In the United States, freedom has never been free. For Black Americans, in particular, the price of freedom has been immense, paid through generations of impossible decisions and forced compromises with the loss of history, family unity, financial stability, and privacy.
Costs that emerged in efforts to escape chattel slavery now continue as many fight to escape its legacy in our carceral system, revealing an ongoing scheme of racialised community destabilisation and economic extraction. In this context, efforts to establish a universal basic income in the United States must not be seen as charity or even policy innovation, but as necessary reparations and redress.
The 13th Amendment did not abolish slavery – it revised it and shrouded it in secrecy. By including an exception clause allowing slavery “as punishment for a crime”, Congress preserved the legal grounds for forced labour. In the aftermath of emancipation, Southern lawmakers used the clause to criminalise everyday Black life through Black Codes and funnel newly freed people into profitable “convict leasing” programmes.
