Plantations, Circa 2012

We watched the movie "The Help" on Christmas afternoon, and boy, did those white people suck. If we are ever able to resurrect the dead, they'll have some serious explaining to do.

On the other hand, let 'em rot.

I was trying to wriggle out of my uncomfortableness by rationalizing that Iowa, where I'm from, was a Free State, and was part of the Underground Railroad. But Iowans were no saints. They ravaged the Indians who preceded them onto that fertile rectangle of land and then joined all the other so-called "Free States" in looking the other way while slavery ruled the South. Only when a law was passed allowing bounty hunters to cross state lines in pursuit of escaped slaves did the Free States decide slavery was worth fighting over.

I don't believe we acquire our fathers' debts, or that we are somehow liable for our forbears' acts of immorality. Because looking the other way as a crime occurs when you have the capacity to try to stop it is on the same octave of evil as owning slaves. Like about a C-sharp.

The other thing I realized is that there are many forms of slavery. When the Civil War finally ended Slavery 1.0, the Slavery 2.0 of the Jim Crow era popped up to take its place.

And now we have slavery 3.0, which is the inner-city government schools. Here are the similarities, if you are unlucky enough to be born into a poverty-stricken inner-city black family:

1. You are compelled to go.

2. Your family has no real options other than forcing you to go; they have no way to buy your freedom.

3. The plantation owner (the school system) gives you just enough sustenance to live, but not enough to prosper, and, when pressured by outsiders, maliciously cheats you out of whatever future you might have had.

4. An underground railroad springs up to deliver the children of a few desperate, clever parents to better schools.

Would white and black parents alike go to extraordinary expense and inconvenience to sneak their kids into Inman and Grady (Grady is not exactly Andover, unless you live in East/South/West Atlanta, in which case it is) if the schools there were not plantations?