I spent about three years functionally enslaved by my ex, a white woman. I escaped her in January of 2019 only by months of planning, and when she finally found out I had gathered the means to get away from her and hid enough of my belongings with friends, one of the first things out of her fucking mouth was “how am I supposed to afford living here without you?” because even though we were no longer together, she had expected me to move in with her and her new boyfriend so that she could continue exploiting me economically.
In the past couple decades, I’ve met a couple dozen Black folks who have had a similar story happen to them with white people with varying timing/lengths. Some I’m still in contact with, some have disappeared, some I just ain’t kept ties with. No deed on us naming us their property legally, but thanks to the machinations of capitalism and white supremacy, property and slaves nonetheless—far beyond the average abusive relationship.
For a lot of y’all, slavery is something abolished a couple centuries ago and history is history, why should it affect you now? Why should there be reparations for Black people or countries? For slightly better-taught folks, when we think of modern slavery, we usually think of prison labor, human trafficking, undocumented and exploited labor, the exploitation of the global south, we think of systems. Don’t get me wrong that shit is still there and needs to be addressed, but some of y’all motherfuckers think the only slavery close to home for y’all is the white people calling themselves slaves on fetlife and that’s a problem to me.
When I first named myself Anonsee, it was as a SW mononym the year I got free from my enslaver, in part because of the version of Anansi played by Orlando Jones for American Gods despite never seeing the full show. In particular, there are two monologues I used to be able to recite perfectly from memory.
The first, Coming to America/Story of Black People, is a story Anansi tells to captured Africans on a slave ship who prayed to him for help. So, he tells them a story. He tells them how they don’t even know how fucked they are yet.
How over three centuries later, even after we “got free”, we would still be getting fucked economically, socially, physically, emotionally, mentally, every damn which way while the professional descendants of slave catchers still enslave us and kill us in the streets, in our homes, our schools, our jobs, anywhere they fucking please.
“You shed tears for Compe Anansi, and here he is, telling you…there isn’t one goddamn reason you shouldn’t go up there right now and slit the throats of every one of these Dutch motherfuckers, and set fire to this ship.”
One hesitant man speaks up, saying that if the ship burns, everyone on it will die.
To which Anansi retorts “You’re already dead, asshole. At least die a sacrifice for something worthwhile. Let. The motherfucker. Burn. Let it all burn.”
The second monologue has him meeting with other African gods in a funeral home, who ask him why he’s so full of rage when they wish to choose peace, to choose complacency, to simply accept how things are.
Anansi says “I am not a god, in the sense that I can tolerate exploitation, oppression, and repression, my worshippers KNOW freedom ain’t free and that the most potent weapon of control for the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed; they know slavery is not a condition, slavery is a cult. Human trafficking is a cult. Slavery got a rebrand like mothafuckin ‘The Alt-Right’ and snatched, another one gone.”
How every 30 seconds, another Black girl fucking disappears, and the new plantation owners built a pipeline to take us from school to prison while we live as a suppressed, oppressed people within the imperial core, living as spectacle, tool, or to be disappeared—no AMBER alert. Snatched, 30 seconds, another one gone.
“The world assumes white people are naturally good, so when something bad happens, it’s a good person doing a bad thing. They assume Black people are naturally bad, so when something good happens, it’s only a matter of time before that animal’s true nature rears its ugly head.”
I run into people regularly who think Abolitionism is too far. Shit, some of them are even Black and think that if we simply reform modes of slavery everything will be ok—that if we just make sure its just the bad ones who experience slavery, surely we can keep the same systems in place. Hell, California even majority voted against abolishing slavery couple years ago. For economic reasons, you understand, right?”
If you are not at bare minimum an Abolitionist, you do not have an actually liberatory politic. If you say “slavery is generally bad but-“ you are not anti-Slavery. If you don’t see a world where every. single. individual. has baseline inalienable right to their life and freedom with no “but” or “except” tacked on at the end, you are a whole lot closer to being a pro-slavery motherfucker than I’m comfortable knowing, to being one of the motherfuckers that helped keep me enslaved to her for years.
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