Joy James opens his article “The Dysfunctional and the Disappearing: Democracy, Race and Imprisonment” by defining what democracy should look like and acknowledging that the US does not meet these standards, leading to racial segregation, censorship of political views, and torture in prisons. All of which serve as a means to create divide and keep people of color, especially black people, confined to the ideals that slavery believed in. In the autobiography “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano” chapter 2 focuses on how he was captured as a child and sold into slavery, documenting the culture shocks he experienced as well as his experiences with the brutality of slavery.
Both of the articles focus on slavery or the ideals behind slavery at two different points in time. The autobiography enforces and builds upon what people usually think about when they hear slavery: the kidnapping and selling of people while the article focuses on how these ideas have evolved and found a place in modern day society with the mistreatment of prisoners today. Booth texts include insights about commonly forgotten people in this context: children and women, whose identity changes the struggles they face in society but does not exclude them from slavery or prison.
The first article is very numbers based which restates ideas that many people should already be familiar with. Presenting these ideas with the history behind these inequalities as well as various statistics throughout the article makes it hard for people to deny stories like these and pass them off as coincidences or analogies that don’t accurately represent the situation. One of the statistics from the first text that surprised me the most was how the majority of women who were incarcerated were convicted of economic and non-violent crimes and that 80% of women had an annual income of less than $2000. This highlights that the nature of these crimes is survival and how the prisons should not condemn them to more debt and work for less than minimum wage.
As for the second text, it was interesting to see a child’s story represented, especially when he mentioned feeling like he was adopted into one of the families that bought him. It reminds you of a child’s nativity and how that was exploited throughout the process. I hope that it attracted people’s sympathy when it was first published.
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