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this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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The Right Can't Meme
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To expand for a non-American who still may not understand the context:
The 13th amendment abolishes slavery in the US, where slavery at the time (prior to 1865) was based on the notion in the southern states that you could and should be owned as a slave if you were black. That included lifelong servitude of you and your children, any punishment deemed appropriate including severe physical punishments, and murder without consequence. Even if you were a free black man, and not shipped in from Africa like the majority of slaves, you could be captured by police and auctioned to someone to work on their plantation.
The 14th amendment establishes primarily that all persons in the US are equal regardless of the color of their skin. The bloodiest war in US history (Civil War, 1861-1865) was fought over the right for the southern states to declare it legal to own slaves, vs the northern states wanting slavery abolished federally. These amendments were ratified after the north won. Even after the war, it took another hundred years before Americans as a whole saw non-white people as equal. This and the next amendment were very much necessary to protect the newly found rights of former slaves.
The 15th, at least, is self explanatory.
The point of this meme is literally positing that it's ok to make black people slaves again if other parts of the constitution can change, because they're pretty boldly racist. There's not much else to it.
We’ve probably got the majority at this point, but this view is definitely not universal among US citizens. I grew up in a place where lots of folks would casually disagree with this notion.
I just read the 13th amendment for the first time and one thing is unclear. Is it slavery or involuntary servitude that is allowed as punishment (or both?).
Because forced labor as a punishment to repay society seems morally ok (to me) whereas slavery (and thus, ownership of people) still seems wrong even as a punishment
Forced labor and slavery aren't really different in the context of the state owning people. That's why it's phrased like that in the constitution. Once you are found guilty of a crime in the US, you lose many of your rights and are considered a prisoner of the state or federal government.
It's actually a hot topic in the US anyway, because the government very often assigns its prisoners it privately owned, for-profit prisons, where those prisoners labor for pennies and have no choice. Here's an example for you.
Is it involuntary servitude or slavery when the state hands you off to a private prison to make them money?
Couple that with the fact that the US coincidentally has the highest incarceration rate in the world (not crime, just the act of putting people in prison) and the fact that private prisons very often sign contracts with the states for a minimum number of prisoners a year, and you can see that it might be argued that private prisons collaborate with the government as an institutional system to keep certain Americans in prisons.
And then there's the fact that poor and non-white people are disproportionately preyed on by police, maybe you could say that modern day slavery still exists.
Involuntary servitude might be morally ok, but there's still a line where it crosses into slavery and we've been on the slavery side for a long time now.