Slave Codes Quotes

Slaves are not allowed to say no. Laborers may be hesitant to say no. But professionals are expected to say no. Indeed, good managers crave someone who has the guts to say no. It’s the only way you can really get anything done.

Hey, check this weirdo out." Hi was inspecting a bust on the mantel. "This face is ninety percent eyebrow. What do you want to bet he owned slaves?" Scowling to match the carving's expression, Hi spoke in a gravelly voice. "In my day, we ate the poor people. We had a giant outdoor grill, and we cooked up peasant steaks every Sunday."

Don't be a slave to history. Don't let existing code dictate future code. All code can be replaced if it is no longer appropriate. Even within one program, don't let what you've already done constrain what you do next -- be ready to refactor... This decision may impact the project schedule. The assumption is that the impact will be less than the cost of /not/ making the change.

I have sometimes thought--that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!

Rules. Even as the world of phone and computer sex (and dominance) were full of their own rules, so was the new world of doing-it-for real. And some of these new rules, (OK, most of them, Robin admitted) were just as silly as the ones she had learned and followed before. Safe words, for example. Magic words that when said by the bottom, stopped a scene so that some kind of inconvenient or dangerous activity could be halted. Robin had nothing against the concept......... Having a code to use so that you're free to pull against the bondage or whimper "no, no, no" seemed to be a great idea. But having all these possible ways to orchestrate what was happening seemed, well, contrary to the point........ I want to feel that I can't stop it. I want to be really mastered, taken over by someone who isn't goin to stop doing things because I'm not getting off on it. Someone who knows enough not to endanger me, unless that was what was intended.........

I dislike guilt." the Morrigan said." it is regret and recrimination and despair over that which cannot be changed. It is like eating ashes for breakfast. It is the whip that clerics use on the laity, making the sheep slaves to whatever moral code the shepherds espouse. it is a catalyst for suicide and untold other acts of selfishness and stupidity. I cannot think of a more poisonous emotion!" ... "Why do you bother to feel it?" Atticus: "Because an inability to feel guilt points to sociopathic tendencies.

Hey, check this weirdo out.” Hi was inspecting a bus on the mantel. “This face is ninety percent eyebrow. What do you wanna bet he owned slaves?” Scowling to match the carving’s expression, Hi spoke in a gravelly voice. “In my day, we ate the poor people. We had a giant outdoor grill, and cooked up peasant steaks every Sunday. “That is General Clemmons Brutus Claybourne, you twit,” a voice said dryly. “He commanded two companies during the Revolution, before dying at Yorktown. You might show a little respect.

people who choose to work seven days a week are essentially slaves

Men enforce a code of behaviour on each other, when working together. Do your work. Pull your weight. Stay awake and pay attention. Don’t whine or be touchy. Stand up for your friends. Don’t suck up and don’t snitch. Don’t be a slave to stupid rules. Don’t, in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, be a girlie man. Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period. The harassment that is part of acceptance on a working crew is a test: are you tough, entertaining, competent and reliable? If not, go away. Simple as that. We don’t need to feel sorry for you. We don’t want to put up with your narcissism, and we don’t want to do your work.

She remembered reading how the American South had often compared itself to Rome back before the Civil War. In the old days their society had been all about impressive architecture, honor, and codes of chivalry. And on the evil side, it had also been about slavery. Rome had slaves, some Southerners had argued, so why shouldn’t we? Annabeth shivered. She loved the architecture here. The houses and the gardens were very beautiful, very Roman. But she wondered why beautiful things had to be wrapped up with evil history. Or was it the other way around? Maybe the evil history made it necessary to build beautiful things, to mask the darker aspects.

If you notice, the moral law in the other legal codes separates people (the Laws of Manu, the caste system, the Code of Hammurabi with the slave/owner distinction). In Islam, the violator is inferior to the obedient one. By contrast, in the Hebrew-Christian tradition, the law unifies people. No one is made righteous before God by keeping the law. It is only following redemption that we can truly understand the moral law for what it is---a mirror that indicts and calls the heart to seek God's help. This makes moral reasoning the fruit of spiritual understanding and not the cause of it.

In the comfortingly distorted view of the past, American slavery came about in the passive sense. That's just the way things were back then. Slavery was an inherited reality, a long-standing if unsavory fact of trade and war. In reality, colonial legislatures consciously conceived American chattel slavery at the turn of the eighteenth century, and they spelled out its terms in painstaking regulatory detail. Virginia's slave codes contained forty-one sections and more than four thousand words. ... The slave codes of 1705 are among American history's most striking evidence that our nation's greatest sins were achieved with clear forethought and determined maintenance.

Hammurabi’s Code, for example, established a pecking order of superiors, commoners and slaves. Superiors got all the good things in life. Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained. Despite

the shrewdest and most powerful anti-Black criminals have legalized their criminal activities, have managed to define their crimes of slave trading and enslaving and discriminating and killing outside of the criminal code.

In his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson contrasts law and in the Congo in the early 16th century with law in Portugal and England. In those European countries, where the idea of private property was becoming powerful, theft was punishable brutally. In England, even as late as 1740, a child could be hanged for stealing a rag of cotton. But in the Congo, communal life persisted. The idea of private property was a strange one, and thefts were punished with fines or various degrees of servitude. A Congolese leader told of the Portuguese legal codes asked a Portuguese once, teasingly, 'What is the penalty in Portugal for anyone who puts his feet on the ground?

