Slavery as a Choice, Yesterday and Today

The purpose of this book is to detail whether American slavery was a choice decided by African-American captives that was not resisted against enormous coercion when it was legal and today when this peculiar institution is prohibited by law. Kanye West, his mentor, Trump, far right/white nationalists, and mentally enslaved people of color, blame African-Americans for choosing to be enslaved for 400 years. To them, the slave could walk away from captivity with relative ease but chose not to do so. This absurd notion is linked to the proslavery notion that American slavery was preferred by the slave over cannibalism and savagery in the jungles of Africa. That notion argues that many slaves were treated better than most poor whites because slave masters were benevolent, kind, and caring. The proslavery notion of choice left out the fact that many bounded slaves preferred suicide rather than slavery. They were bound to prevent this fate and escape from this inhuman condition. Yet, large numbers managed to escape their restraints, slave hunters, and to set-up maroon communities to protect themselves, family, and friends who took flight or joined them on their own or from raids on plantations. The maroons of Haiti even fought back two French military expeditions to maintain their freedom. Many of these communities rose throughout the Western Hemisphere. Their stories were intentionally left-out of historical accounts or was mitigated as undeserving acts of racial savagery due to too much freedom or benevolence. Turning to the present, this book looks at whether slavery has actually disappeared in policy, practice, custom, tradition, and race relations in a nation where our government is high jacked by white nationalists, like Trump and Ayn Rand/Social Darwin Republicans. It looks at the media, incarceration, prison labor, unlivable and disparate wages, racially inferior schools, environmental racism, disparate health conditions, treatment and life expectancy. The book also looks at extra-legal killings by rogue policing on par with slave patrols of the past and vigilantism. The thesis treaded throughout the book is that slavery in terms of status, racial treatment, and injustice, has transformed from blatant chains and whips to psychological dependency on white supremacy encompassed in thinking like their masters or "Stockholm syndrome" with hyperbolic self-hatred, PTSS, rage, and detrimental stress and anxiety conducive to chronic illnesses.