Nope, I don’t want reparations, though I’m completing a book to advocate for it. I’m just saying that in the past we have a viewpoint of black American history that “things were worse” instead of “things were better”. To be clear, slavery was always evil, and the corporate slavery of the Portuguese and British had already been the worst in the history of world slavery. But that doesn’t mean white enslavers in the South couldn’t make it worse. They did. It was worse and in the early 1800s got even worse. After the Civil War it stayed bad, and in some ways worse, as freed black Americans were not worth anything on paper for whites in the South, so killing them wan’t taboo since they had no fear about damaging another white man’s “property” and paying “damages”, which were required by law. By the 1890s 5 percent of the “duly convicted” black Americans the state of Alabama leased to a coal mining company were killed every year. The coal mining company would then call the state and lease “duly” convicted “criminals” at the start of the next year, a practice of legalized slavery allowed under the Exception Clause in the 13th amendment. The practice became so successful and profitable that Alabama decided to make five year leases, effectively mandating a longer criminal sentence on the black men (and some women to be fair—or unfair) it leased out. Alabama and states like it were earning 50 to 75 percent of its budget from renting out these black humans. I’m just trying to raise awareness that sometimes the narrative of “things got better, we ended slavery” that white spout out is deeply embedded as a belief but also patently false. The reverse is true.