The word union itself seemed to be a dog whistle in the South, code for undeserving people of color who needed a union to compensate for some flaw in their character. As the workers spoke, I realized that it couldn’t be a coincidence that, to this day, the region that is the least unionized, with the lowest state minimum wages and the weakest labor protections overall, was the one that had been built on slave labor—on a system that compensated the labor of Black people at exactly zero.

To the extent the divine source and inalienability of our rights are purported to be factual, history has proved our Founding Fathers plainly wrong: Every right has, in fact, been alienated by governments since the beginning of time. Within a generation of the establishment of our nation, the Founding Fathers rescinded virtually every right they previously declared unalienable. John Adams, one of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, alienated the right to speak freely and express dissenting views when, as president, he enforced the Alien and Sedition Acts against his political opponents—with Hamilton’s support. (Perhaps Hamilton’s God had not given “sacred rights” to Jeffersonians!) Another of the drafters, Jefferson himself, alienated the most basic of rights—to the equal protection of the laws, based on the “truth” that “all men are created equal”—when he helped to write (and strengthen) Virginia’s “Slave Code,” just a few years after drafting the Declaration of Independence. The revised code denied slaves the right to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness by punishing attempted escape with “outlawry” or death. Jefferson personally suspected that “the blacks … are inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.” In other words, they were endowed by their Creator not with equality but with inferiority. There is no right that has not been suspended or trampled during times of crisis and war, even by our greatest presidents. ... I wish there were an intellectually satisfying argument for the divine source of rights, as our Founding Fathers tried to put forth. Tactically, that would be the strongest argument liberals could make, especially in America, where many hold a strong belief in an intervening God. But we cannot offer this argument, because many liberals do not believe in concepts like divine hands. We believe in separation of church and state. We are pragmatists, utilitarians, empiricists, secularists, and (God forgive me!) moral relativists. We are skeptical of absolutes (as George Bernard Shaw cynically quipped: “The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.”).

As the population of software developers ages, they care more about the rest of their lives. Many lament wasting their twenties locked up in an office slaving over a piece of code that failed to reach market expectations and became obsolete soon after release. Work/life

The book was Shelley, and it opened at a passage that he had cherished greatly two years before, and marked as “very good.” “I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is, that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion, though it is in the code Of modern morals, and the beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go.

The future Harriet Tubman was born a slave in Dorchester County, Maryland, in 1822. In 1844 she married a free man, John Tubman. Five years later, fearing that she was about to be sold, Tubman tapped into a local network, received two names of safe houses from a white neighbor, and fled north toward Philadelphia. The journey was terrifying and mystical. She navigated using the North Star; she may have followed the drinkiri gourd, a code name for the Big Dipper; and in a clear homage to the Israelites’ flight from Egypt, she recalled that she felt led by an “invisible pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night.

There were slave traders, Nazis, and Communists who were compassionate in their personal lives, but all of them told, and most of them believed, some great lie that enabled them to participate in a great evil. Black slavery was made possible in large measure by the lie that blacks were innately inferior to whites.

The underground railroad maintained no lines to speak of. The decoys in negro dress, the secret codes in the back pages of newspapers. They openly bragged of their subversion, hustling a slave out the back door as the slave catchers broke down the front. It was a criminal conspiracy devoted to theft of property, and Ridgeway suffered their brazenness as a personal slur.

In Berlin, Stauffenberg and his confederates had at last perfected their plans. They were lumped under the code name “Valkyrie”—an appropriate term, since the Valkyrie were the maidens in Norse-German mythology, beautiful but terrifying, who were supposed to have hovered over the ancient battlefields choosing those who would be slain. In this case, Adolf Hitler was to be slain. Ironically enough, Admiral Canaris, before his fall, had sold the Fuehrer the idea of Valkyrie, dressing it up as a plan for the Home Army to take over the security of Berlin and the other large cities in case of a revolt of the millions of foreign laborers toiling in these centers. Such a revolt was highly unlikely—indeed, impossible—since the foreign workers were unarmed and unorganized, but to the suspicious Fuehrer danger lurked everywhere these days, and, with almost all the able-bodied soldiers absent from the homeland either at the front or keeping down the populace in the far-flung occupied areas, he readily fell in with the idea that the Home Army ought to have plans for protecting the internal security of the Reich against the hordes of sullen slave laborers.

Christianity, as it was first given to the slaves [...] was to be used strictly as a code of conduct which would enable its devotees to participate in an afterlife; it was from its very inception among the black slaves, a slave ethic. [...] One of the very reasons Christianity proved so popular was that it was the religion, according to older Biblical tradition, of an oppressed people. The struggles of the Jews and their long-sought "Promised Land" proved a strong analogy for the black slaves.

I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is, that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion, though it is in the code Of modern morals, and the beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go. - Epipsychidion

The system was psychological and physical at the same time. The slaves were taught discipline, were impressed again and again with the idea of their own inferiority to “know their place,” to see blackness as a sign of subordination, to be awed by the power of the master, to merge their interest with the master’s, destroying their own individual needs. To accomplish this there was the discipline of hard labor, the breakup of the slave family, the lulling effects of religion (which sometimes led to “great mischief,” as one slaveholder reported), the creation of disunity among slaves by separating them into field slaves and more privileged house slaves, and finally the power of law and the immediate power of the overseer to invoke whipping, burning, mutilation, and death. Dismemberment was provided for in the Virginia Code of 1705. Maryland passed a law in 1723 providing for cutting off the ears of blacks who struck whites, and that for certain serious crimes, slaves should be hanged and the body quartered and exposed.

