Recently, I was scrolling through social media, when I saw this segment of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent interview with Hasan Minhaj. He says (you can also watch below):
“There are people who in 1830 — very intelligent people — would have said, ‘We cannot abolish slavery. If we abolish slavery, this country will collapse. There will be chaos. God knows what will happen.’
“Logically, there’s an argument for what they’re saying. I would never argue that, because what I would argue is slavery is so immoral that you can’t just sit here — there’s just no option to pursue this path, you know? It’s just that wrong. And I guess, like, when you highlight Yemen, as you just did, what I think about is not just Barack Obama. I think about — 75 years? How long are we going to make war in the Middle East? How long are we going to do this?
“How long — I think about Iran, you know, all the time. I don’t think — and I don’t mean this in any sort of disrespectful way — because people have lives and they have things they have to do — but I don’t think people understand. Between Iraq and Iran, how much war-making we’ve done over there and how violent our presence has been over there, and how, you know, in certain cases, how anti-democratic our presence has actually been. How long are we going to go on with this, man? Is this going to be every presidency after every presidency? And then each one makes some sort of excuse for why we have to do this.
“I just, I don’t want to be part of that project.”
A few days later, I was driving in my car when a news story from NPR came on. One of their reporters sat in on quarterly earnings calls for CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two private prison companies that are making billions of dollars by detaining immigrants in our country. People have been taken away at their immigration check-ins. Or they’ve been snatched after dropping off their kids at school. Or they went to the grocery store and never made it home.
And many are languishing in these detention centers. In the last quarter alone (also, why are we talking about quarters when these are human lives?), CoreCivic earned $1.4 billion. And this does not include the additional $1.6 billion CoreCivic has received after selling four of its facilities to the Department of Homeland Security.
If it is abhorrent to make money from bringing human beings into enslavement, is it not just as immoral to make a profit from ripping human beings from their families and their daily lives?
I just, I don’t want to be a part of that project. But I rarely do or say anything. I know that I am complicit.
Smuggling Grace 