Searing essay by Daryl Michael Scott (History, Howard Univ.), "The Scandal of Thirteentherism,” in the 2nd issue of @readliberties:

"At war with classical liberalism and 'neo-liberalism' alike, the progressives are busy rewriting American history.

(Thread, bc it's not online)

2/ "They want a past that reflects their dim view of the American record and justifies certain policies to address racial grievances. American history, they now instruct, is dominated by topics that liberals allegedly marginalized, including settler colonialism, slavery, ...

3/ "...white supremacy, whiteness, and peoples of color. [...] Racism explains slavery, which in turn explains the American Revolution and much else worth knowing about American history.

4/ "Rather than claiming their own version of the liberal tradition articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the Reconstruction Amendments, ...the New Deal, & the Civil Rights Acts..., progressives play up the failures & the betrayals of previous generations of liberals.

5/ "One of the pillars of American liberalism under assault is the Thirteenth Amendment. Many Americans now believe that slavery never ended — not despite but because of the amendment that fulfilled the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation.

6/ For the "Thirteenthers, it was the great amendment of 1865 that led to the re-enslavement of black people & mass incarceration. The key to...its evolution is the exception cause in the amendment, which ended slavery & involuntary servitude 'except as a punishment for crime.'

7/ "Under cover of those words, the Thirteenthers claim, ownership of slaves shifted from individuals to the state, even as the Thirteenth Amendment gave the American people, especially its newly freed people, the false impression that America had ended slavery once and for all.

8/ "Some...do not simply believe that the amendment led to mass incarceration; they also hold that [it was] a diabolical scheme concocted by whites as a race. [A]ll Thirteenthers [believe] the loophole created a seamless history of black slavery from the 17th century until today.

9/ "Thirteentherism is best viewed as another episode in a long tradition of using history as a weapon in a political struggle. At times, the distinction between historical truth and propaganda gets lost.

10/ "Rather than making the incontrovertible case that mass incarceration is an...evil, they...hitch their cause to the moral opprobrium that already exists against chattel slavery. They have little use for differences & distinctions, & ... wish to call incarceration slavery.

11/ "Never mind that Americans of African descent have always held historical truth as sacrosanct, believing that the dispelling of falsehoods is the proper foundation for black people's progress. Thirteentherism breaks with that black historical tradition of truth telling...

12/ "Of those seeing a white conspiracy to re-enslave blacks as convicts, an obvious question needs to be asked: why would Congress need to create a special constitutional amendment for blacks to make convict slaves of them? They had done that very thing to whites for centuries.

13/ "The Republican-dominated Congress [wanted to end] chattel slavery, nothing more, nothing less. They decided on language that had been [a] chattel slavery killer since 1787. The exception clause [entered] federal law when Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance in 1787.

14/ "Congress prohibited chattel slavery in the territories ceded to the fed gov't — except for those...found guilty of crimes, who could be subject to 'involuntary servitude or slavery.' Thomas Jefferson, who most likely drafted the provision, wanted to end the expansion...

15/ "...of chattel slavery. Congress required the exception clause as part of every constitution submitted by territories to enter the union as a free state. Over time, Jefferson's proviso...ended chattel slavery wherever it was enshrined in a state constitution.

16/ "The convict lease system is the indispensable element in the Thirteenthers' narrative, and every effort is made to play up its size, its duration, and its profitability. [...] And little attention is paid to the size of the system throughout its duration.

17/ "Instead the impression is given that re-enslavement captured a huge percentage of the black population. I repeat: the historical truth is that it captured less than one percent.

18/ "The small, brutish system of convict lease proved to be shorter in duration than the Thirteenthers suggest. They point out that AL's system existed until 1928, but rarely, if ever, do they note that it was an outlier. In the 1890s, VA, TN, SC, NC, and MS ended theirs.

19/ "Ironically, the white supremacist governments that brought the nation the illiberal institutions of state-mandated segregation and black disenfranchisement ended the system most associated with chattel slavery.

20/ "Rather than trying to persuade Americans that mass incarceration is an inherent and expensive evil, which is an indisputable proposition, Thirteenthers have sought to trade on America's moral distaste for chattel slavery, pretending that convict slavery was its offspring.

21/ "Thirteenther use of history as propaganda [for] a political end marks a break with the tradition of black history. [B]lack historians...have believed that ...falsehoods justified black oppression & that the truth [was] an ally in the movement for racial justice & equality.

22/ "By distorting the history of the Thirteenth Amendment and by denying one of black people's greatest triumphs in American history — the destruction of chattel slavery — this generation has sought to emancipate itself by diminishing its ancestors' prized accomplishment.

23/ "[This generation] has also sought to free itself from culpability for a system that all Americans, including blacks, had a part in making. The legion of black intellectuals who have conflated convict labor and chattel slavery have reached the limits of false persuasion.

24/ "History as propaganda works better to rationalize the status quo than to usher in change. Rejecting the historical meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment is not an avenue to progress.

25/ Read Daryl Michael Scott's entire "The Scandal of Thirteentherism”—a blistering critique of the premise of scholarship by Kimberlé Crenshaw and others and of DuVernay's film "13th"—in print (not online) in the new issue (the 2nd so far) of Liberties: https://libertiesjournal.com/issues/02/