But forgiveness is not a moral rule that comes with sanctions attached. God doesn’t deal with us on the basis of abstract codes and rules like that. Forgiveness is a way of life, God’s way of life, God’s way to life; and if you close your heart to forgiveness, why, then you close your heart to forgiveness. That is the point of the terrifying parable in Matthew 18, about the slave who had been forgiven millions but then dragged a colleague into court to settle a debt of a few pence. If you lock up the piano because you don’t want to play to somebody else, how can God play to you? That is why we pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” That isn’t a bargain we make with God. It’s a fact of human life. Not to forgive is to shut down a faculty in the innermost person, which happens to be the same faculty that can receive God’s forgiveness. It also happens to be the same faculty that can experience real joy and real grief. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Of

A final word should be said concerning the status of free blacks. Before the American Revolution this status had been ambiguous, and the number of free blacks was insignificant. <...> A rash of new laws, similar to the later Black Codes of Reconstruction, reduced free blacks almost to the status of slaves without masters. The new laws regulated their freedom of movement, forbade them to associate with slaves, subjected them to surveillance and discipline by whites, denied them the legal right to testify in court against whites, required them to work at approved jobs, and threatened them with penal labor if not actual reenslavement.

Her parents didn't get it. Life was different now. The future, her future and that of everyone else her age, had blown up in slow motion. She lived the way she did because greed had sucked the juice out of the world and it was no longer possible to get one of those humble but promising jobs that led, with hard work and perseverance, to something that might be considered a career. Instead you competed with ambitious, underpaid people on the Indian subcontinent for the sucky customer service jobs, or you might choose to go the tech route and work as a coding slave, or sign noncompete and binding arbitration agreements with some major corporation that still required human bodies to do their dirty work for them.

Two Points of View If I forget, — May joy pledge this weak heart to sorrow! If I forget, — May my soul's coloured summer borrow The hueless tones of storm and rain, Of ruth and terror, shame and pain, — If I forget! Though you forget, — There is no binding code for beauty; Though you forget, — Love was your charm, but not your duty; And life's worst breeze must never bring A ruffle to your silken wing, — Though you forget. If I forget, — The salt creek may forget the ocean; If I forget, — The heart whence flows my heart's bright motion, May I sink meanlier than the worst, Abandoned, outcast, crushed, accurst, — If I forget! Though you forget, — No word of mine shall mar your pleasure; Though you forget, — You filled my barren life with treasure, You may withdraw the gift you gave, You still are lord, I still am slave, — Though you forget.

Early in the colonys history, he argued, the European men who came to the colonies "burning with the desire to make a fortune" but "weakened by the heat of the climate, often sick, and deprived of the aid wives of their own color could have given them," turned to "African women." These slave women cared for them assiduously, hoping to gain "the greatest recompense, their liberty." "These first whites," Raimond explained, "lived with these women as if they were married" and had children with them. Some freed the women and married them, as the Code Noir stipulated whites who had children with slaves should do. Many whites left land and slaves to their partners and children. Indeed it was generally expected that they would do so, and Saint-Domingue whites resisted royal attempts to institute laws outlawing such bequests. As a result, a class of property-owning free people of color emerged in the colony.s

By the end of 1865, so-called Black Codes began to forge a new caste system in the South, a segregated world where freed slaves worked as indentured servants, subject to arrest if they left jobs before their annual contracts expired. It was a cruel new form of bondage, establishing the foundations of the Jim Crow system that later ruled southern race relations. In South Carolina, blacks were confined by law to their plantations, forced to work from sunup to sundown. In Florida, blacks who showed “disrespect” to their bosses or rode in public conveyances reserved for whites could be whipped and pilloried. In Mississippi, it became a criminal offense for blacks to hunt or fish, heightening their dependence upon white employers. Thus, within six months of the end of the Civil War, there arose a broadly based retreat from many of the ideals that had motivated the northern war effort, reestablishing the status quo ante and white supremacy in the old Confederacy.

The history of slavery provides the spine of this novel. Some texts that offered “deep background” were Boubacar Barry’s Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, which excavates eighteenth-century slave trading history in Wolof-speaking areas of West Africa, and Walter Rucker’s Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power, about Asante peoples of West Africa, those who would come to be called “Coromantee.” Sylviane Diouf’s Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas is a must-read for anyone interested in Muslim history on the American side of the Atlantic. And Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History gives background information about the brutal transatlantic slave trade. In addition, the digitized Georgia Archives provided information about eighteenth-century slave and Native American codes, as well as Land Lottery records. Henry Louis Gates’s edited The Classic Slave Narratives, which include Jacobs’s as well as Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies, continue to be so important to me. Ailey’s family lives

Virginia lawmakers made slave patrols compulsory for non-slaveholding Whites; these groups of White citizens were charged with policing slaves, enforcing discipline, and guarding routes of escape. The Virginia legislature also denied Blacks the ability to hold office. Evoking repeatedly the term “christian white servant” and defining their rights, Virginia lawmakers fully married Whiteness and Christianity, uniting rich White enslavers and the non-slaveholding White poor. To seal the unity (and racial loyalty), Virginia’s White lawmakers seized and sold all property owned by “any slave,” the “profit thereof applied to the use of the poor of the said parish.” The story would be told many times in American history: Black property legally or illegally seized; the resulting Black destitution blamed on Black inferiority; the past discrimination ignored when the blame was assigned. Virginia’s 1705 code mandated that planters provide freed White servants with fifty acres of land. The resulting White prosperity was then attributed to White superiority.

