Falsehoods that Built America
We at the Unpaid Labor Project have asked ourselves some questions:
• What does Unpaid Labor mean to me?
• What do we think the Unpaid Labor Project will do for the first 12 generations of Americans of African descent?
• What do we think the Unpaid Labor Project will do for their descendants and for every American alive today?
• What must happen to change the system of racial superiority and inferiority that is hundreds of years old and still in place in America today?
Our answers to these questions have informed our efforts from the beginning.
America is the most successful nation in modern history. She stands on the foundation of the Contribution of the first 12 generations of Americans of African descent who lived between 1607 and 1865. That Contribution involves 12.5 million lifetimes of unpaid labor over the course of 250 years.
Between the years 1870 and 1900, the United States economy became the biggest in the world. It continued to be the biggest for more than 100 consecutive years. The economic strength of the world’s biggest economy made the development of the nation’s social, political, judicial, economic, educational, and military systems possible.
The forced labor system of racial slavery that was put in place 169 years before the United States became a nation required the following:
1. The creation of the false concept of race. The idea that people are fundamentally more or less human based upon their skin color and other physical characteristics.
2. Dehumanizing people imported from Africa to America for their labor. That allows for the people that imported them to twist their thinking in such a way as to allow those imported to be treated as animals or living tools. The forced compliance to the twisted thinking of the majority perverted the thinking of the Unpaid Laborers as well.
3. Using force to maintain the social order based upon this false concept of race.
By now, my reader will recognize that this whole system was built on falsehoods. What may not be so clear is that the thinking that supports this system has never changed. It lives on today in the false ideas of race and racial superiority and inferiority. What’s more these falsehoods support the idea that ending legal slavery has eliminated the thinking that made it possible. It has not. That thinking has kept the system of racial superiority and inferiority in place to this very moment.
The benefits of citizenship that everyone enjoys in America today have their foundation in Unpaid Labor Contribution. The racial disparities in our nation that express themselves in broken Black communities in every area in the United States have their foundation in the false system of race. The thousands upon thousands of “healthy” White communities in every area of the United States are the outgrowth of that same false system. The sick thinking that burdens blacks and whites alike is the inheritance of these same falsehoods.
Instead of seeking another compromise for the purpose of moving on by keeping these falsehoods in place it is time for a change. Racial slavery in the United States has been abolished. Now it’s time to abolish the false thinking that made it possible and that continues to plague us today. The Unpaid Labor Project is committed to that end.