NEWSHISTORICAL SLAVERY

Conscious consumers have recently been growing concerned about child labor used to make imported goods -- rugs from India, chocolate bars from Ghana, clothing from China. But sadly, many of these consumers needn't look any further than their fruit bowl or vegetable bin to see the results of child labor -- even if they buy American. According to a report from Human Rights Watch, children as young as 12 regularly risk their health, safety, and future to work on farms in the U.S. growing food and other products for American consumers. But now, a growing movement of those consumers is looking to end exploitative labor for American kids.

At just 12 years old, a child in the U.S. can work for any farmer up to 14 hours a day during peak seasons -- and seeing children as young as 7 or 8 is not uncommon. They do not have to be paid minimum wage, and often see their small wages garnished for necessities like clean drinking water. Child farmworkers suffer fatalities at four times the rate of children performing other jobs, and their work can severely limit their educational opportunities.

In 1960, famed journalist Edward R. Murrow produced the documentary film Harvest of Shame, marking the first time a major media outlet highlighted the fact that migrant workers in America's agricultural industry faced situations akin to slavery. Fifty years later, many of Murrow's claims are still true. Will it be another fifty years before we finally make the American agricultural system slavery-free?

In 1960, the men who harvested and processed most of America's food were mostly poor African Americans, many of them only a generation or two removed from the legal slavery of the 19th century. Today, many migrant agricultural workers are Hispanic -- both recent immigrants and citizens from multi-generational families of Americans. But their experiences are much the same. They have few legal protections and therefore are routinely discriminated against, underpaid, and exploited. Fifty years ago, racism kept many African American workers in poverty, making migratory farm work one of their few options. Today, racism and nativism keep Hispanic workers and immigrants in poverty, making them more vulnerable to the abuses of the agricultural industry. And the similarities don't end there.

Murrow's film opens with shots of men being packed into trucks like cattle and driven away to toil in fields for pennies. One farmer watching the scene commented, "we used to own our slaves; now we just rent them." It's a deeply dehumanizing image, and one that makes us indignantly think, "surely in the past fifty years, after civil rights and Cesar Chavez, the people who pick our food are treated with more dignity"? A modern-day slavery museum operated by The Coalition of Immokalee Workers' says otherwise. It occupies a cargo truck identical to one that transported enslaved farmworkers in Florida in 2008. It's a truck uncomfortably similar to the one in Harvest of Shame.

Since the beginning of civilization, people have enslaved other people. Egyptians enslaved Jews, Ottoman Turks enslaved Armenians, and Americans and Europeans enslaved Africans. Even today, after slavery has been made illegal in every country on earth, the rich enslave the poor, men enslave women, and adults enslave children. But in 2010, we have a powerful weapon in the fight against slavery. Twitter. Yes, the 144 character social media tool might just do what all the legislation and international conventions have failed to  — finally end slavery.

Twitter is increasingly becoming the most popular platform for the growing modern-day abolitionist movement. Modern-day slavery is an issue which is often overlooked by mainstream media; the Washington Post and New York Times don't have human trafficking beats. Yet across the world, millions of people still live in slavery as real as what's described in history books. They harvest tea, sugar, and cocoa. They make cell phones, sew blue jeans, and clean private residences. And they are trapped in brothels and sold through online classified services. But even as a global understanding that slavery still exists grows, trafficking victims' experiences are rarely front page news.

Enter Twitter, the 144 character social media site and it's most prolific user, Ashton Kutcher. Kutcher has proven that Twitter can be a tremendous force in building and mobilizing the movement to end human trafficking. At a recent event at the United Nations, journalist Nicholas Kristof pointed out that Kutcher has just over 6 million followers on Twitter, compared to 140,000 who follow the UN. But while Kutcher could use his power only to promote his films or share videos of fainting cats, he instead uses it as a platform to educate people about human trafficking and mobilize them into action.

Does it frustrate anyone else out there when slavery is spoken about as a past institution, limited to a single era in history, a mere “once upon a time?” It’s a common misconception, but one that the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, seeks to shatter in its new exhibit, called “Invisible: Slavery Today.”

The Freedom Center, which primarily focuses on our nation’s affair with slavery prior to the Civil War, has added a new and permanent exhibit that links our past to our present with a spotlight on human trafficking and modern-day slavery.  Broken up into three parts, the exhibit looks at various forms of enslavement in today’s world, slavery’s contemporary causes and extent and, optimistically, the ways in which slavery is currently being fought. After learning all about the more historical facets of the slave trade, museum-goers will come to understand the practice is not only ongoing, but widespread, and perhaps find inspiration to become a modern-day abolitionist.

A few weeks back, I was reminded of how important it is to relate historical slavery to modern-day slavery while watching the documentary Traces of the Trade. The film examines the DeWolf family’s prominent role in the Triangle Trade while living in New England (as opposed to the more predictable South) and discusses the meaning of that legacy. And for a thoughtful look at race relations in America, it’s terrific. But for a movie that so clearly could and should have connected the dots between the slavery of yesteryear with the slavery of today, it was, sad to say, an epic fail.