But it is also true that this long-winded, unwieldy compilation of assorted prescriptions represents an overall softening—a humanizing—of the common law of the ancient Middle East, which easily prescribed a hand not for a hand but for the theft of a loaf of bread or for the striking of one’s better and which gave much favor to the rights of the nobility and virtually none to the lower classes. The casual cruelty of other ancient law codes—the cutting off of nose, ears, tongue, lower lip (for kissing another man’s wife), breasts, and testicles—is seldom matched in the Torah. Rather, in the prescriptions of Jewish law we cannot but note a presumption that all people, even slaves, are human and that all human lives are sacred. The constant bias is in favor not of the powerful and their possessions but of the powerless and their poverty; and there is even a frequent enjoinder to sympathy:     “A sojourner you are not to oppress:     you yourselves know (well) the feelings of the sojourner,     for sojourners were you in the land of Egypt.” This bias toward the underdog is unique not only in ancient law but in the whole history of law. However faint our sense of justice may be, insofar as it operates at all it is still a Jewish sense of justice.

Nietzsche, one of the main thinkers being channeled by rightist chan culture knowingly or otherwise, argued for transgression of the pacifying moral order and instead for a celebration of life as the will to power. As a result, his ideas had appeal to everyone from the Nazis to feminists like Lily Braun. Today, the appeal of his anti-moralism is strong on the alt-right because their goals necessitate the repudiation of Christian codes that Nietzsche characterized as slave morality. Freud, on the other hand, characterized transgression as an anti-civilizational impulse, as part of the antagonism between the freedom of instinctual will and the necessary repressions of civilization. Perhaps the most significant theorist of transgression Georges Bataille inherited his idea of sovereignty from de Sade, stressing self-determination over obedience. Although rightist chan culture was undoubtedly not what Bataille had in mind, the politically fungible ideas and styles of these aesthetic transgressives are echoed in the porn-fuelled shocking content of early /b/ and in the later anti-liberal transgressions of the later /pol/. Bataille revered transgression in and of itself, and like de Sade viewed non-procreative sex as an expression of the sovereign against instrumentalism, what he called ‘expenditure without reserve’. For him excessive behavior without purpose, which also characterizes the sensibility of contemporary meme culture in which enormous human effort is exerted with no obvious personal benefit, was paradigmatically transgressive in an age of Protestant instrumental rationality.

I dislike guilt,” the Morrigan said. “It is regret and recrimination and despair over that which cannot be changed. It is like eating ashes for breakfast. It is the whip that clerics use on the laity, making the sheep slaves to whatever moral code the shepherds espouse. It is a catalyst for suicide and untold other acts of selfishness and stupidity. I cannot think of a more poisonous emotion.” “I don’t like it either,” I admitted. “So why do you bother to feel it?” the Morrigan asked. “Because an inability to feel guilt points to sociopathic tendencies.” The Morrigan made a purring noise deep in her throat, and her hands rose to pinch her nipples. “Oh, Siodhachan. Are you suggesting I’m a sociopath? You always say the sweetest things.” I took a step back and raised my own hands defensively. “No. No, that wasn’t meant to be sweet or flirtatious or anything.” “What’s the matter, Siodhachan?” “Nothing. I’m just not being sweet.” The Morrigan’s eyes dropped. “Fair enough. Looks to me like you’re scared stiff.” I looked down and discovered that the sodding abundance and fertility bindings weren’t messing around. “Ignore that guy,” I said, pointing down. “He’s always intruding on my conversations and poking his head in where he’s not wanted.” “But what if I want him?” The Morrigan had an expression on her face that was almost playful; it humanized her, and for a moment I forgot she was a bloodthirsty harbinger of death and realized how stunningly attractive she was. She reminded me of one of those old Patrick Nagel prints, except very much in three dimensions and far more sexy. I found it difficult to come up with a clever reply, perhaps because most of the blood that used to keep my brain functioning well had relocated elsewhere.

[I]t is perhaps more important to realize that the regime most difficult to change is oligarchy, the regime which occupies the central place in the order of regimes presented in the Republic. Surely, the city to be founded must not be tyrannically ruled. The best regime is that in which a god or demon rules as in the age of Kronos, the golden age. The nearest imitation of divine rule is the rule of laws. But the laws in their turn depend on the man or men who can lay down and enforce the laws, i.e., the regime (monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, aristocracy, democracy). In the case of each of these regimes a section of the city rules the rest, and therefore it rules the city with a view to a sectional interest, not to the common interest. We know already the solution to this difficulty: the regime must be mixed as it was in a way in Sparta and Crete, and it must adopt a code framed by a wise legislator. The wise legislator will not limit himself to giving simple commands accompanied by sanctions, i.e., threats of punishment. This is the way for guiding slaves, not free men. He will preface the laws with preambles or preludes setting forth the reasons of the laws. Yet different kinds of reasons are needed for persuading different kinds of men, and the multiplicity of reasons may be confusing and thus endanger the simplicity of obedience. The legislator must then possess the art of saying simultaneously different things to different kinds of citizens in such a way that the legislator’s speech will effect in all cases the same simple result: obedience to his laws. In acquiring this art he will be greatly helped by the poets. Laws must be twofold; they must consist of the “unmixed law,” the bald statement of what ought to be done or forborne “or else,” i.e., the “tyrannical prescription,” and the prelude to the law which gently persuades by appealing to reason. The proper mixture of coercion and persuasion, of “tyranny” and “democracy,” of wisdom and consent, proves everywhere to be the character of wise political arrangements.

