The painful absurdity of AG William Barr's slavery comment - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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"It is incredible, as chief law enforcement officer in this country, to equate human bondage to expert advice to save lives. Slavery was not about saving lives. It was about devaluing lives."
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Slavery was not about saving lives. It was about devaluing lives. For hundreds of years, enslaved Africans were beaten, tortured, raped and treated as property.
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"The institution of slavery was, for a quarter of a millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired,
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In this system, African captives "could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner's debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate," Wilkerson writes.
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That Barr painted a few months of being told -- or really, in many cases, asked -- to stay home during a global pandemic as even remotely in the same category as the practice of enslavement is ridiculous. (To say nothing of the fact that he skipped over, among other things, Jim Crow, Japanese internment during World War II, and the slaughter of Native Americans.)
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You know, I think the narrative that the police are on some, you know, epidemic of shooting unarmed Black men is simply a false narrative and also the narrative that that's based on race," Barr said earlier this month
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According to The Washington Post's police shootings database, Black Americans are killed by police at more than twice the rate of their White counterparts, despite the fact that the former make up less than 13% of the country's population.
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"It was also Barr, serving as then-President George H.W. Bush's attorney general, who helmed the federal response during 1992's Los Angeles riots, which came after four officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King," Vazquez wrote. "That was, in fact, the last time the Insurrection Act was invoked -- the 1807 law allowing for the use of US military on US soil.