Water is necessary for all people to live, and for some people can mean life, health, and freedom. But for millions of people who have lived in slavery, from ancient times to today, water means abuse and forced labor. That's because the history of slavery is deeply tied to the presence and availability of water.

Today is Blog Action Day, which brings together thousands of writers from around the world to unite our voices, this year about water. Lack of access to clean and safe water contributes to human trafficking. But the relationship between water and slavery goes way, way back.

Transport of Slaves

Slaves have traditionally been transported across bodies of water on ships. The transatlantic slave trade sailed a famous triangle trade route carrying some combination of slaves, cash, and crops between the U.S., Europe, and Africa. In America, African slaves were shipped from port cities like Charleston to farms in Georgia and Mississippi via rivers. Today, human trafficking victims are more often shipped by land and air, but some are still smuggled into ports in Europe and the U.S.

Slaves Seeking Freedom

Water also played an important role in slaves seeking freedom and abolitionists fighting slavery. Two of the most famous slave songs from the American South, Follow the Drinking Gourd and Wade in the Water, centered on water as a path to freedom. Many historians believe these and other songs contained coded messages guiding slaves along rivers to freedom in the North. One of the most significant markers of geographical freedom was the Ohio River, which separated slave-owning Kentucky from free Ohio. Today, access to clean water can help prevent children from becoming trapped in slavery in the first place.

Taiwanese labor groups are outraged by a proposed law which would offer a reward to citizens who catch "runaway" migrant workers and turn them in. The legislation would be a second cousin to the Fugitive Slave Law in the 19th century U.S., which required citizens to return runaway slaves to their owners. Is Taiwan taking its legal system all the way back to the 19th century when people were property?

Taiwan's Council on Labor Affairs (CLA) has been struggling with a problem: migrant workers who travel to Taiwan on employer-specific visas keep running away from their employers. In fact, there are currently over 33,000 migrant workers in Taiwan who have gone MIA since taking a job. So what's the CLA's solution? Turn each one of its citizens into some xenophobic version of Dog the Bounty Hunter by offering cold, hard cash for the capture of a runaway worker. The pay day turns out to be roughly $160 per "fugitive" — not a fortune, but a way for someone struggling to make a living in a downed economy to get a leg up. And if people are hurt in a mob of cash-crazy vigilantes? Well, they're only migrant workers.

Of course, what the CLA or the Taiwanese government hasn't done is ask itself why migrant workers are running away in the first place. Most of them spend serious time and money getting visas to come work in Taiwan and many workers from Southeast Asian countries have families back home relying on that paycheck. Things must be pretty bad to leave a paying job and a place to live in a foreign country where you don't have immigration papers. And for some workers, things are that bad. Southeast Asian women and girls are trafficked into domestic servitude in Taiwan, often beaten and degraded by their employers. And just recently six men were killed at an unsafe work site, which probably hadn't been kept up to code because the men at the site were undocumented. But no one is proposing a law to reward citizens for spotting human trafficking, exploitation, or unsafe working conditions.

And what awaits these runaway workers when spotted by a vigilant public and turned in for reward money? Apparently, they will "be assisted with a passport and provided with the expenses for repatriation." That a really, really polite way of saying they'll be deported but the government will foot the bill for getting them the hell out. No attempt to figure out why these people have fled from their employers, no counseling or aid for trafficked people, no attempt to reform what is obviously a broken system.

The Fugitive Slave Law didn't help the U.S. two centuries ago, Taiwan, and its cousin won't help you now. Let's make sure the U.S. doesn't step back two hundred years like Taiwan threatens to by asking your state to support domestic workers' rights, many of whom are migrants. Together, we can make sure the Fugitive Slave Act stays a historical document.

Photo credit: vincepal

The U.S. government has admitted they conducted medical experiments by infecting Guatemalans with STDs in the 1940s. As part of the experiments, they intentionally infected women in prostitution with syphilis and instructed them to have sex with prisoners to track the spread and treatment of the disease. It's an example of the abuse and exploitation of women in the commercial sex industry that dates back far before the anti-trafficking movement.

The experiments were originally conducted in Guatemala City's Central Penitentiary, because at the time men imprisoned there were permitted to have sex with women in prostitution. Some of these women were already infected with syphilis. For those who weren't, doctors intentionally applied infected material to their cervixes before sending them to have sex with the incarcerated men. The U.S. government used similar techniques to study the spread of gonorrhea among these same populations. It's still unclear how many of the study's "participants" were treated for the diseases or what those treatments consisted of. However, untreated gonorrhea can cause infertility and untreated syphilis can cause blindness, dementia, and death.