Dehumanization has fueled innumerable acts of violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocides. It makes slavery, torture, and human trafficking possible. Dehumanizing others is the process by which we become accepting of violations against human nature, the human spirit, and, for many of us, violations against the central tenets of our faith. How does this happen? Maiese explains that most of us believe that people’s basic human rights should not be violated—that crimes like murder, rape, and torture are wrong. Successful dehumanizing, however, creates moral exclusion. Groups targeted based on their identity—gender, ideology, skin color, ethnicity, religion, age—are depicted as “less than” or criminal or even evil. The targeted group eventually falls out of the scope of who is naturally protected by our moral code. This is moral exclusion, and dehumanization is at its core. Dehumanizing always starts with language, often followed by images. We see this throughout history. During the Holocaust, Nazis described Jews as Untermenschen—subhuman. They called Jews rats and depicted them as disease-carrying rodents in everything from military pamphlets to children’s books. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Indigenous people are often referred to as savages. Serbs called Bosnians aliens. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. I know it’s hard to believe that we ourselves could ever get to a place where we would exclude people from equal moral treatment, from our basic moral values, but we’re fighting biology here. We’re hardwired to believe what we see and to attach meaning to the words we hear. We can’t pretend that every citizen who participated in or was a bystander to human atrocities was a violent psychopath. That’s not possible, it’s not true, and it misses the point. The point is that we are all vulnerable to the slow and insidious practice of dehumanizing, therefore we are all responsible for recognizing it and stopping it. THE COURAGE TO EMBRACE OUR HUMANITY Because so many time-worn systems of power have placed certain people outside the realm of what we see as human, much of our work now is more a matter of “rehumanizing.” That starts in the same place dehumanizing starts—with words and images. Today we are edging closer and closer to a world where political and ideological discourse has become

But the punishments! Imperial bureaucrats who accepted bribes were to have their hands cut off (Theodosian Code 1.16.7); ineffective guardians of girls who had been seduced were to have molten lead poured down their throats (Theodosian Code 9.24.1); tax collectors who treated women tax delinquents rudely were to “be done to death with exquisite tortures”; anyone who served as an informer was to be strangled and “the tongue of envy cut off from its roots and plucked out” (Theodosian Code 10.10.2); slaves who informed on their masters were to be crucified (Theodosian Code 9.5.1.1); How is one to account for such judicial cruelty from a Christian emperor? MacMullen suggests that by the fourth century Christianity was revealing an increasingly cruel streak. He notes in particular the heightened popularity of the Christian literature... in recounting in graphic detail the torments of hell for those who refuse to do God’s will. Possibly what applied to heaven applied to earth: If this is how God handles sin, then who are we to act differently? Religious beliefs may have made judicial punishment specially aggressive, harsh, and ruthless.

Hammurabi’s Code, for example, established a pecking order of superiors, commoners and slaves. Superiors got all the good things in life. Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained.

Where there is simplicity, there is sustainability. Donde hay simplicidad, hay sostenabilidad. A materialistic and self-absorbed world chasing after the so-called sustainable development goals is like a superobese dog chasing after its own tail. In a self-absorbed world sustainability is a myth. In a simple and gentle world sustainability is the norm. So let's forget about sustainability. Let's forget about sustainable development goals. These are all gimmick. I’ll tell you why. Sustainable development goals is actually the privileged lot's code for ‘let's screw this world with our narcissistic shenanigans, then we can make TV shows on us pretending to fix the world's problems that we continue to create with our lavish, self-centric lifestyle.’ It's not a global goal, it's a global scam, sold by the rich to the rich at the expense of everybody else - at the expense of the working people of planet earth. Am I being too harsh? Perhaps I am, but then again, this planet has never been the home of the human race, it has always been the home of the rich and privileged, while the rest of humanity slave their butt off, barely scraping by on hand-me-downs and leftovers. The privileged screw the world, then the privileged pretend to fix the world. What a joke! So instead of focusing on intellectual pomposities like sustainable development goals, the next time you indulge in a luxury, ask yourself, is it a luxury you really need – if not, how many lives you could lift with the resources spent on that particular luxury! Let me put it into perspective. One fancy apple watch could feed a family of four in the developing parts of the world for half a year. So, stop talking about sustainable development goals, and start practicing sustainable habits.

The Negro Act of 1740 had as its foundational principles that Negroes were “absolute slaves” including those not even born yet. They were “property.” They were instinctually criminal. And therefore they must be “kept in due subjection and obedience.” With that as the underlying premise, the statute, which became the model for slave codes throughout North America, required heavy-handed white control that curtailed the enslaved’s movements, literacy, right to self-defense, and access to firearms.

Not only is the Bible not literally true—not only is it a book full of what can charitably be described as a hodge-podge of remarkably violent legends, tall tales and tribal history, interspersed with a little lyric poetry, a lot of revenge-filled fantastical rants and some origin myths—but these were all told and then set down in writing to reinforce first, a patriarchal desert agriculture society several thousand years ago, then a slave empire in Rome, and then an oppressive feudal society in Europe. It is filled with codes of behavior that are either hypocritical or openly oppressive. Now this same ancient stuff is being adapted to reinforce the capitalist oppression of today, in a 25-million-dollar, cleverly-promoted, Hollywood film.

