just a soul whose intentions are good

thing thats bad: aww

thing that has both genuinely amazing pieces of storytelling and abysmal dogshit slop both happening like entirely interchangably:

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

"Around 63,000 inmates produce goods for external sale...from farm work and manufacturing to call center and distribution services."

"In Oklahoma and Mississippi, [work release] is not restricted to inmates. Oklahoma uses defendants sent to rehabilitation programs to process chickens at a private facility for no pay... Mississippi has ‘restitution programs’ where it sends people to work off debts owed to the state by acting as a temp agency for a number of industries."

"...federal immigration detention centers rely on the labor of civil immigrant detainees to lower their operating costs. The large prison corporations running the centers – like CoreCivic and GEO Group – are currently facing lawsuits, alleging that they employ deprivation schemes, where detained immigrants are forced to choose between living without basic necessities or working for sub-minimum wages, and then are threatened with punishment for refusing to work."