"Slavery (n.) - A condition compared to that of a slave in respect of exhausting labor or restricted freedom."
Bondage, enslavement, servitude, drudgery, toil, hard labor, restriction. (Do these words sound familiar)
Slavery is simply, a lack of freedom. And still exists today.
Last weekend I drove to Cincinnati with a few friends to explore the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. The experience was beyond my expectations, and heightened my awareness to (no, not the history of the underground railroad) slavery in today. I want to talk about this experience I had and how each exhibit affected me incredibly.
The Underground Railroad. We all are aware of what it is, how it was used, and why, and if you don't then I would recommend research because this article isn't going to be about the history, it's going to be about the lack of change in America. The museum itself focused a lot on the concept of the Underground Railroad of course, but it morphed into a lot about modern slavery, more than I ever expected to know.
When we first walked into the museum, we were introduced with a Race IAT Test - An Implicit Association Test. I thought already that this was a fascinating way to begin such a journey throughout the museum. The test is used to determine how decisive a human can be, unknowingly. For the test, an individual sits down at a computer screen and is given four categories: European American, African American, Good Words, and Bad Words. The first task is to categorize the good words and European Americans into one category, and the African Americans and Bad words into the other. Then vice versa, Eur. Am. with bad words in one, and Af. Am. and good words in the other. They switch these two combinations and placements up a few times, and then determine how implicitly "racist" you are, based on the amount of mistakes, reaction time, and overall testing. At the end, it will either tell you that you have a strong preference for one or the other, or a weak preference between both. For me, my results were a weak distinction between the two, meaning I see people as what they are: All Human.
This fascinated me. The museum opened up with a concept that is so interactive and relevant, yet honest and slightly brutal (depending on how you take it) to the topic of race distinction. It prepares you for the forthcoming exploration throughout the museum with the idea of who you might've been over a hundred years ago. Or, who you are now, as I learned later on.
The museum begins with the basics: The Underground Railroad. The museum was extremely colorful, elaborate, interactive, and engaging. You saw the history told in words and pictures. You read words of Rosa Parks and escaped slaves. I saw a slave pen, clothes, cotton, houses used the the underground railroad. All in all, it was nothing new. At one point, humans used other humans as objects and laborers, storing them in housing and beating them while malnourished humans lived in misery. This is all stuff we learn throughout school, and why do we learn it? Well, to learn from our mistakes. To acknowledge what we had done and how it was wrong, and why we shouldn't repeat the past. What little America has truly learned.
The museum travels through many stories and pictures of the past and eventually hits an exhibit about today. Modern Slavery. A topic I had very little awareness of. And a topic that disgusts me to the bone, to know that people have not changed, and we may be treating humans worse now than ever before.
I hadn't realized that today, there are several different types of slavery, that are literally underground. Sex slave trades, trafficking, fraud, hard labor, drug abuse in labor, restriction of escaping work, debt, trafficking, sex slavery, trafficking, trafficking. Trafficking was a big one.
This is all currently happening today, and this blows my mind. I can not express how elaborate the museum was and how repulsive the exhibits and visuals were in truth. There were stories all over the walls about workers who were beaten and locked in cement rooms who couldn't escape the island they were working on, and if they did, they were tracked down and tortured. There were stories about girls and runaways who were picked up by traffickers, who were weak and afraid, and we're then used as sex slaves. There were stories of workers who used child laborers to fish 18 hour days and kept the children going buy forcing them to take amphetamines. One of the most disgusting facts that I read, was the price difference in slaves today compared to the past. Yes this does exist. In 1850, a slave sold at the price of $40,000. Today? 90 bucks. And today we are all vulnerable of what we may imagine as unrealistic and inevitable. We can be slaves to the thought of even money, debt, surrendering ourselves to the black hole of money for he rest of our lives. The truth remains the brutal fact that slavery is more than the past, it is today. The world is in a constant cycle of repetition.
"We are living in the midst of a tragic paradox; no longer is there an underground network to guide slaves to freedom, but rather there is an underground criminal network to entrap people and sell them into slavery. And, until we unit to confront this grave human rights violation, it will continue to plague the world and feed off of vulnerable men, women, and children." -The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