Much to the slaveholders' delight, the degradation of slave life increased the social distance between plantation slaves and urban free people of color. Nothing seemed to be further from the cosmopolitan world of New Orleans and the other Gulf ports than the narrow alternatives of the plantation, with its isolation, machine-like regimentation, and harsh discipline. As free people of color strove to establish themselves in the urban marketplace and master the etiquette of a multilingual society, they drew back from the horrors of plantation life and from the men and women forced to live that nightmare. The repulsion may have been mutual. Plantation slaves, many of them newly arrived Africans, little appreciated the intricacies of urban life and had neither the desire nor the ability to meet its complex conventions. Rather than embrace European-American standards, planation slaves sought to escape them. Their cultural practices pointed toward Africa - as did their filed teeth and tribal markings. While free people of color embraced Christianity and identified with the Catholic Church, the trappings of the white man's religions were not to be found in the quarter. Planters, ever eager to divide the black majority, labored to enlarge differences between city-bound free people of color and plantation slaves. Rewarding with freedom those men and women who displayed the physical and cultural attributes of European Americans fit their purpose exactly, as did employing free colored militiamen against maroons or feting white gentlemen and colored ladies at quadroon balls. It was no accident that the privileges afforded to free people of color expanded when the danger of slave rebellion was greatest. Nor was it mysterious that the free colored population grew physically lighter as the slave population - much of it just arrived from Africa - grew darker. But somatic coding was just one means of dividing slave and free blacks. Every time black militiamen took to the field against the maroons or a young white gentlemen took a colored mistress, the distance between slaves and free people of color widened.

With the end of the American Revolution, ambitious European and American planters and woud-be planters flowed into the lower Mississippi Valley. They soon demanded an end to the complaisant regime that characterized slavery in the long half century following the Natchez rebellion, and Spanish officials were pleased to comply. The Cabildo - the governing body of New Orleans - issued its own regulations combining French and Spanish black codes, along with additional proscriptions on black life. In succeeding years, the state - Spanish (until 1800), French (between 1800 and 1803), and finally American (beginning in 1803) - enacted other regulations, controlling the slaves' mobility and denying their right to inherit property, contract independently, and testify in court. Explicit prohibitions against slave assemblage, gun ownership, and travel by horse were added, along with restrictions on manumission and self-purchase. The French, who again took control of Louisiana in 1800, proved even more compliant, reimposing the Code Noir during their brief ascendancy. The hasty resurrection of the old code pleased slaveholders, and, although it lost its effect with the American accession in 1803, planters - in control of the territorial legislature - incorporate many of its provisions in the territorial slave code. Perhaps even more significant than the plethora of new restrictions was a will to enforce the law. Slave miscreants faced an increasingly vigilant constabulary, whose members took it upon themselves to punish offenders. Officials turned with particular force on the maroon settlements that had proliferated amid the warfare of the Age of Revolution. They dismantled some fugitive colonies, scattering their members and driving many of them more deeply into the swamps. Maroons unfortunate enough to be captured were re-enslaved, deported, or executed.

Having seized the most fertile lands and prime riverine locations, planters made the region safe for slavery by securing political power. Without exception, territorial governors were appointed from the ranks of the planter class or those who would soon enter the planter class, and slaveholders populated the territorial and state legislatures as well as county courthouses and sheriffs' offices. Those legislatures imported slave codes from the established slave states, sometime borrowing provisions that had first been enacted by Barbadian planters in the mid-seventeenth century at the start of the sugar revolution. Kentucky's slave code derived from that of Virginia, Tennessee's could be traced back to North Carolina, and Mississippi's to Georgia. Upon entering the new territories, planters could be assured that their claim to property-in-perons would be protected, that their rights to discipline their slaves would be unchallenged, and that slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike would cooperate in the return of fugitives and the suppression of slave rebels. Behind the master class stood the power of the state in the form of militia, police juries, and patrols.

Psychiatry doesn’t heal, it controls, and it doesn’t deal with the soul, but with the brain. It is the ultimate weapon against spiritual conscience, when the educational system and the social structure seem to fail in producing functional slaves.

Shirt" The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, The nearly invisible stitches along the collar Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break Or talking money or politics while one fitted This armpiece with its overseam to the band Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. One hundred and forty-six died in the flames On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes— The witness in a building across the street Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step Up to the windowsill, then held her out Away from the masonry wall and let her drop. And then another. As if he were helping them up To enter a streetcar, and not eternity. A third before he dropped her put her arms Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down, Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers— Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.” Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks, Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian, To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor, Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers To wear among the dusty clattering looms. Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader, The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields: George Herbert, your descendant is a Black Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit And feel and its clean smell have satisfied Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality Down to the buttons of simulated bone, The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape, The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

