A new system of slavery
The church’s response to the call for reparations can begin with resistance to the prison-industrial complex
by Rima Vesely

Slavery is being practiced by the system under the cover of law. ... Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today; it’s the same thing, but with a new name. They’re making millions and millions of dollars enslaving blacks, poor whites and others — people who don’t even know they’re being railroaded.

– Ruchell Magee (a political prisoner)

With the call for reparations sounding from the black intellectual left voice of American politics, a crisis within the African-American community has been exposed. Poverty rates remain high, the quality of education and health care remains low, and the underground economy functions as one of few financial options within destitute neighborhoods. Aggressive police forces continue to racially profile people of color and minimum drug laws instituted by state lawmakers across the country have resulted in a prison-industrial complex that now incarcerates more than two million people. Fifty-one percent of inmates are African Americans and most are convicted of non-violent crimes. With states and corporations profiting from the labor of inmates, another system of slavery has been put into place — this time behind prison bars.

Reparations, therefore, is both a call for financial compensation for four hundred years of historical slavery and a call for response against the new system under which slavery now operates. The mass of people caught up within the prison system has become fodder for profit, and the prison industry is aptly termed "slavery" within black political circles. Denied rights, bargaining power and visibility, inmates within the prison-industrial complex work for the state or corporations in a country that instituted the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery but did not outlaw forced labor for convicts. (The amendment reads: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment of crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.")

State politicians use prisons as a growth industry, instituting legislation that upholds minimum drug law sentences, therefore providing jobs for small-town communities as well as an extensive labor pool for both state and corporate entities. In a New York Times article written in August 2001, journalist David Rohde wrote: "New York’s sprawling 70-facility, $2.4-billion-a-year prison system pours hundreds of millions of dollars into the upstate economy each year. … Corrections officers’ salaries start at $33,000 and rise to $48,000 in 20 years."

Corporations such as Westinghouse, Sprint, MCI, Smith Barney, American Express, General Electric and Corrections Corporation of America use prison labor, paying inmates anywhere from 23 to 65 cents per hour. Prison laborers are unable to have union protection, bargaining power, rights to organize or strike, file a grievance of complaint, circulate an employee petition or newsletter or call meetings.

How do Christians who call themselves the Body of Christ respond?

As a young African-American woman who has come into the Episcopal Church after years in movement politics, this question stands before me, as visible in its urgency as the computer I type upon. Episcopal liturgy brings all of us into a spiritual realm that calls us to recognize the invisible of our society, an inner space in which we are reminded of Christ’s anguish and passion for the outcast of his times. The reality of suffering that Christ entered and made visible compels the church, as the Body of Christ, into a political movement that seeks to manifest the very actions of Christ in the work of repairing and restitution. God is found not only at the altar, but as the radical Anglican theologian William Stringfellow writes, also in the profane, difficult, violent world which is inseparable from sacramental worship. Stringfellow’s theology, which he calls "the theology of the Incarnation," begins with Christ’s presence in an unredeemed world. Stringfellow writes that "When a congregation gathers in sacramental worship, the members of the Body are offering the world to God, not for his sake, not for their own sake, but for the sake of the world, and the members then and there celebrate God’s presence in the world, and on behalf of the world, even though that world does not yet discern his presence."

The response of the church in the movement for reparations begins with the recognition of the invisible within our society: misunderstood, denied, perceived as a threat to the status quo. The Body of Christ is compelled to reach out to every person rejected by society, those whom Christ himself sought out and loved, healed and repaired. The reparations movement is essentially founded upon the same actions of healing and repairing the overwhelming violence done to people of African descent. And thus the reparations movement is essentially a religious movement, in which the church as the visible Body of Christ is able to have an essential and critical voice. The boldness of Christians during the abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement paved the way for modern-day boldness and moral critique of slavery and the reparations movement. Those whom Christ called his disciples to reach out to and recognize in our times are found behind bars, degraded and dehumanized, exploited for profit, invisible, voiceless. They are precisely the ones that the church is called to free.

Freedom must occur on a multitude of levels. The sophisticated political analysis grounding the reparations movement reveals the interlocking systems of oppression that maintain this system of slavery behind prison bars. In present times, whole communities are devastated by the drug trade and minimum drug law sentences. Thus the cycle of devastation begun with chattel slavery continues. A study done by Harvard professor Lawrence Bobo found that in 1998 there was less than ten cents in a black household for every one dollar in a white household.

This fight against financial destitution and modern-day slavery is our civil rights movement, and it is intimately connected with the movement for reparations. In pragmatic, concrete ways, Christians can rally against racist minimum drug laws and growth-industry prison building, oppose legislators who stake their campaigns on aggressive community policing, and form networks with organizations committed to direct care of inmates. Thus there exists a multitude of means by which churches can support the political campaign begun by the black left.

Reparations for communities

Individuals who oppose the reparations movement point out the difficulty of providing reparations to individuals. Yet the connections between historical slavery, racism, poverty and current levels of incarceration cannot be ignored. Thus while the government may logistically argue against reparations for individuals, clearly reparations for communities of African Americans living in impoverished neighborhoods will support schools, health care facilities, housing, job training, and employment opportunities.

While calling for investment into low-income communities, Christians are taking a stand against the poverty fueling the drug trade, which directly feeds the prison-industrial complex. Far beyond duty, becoming part of this movement is essentially how we understand our identity as the Body of Christ. As we take part in the Eucharist, we become part of one another and become part of the risen Christ, who in breaking bread, disappeared from the sight of his followers. We are Christ’s followers today, and as we live Christ’s absence into presence, we too are the Body called upon to repair and heal by rallying against slavery and supporting the call for reparations.