The Guatemala experiments were led by Dr. John Cutter, the same doctor responsible for the infamous Tuskegee experiments, which intentionally infected hundreds of African American men with syphilis and left them untreated to study the advanced stages of the disease. The men participating in the study were never told they had syphilis and never asked if they were willing to participate in a study which left their disease untreated.It's unclear as to whether or not the participants in the Guatemala study had the same information withheld or if the women in prostitution were consenting. However, it's doubtful that women who were contracted to service incarcerated men in an inner-city Guatemalan prison in the 1940s were all there of their own fruition. And it's certainly highly unlikely that they consented to being infected with syphilis and sent to infect others with the disease. Dr. Cutter and his team used prostitution, and the women who by force or choice were involved in it, to spread STDs and study their affects. The experiment was unequivocally a gross violation of the rights of everyone involved. And the exploitation of prostitution as a tool to spread STDs is just one more layer of abuse.

Marriage is the practice of two people making a legal, emotional, and sometimes spiritual commitment to each other. Slavery is the practice of one or more people using coercion, violence, threats, deceit, and other means to control another person or group of people. It doesn't seem like it would be easy to conflate these two things, right? Well, the National Organization for Marriage has somehow managed to say that promoting marriage equality is the same as promoting slavery. Ask them to apologize for and retract this ridiculous comparison.

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) has been the primary opponent of state-level marriage equality legislation, including Proposition 8 in California and Question 1 in Maine. And this summer, they've been on tour denouncing same-sex marriage around the country. As Daily Kos points out, it's hard to choose which of their many tweets and public statements are the most offensive, but in my mind there is one clear winner. According spokesman Brian Brown on Twitter, “It is 1972 for marriage. This is the same as the time as before Roe v. Wade. . . . What if William Wilberforce listened to those telling him not to bring his religion into the public square?"

William Wilberforce was a British Member of Parliament in the 19th century who was almost single-handedly responsible for ending slavery in the British empire, and is today lauded as one of the most famous abolitionists in the world. He was also a devout Christian, which is the religion Brown references. But by comparing Wilberforce's public campaign against slavery to NOM's public campaign against marriage equality, they are equating the systematic sale and enslavement of an entire continent of people with the extension of the right to marry whom they choose to all Americans.

This comparison is offensive on a number of levels. It's offensive to LGBT p

If you've ever seen a movie featuring an English or Scottish funeral, chances are you've heard the song "Amazing Grace" played on the bagpipes. "Amazing Grace" is one of the most famous religious hymns today, but its history and origins are deeply intertwined with the abolition of the slave trade. And its message is one for all people, regardless of their faith.

"Amazing Grace" was written by a man named John Newton, who began his career as slave trader in England in the early part of the 18th century. For years he earned a living selling human beings kidnapped and lured from Africa to colonial plantations in the Caribbean and to Europe. Several years into his career, he and his crew managed to live through a particularly nasty storm, which set in motion a deep religious conversion for Newton. Over the course of the next couple years, he gave up profanity and drinking, and then eventually the slave trade. He became an Anglican priest and in the course of his work, wrote several popular hymns, including "Amazing Grace." Newton also mentored a young man named William Wilberforce, a British politician and devout Christian as well, who led the campaign for Parliament to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire, culminating in the Slave Trade Act 1807.

Many scholars have suggested that "Amazing Grace's" message of forgiveness and redemption is a result of John Newton's regret that he was involved in slavery. In the first verse, "I once was lost but now am found/ Was blind but now I see" could easily Newton's hindsight perception of his the  business of slavery as evil. The song was used several years later in the American anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, and later became a popular spiritual during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Even this year it was sung in unison in over 60 languages to set a Guinness World Record, demonstrating unity in diversity. John Newton may not have intended to write a song about abolition and freedom, but that's how many oppressed people have taken "Amazing Grace."

Slavery was made illegal in Yemen in 1962. But a judge there recently passed the ownership title for a slave from one master to another, legally and officially. His action has drawn international attention to slavery in Yemen, which is widely practiced and quasi-legal in some areas of the country.

Slavery, and even formal, acknowledged slavery, is not uncommon in Yemen. In the one small town where this legal slave transfer took place alone, residents claim approximately 300 slaves among them. And human rights groups have found that both men and women live in socially-accepted slavery across Yemen. In addition to the traditional slaves, many Yeminis who have been legally freed from slavery are still exploited and trapped in practice. Once freed, for example, a Yemini slave will sometimes go work for his former master. The master will provide his slave (even after legal freedom, the term slave is often used) with food and shelter, but no payment for his work. Whole families live like this for generations, with children born into slavery in practice if not in policy.

One of the major reasons Yemini authorities have been reluctant to address modern-day slavery is the power of rural tribes who have practiced slavery for centuries. These tribes have significant political, social, and religious control, and so the government is often unwilling to go after them for human rights violations. So while slavery in Yemen technically merits a 10 year prison sentence, that sentence is rarely enforced against the worst offenders.

The judge in question maintains that he only approved the legal transfer of a slave because the new owner promised to set him free. But regardless of his intentions, by recognizing the ownership title to a slave he put his stamp of approval on one human being owning another. And there is never a good reason to do that.

Photo credit: Aiace