There had to be something near racial parity in the early stages because setting up the infernal machine required at least as many Europeans as Africans. Consequently, the original contact language had to be not too far from the language of the slave owners. Because at this stage Europeans were teaching Africans what they had to do, the contact language had to be intelligible to native speakers of the European language. Because so many interactions were between Europeans and Africans, the latter would have much better access to that European language than at any later stage in plantation history. We should remember that Africans, unlike modern Americans, do not regard monolingualism as a natural state, but expect to have to use several languages in the course of their lives. (In Ghana, our house-boy, Attinga, spoke six languages-two European, four African-and this was nothing out of the ordinary.) But as soon as the infrastructure was in place, the slave population of sugar colonies had to be increased both massively and very rapidly. If not, the plantation owners, who had invested significant amounts of capital, would have gone bankrupt and the economies of those colonies would have collapsed. When the slave population ballooned in this way, new hands heavily outnumbered old hands. No longer did Europeans instruct Africans; now it was the older hands among the Africans instructing the new ones, and the vast majority of interactions were no longer European to African, the were African to African. Since this was the case, there was no longer any need for the contact language to remain mutually intelligible with the European language. Africans in positions of authority could become bilingual, using one language with Europeans, another with fellow Africans. The code-switching I found in Guyana, which I had assumed was a relatively recent development, had been there, like most other things, from the very beginning. In any case, Africans in authority could not have gone on using the original contact language even if they'd wanted to. As we saw, it would have been as opaque to the new arrivals as undiluted French or English. The old hands had to use a primitive pidgin to communicate with the new hands. And, needless to add, the new hands had to use a primitive pidgin to communicate with one another. Since new hands now constituted a large majority of the total population, the primitive pidgin soon became the lingua franca of that population. A minority of relatively privileged slaves (house slaves and artisans) may have kept the original contact language alive among themselves, thus giving rise to the intermediate varieties in the continuum that confronted me when I first arrived in Guyana. (For reasons still unknown, this process seems to have happened more often in English than in French colonies.) But it was the primitive, unstructured pidgin that formed the input to the children of the expansion phase. Therefore it was the children of the expansion phase-not the relatively few children of the establishment phase, the first locally born generation, as I had originally thought-who were the creators of the Creole. They were the ones who encountered the pidgin in its most basic and rudimentary form, and consequently they were the ones who had to draw most heavily on the inborn knowledge of language that formed as much a part of their biological heritage as wisdom teeth or prehensile hands.

Encouraged by a sympathetic president, Mississippi in November of 1865 passed Black Codes to replace the prewar Slave Codes. All other former Confederate states quickly followed suit. The white power structure intended the laws to legalize a racial hierarchy, separate the races (something new: segregation had been the custom only in the North before the war), and insure a cheap labor force.

Enoch stood. He carried with him a tablet and dove right into his rebuttal. “The testimony we have just heard from the Accuser has several half-truths in it, or as I would more accurately define them, lies.” Enoch read from the clay tablet in his hand. “Yahweh Elohim did not say that the couple could not touch the tree, he said that they could not eat of it. That is an exaggeration of the command to make the Creator appear excessive and overbearing. Secondly, it was not ‘the tree of knowledge’ that was forbidden, it was the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil.’ Yahweh Elohim was not forbidding knowledge to humanity, he was commanding reliance upon him as their ultimate authority to define good and evil. And we are right back to ultimate authorities that I spoke of earlier. Yahweh Elohim is the only ground of morality that can justify the Accuser’s own attack on morality.” Enoch paused for a moment in thought, then said, “It would not surprise me if one day, the serpent will have effectively convinced the masses with more of these kinds of distortions. I can imagine him twisting the ‘forbidden fruit’ into sex, and turning Yahweh Elohim into a cosmic killjoy prude who just wants to keep people from having fun.” Enoch launched into his conclusion, “No, the forbidden fruit is the essence of freedom. The Accuser would have us believe that boundaries of protection are actually restrictions of oppression; that rules repress human potential and laws take away freedom. He and his Watchers argue that freedom is the ability to do whatever one wants without an external code imposed upon them. Let each man be a law unto himself. Yet, look around the earth below to see the consequences of such ideas. Humans have achieved the self-determination from the knowledge of good and evil and in so doing have become slaves to their own lusts. Prisoners of their desire. They claim to be free, but they are everywhere in chains of their own making. Only in the boundaries of a loving Creator can humanity be free. Is a fish out of the water free? Is a bird out of the sky free? Only in fulfilling our god-given purpose can mankind experience the liberty of obedience. Disobedience is not enlightenment, it is pure blindness; it is not freedom, it is slavery.” Enoch stood for a moment as his words sank into his own soul. He realized that he had fought God’s purpose for himself so many years — that he prayed when he should have fought, fought when he should have prayed, and too often exhibited the ultimate sin of spiritual pride. Enoch fell to his knees and wept in repentance before Yahweh Elohim.

