to the surplus free labor upon which American capitalism was and continues to be founded.

After the passage of the 13th Amendment, U.S. policymakers began to create and enforce laws that systematically marginalized, criminalized, and imprisoned newly released slaves and other marginalized people for trivial offenses.

Since many blacks and poor whites were effectively segregated and excluded from mainstream society and stereotyped as being misfits and not ready to handle the responsibilities of freedom, they became prime suspects for wrongdoing and even mistreatment and persecution by the police—just like in antebellum times when the slaves were patrolled by slave-catchers. We saw this play out over the next 150 years with the abandonment of Reconstruction, Black Codes, Peonage, The Wars on Drugs and Poverty, The FBI'S Counterintelligence programs to vilify and destroy Black Leadership and the 1960-70s social change movements, and a nation-wide mass construction of jails and prisons to hold what would fast grow from a small number of people to 2.3 million Americans incarcerated in the American Penal System—an enterprise that retained the profit-making scheme of the old institution and holds more slaves today than were held in antebellum slavery!

To call Black, Brown, and poor people criminals, thugs, gangsters, and other foul names is actually a play of power-politics and a cover up of the abuse of power and ongoing oppression of African Americans and other persons similarly situated. And we are exposing this and bringing this out for public scrutiny!

Higher education, community reinvestment, and fundamental fairness is our idea of Reconstruction, righting the wrongs of slavery and finally ending involuntary servitude now and forever!

To free our people from the bonds of white supremacy and liberate them from the ghettos, impoverished environments, and prison cages in this nation, we are asking students, workers, tenants rights groups, disabled rights groups, prisoners, LGBTQ people and all fellow humans to join us in a mass movement of rallies, marches, demonstrations, and protests and to call, write, and lobby your local, state, and federal public officials to write policy and laws in support of (1) Reconstruction: i.e., higher education, community reinvestment, and fundamental fairness as alternatives to incarceration; (2) Reparations: i.e., land, opportunity, and space to heal, forgive, redeem and empower ourselves to build our ideal community!

Thanking you all for your time, consideration, cooperation, understanding and support in this pressing matter!

In Solidarity,
Ishkaten