The refusal to examine Islamic culture and traditions, the sordid dehumanization of Muslims, and the utter disregard for the intellectual traditions and culture of one of the world’s great civilizations are characteristic of those who disdain self-reflection and intellectual inquiry. Confronting this complexity requires work and study rather than a retreat into slogans and cliches. And enlightened, tolerant civilizations have flourished outside the orbit of the United Sates and Europe. The ruins of the ancient Mughal capital, Fatehpur Sikri, lie about 100 miles south of Delhi. The capital was constructed by the emperor Akbar the Great at the end of the sixteenth century. The emperor’s court was filled with philosophers, mystics and religious scholars, including Sunni, Sufi, and Shiite Muslims, Hindu followers of Shiva and Vishnu, as well as atheists, Christians, Jains, Jews , Buddhists and Zoroastrians. They debated ethics and beliefs. He forbade any person to be discriminated against on the basis of belief and declared that everyone was free to follow any religion. This took place as the Inquisition was at its height in Spain and Portugal, and as Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Rome’s Campo de Fiori. Tolerance, as well as religious and political plurality, is not exclusive to Western culture. The Judeo-Christian tradition was born and came to life in the Middle East. Its intellectual and religious beliefs were cultivated and formed in cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. Many of the greatest tenets of Western civilization, as is true with Islam and Buddhism, are Eastern in origin. Our respect for the rule of law and freedom of expression, as well as printing, paper, the book, the translation and dissemination of the classical Greek philosophers, algebra, geometry and universities were given to us by the Islamic world. One of the first law codes was invented by the ancient Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, in what is now Iraq. One of the first known legal protections of basic freedoms and equality was promulgated in the third century B.C. by the Buddhist Indian emperor Ashoka. And, unlike, Aristotle, he insisted on equal rights for women and slaves. The division set up by the new atheists between superior Western, rational values and the irrational beliefs of those outside our tradition is not only unhistorical but untrue. The East and the West do not have separate, competing value systems. We do not treat life with greater sanctity than those we belittle and dismiss. Eastern and Western traditions have within them varied ethical systems, some of which are repugnant and some of which are worth emulating. To hold up the highest ideals of our own culture and to deny that these great ideals exist in other cultures, especially Eastern cultures, is made possible only by a staggering historical and cultural illiteracy. The civilization we champion and promote as superior is, in fact, a product of the fusion of traditions and beliefs of the Orient and the Occident. We advance morally and intellectually only when we cross these cultural lines, when we use the lens of other cultures to examine our own. It is then that we see our limitations, that we uncover the folly of or own assumptions and our prejudices. It is then that we achieve empathy, we learn and make wisdom possible.

a British world that was developing more and more sophisticated racist ideas to rationalize African slavery. English scientists and colonizers seemed to be trading theories. Around 1677, Royal Society economist William Petty drafted a hierarchical “Scale” of humanity, locating the “Guinea Negroes” at the bottom. Middle Europeans, he wrote, differed from Africans “in their natural manners, and in the internal qualities of their minds.” In 1679, the British Board of Trade approved Barbados’s brutally racist slave codes, which were securing the investments of traders and planters, and then produced a racist idea to justify the approval: Africans were “a brutish sort of People.

Proslavery legislators repressed the very captives they said were docile, and restricted the education of the very people they argued could not be educated. Racist ideas, clearly, did not generate these slave codes. Enslaving interests generated these slave codes. Racist ideas were produced to preserve the enslaving interests.

It is the whip that clerics use on the laity, making the sheep slaves to whatever moral code the shepherds espouse. It is a catalyst for suicide and untold other acts of selfishness and stupidity.

In 1775 the Congress had called slaves “domestic enemies,” tacitly reproducing the long-refuted argument that slavery was the right of the victor in war.

am familiar with the biblical concept of the ‘times of the Gentiles,’ but what is a final Jubilee?” “I’m not sure about that, but a biblical Yowbel, or Jubilee as most know it, is a cycle of fifty years which culminate in a year of release. To use the definition in Leviticus 25, a Jubilee is seven cycles of seven years, and then the year following these forty-nine years is the Jubilee.” Rachael interjected, “During the Jubilee, YHWH commanded all debts to be forgiven and slaves set free. It was a mandatory economic recalibration, so to speak. The Bible goes on to explain this Yowbel was given so the people would not abuse each other.

yowbel was the Hebrew word for a ram’s horn trumpet. The first occurrence of the word in the Scripture was when YHWH shouted out the Ten Commandments verbally to Israel in the wilderness. That was before he wrote the law on the tables of stone. The next thirteen occurrences of the word were in relation to the Jubilee cycle as given to Moses in Leviticus 25. This was, as he had already learned, a cycle of fifty years which ended in the release of slaves and the forgiveness of debts. How could the Jubilee be connected to the 13th Enumeration?

Leviticus 25 states that a Jubilee is seven sets of seven years, and the following or fiftieth year is the Jubilee. On the Day of Atonement in this fiftieth year, all debts are forgiven and all slaves are to go free. This reset, so to speak, kept commerce and trade in balance. Before I go any further, let me give you a brief explanation of both schools of thought on how to count the yearly Jubilee.

Every institution of our day, the family, the State, our moral codes, sees in every strong, beautiful, uncompromising personality a deadly enemy; therefore every effort is being made to cramp human emotion and originality of thought in the individual into a straight-jacket from its earliest infancy; or to shape every human being according to one pattern; not into a well-rounded individuality, but into a patient work slave, professional automaton, tax-paying citizen, or righteous moralist.

Slaves were considered by slave traders and slaveholders as chattel, pieces of personal or real property owned by individuals. Yet the willful killing of slaves was illegal. However, these crimes were rarely, if ever, prosecuted within the states because state legal codes provided exceptions that allowed slave owners to claim that the killing of the slave had been justified or accidental. Slave captains routinely ordered crew members to throw sick slaves overboard, almost as a matter of hygiene, to keep them from contaminating the cargo and, more

As South Carolina’s black labor force grew and reduced whites to minority status, their fears rose accordingly, especially given their perception of African people. Carolina’s first comprehensive slave code, passed in 1712, confirms this. After its preamble explains why slavery was an absolute necessity, it issued a stern warning about the dangerous presence of African people. The Negroes, it said, “are of barbarous, wild, savage natures,” wholly unfit to be governed under the enlightened law of the province. Therefore special laws were required “for the good regulating and ordering of them, as may restrain the disorders, rapines and inhumanity, to which they are naturally prone and inclined; and may also tend to the safety and security of the people of this Province and their estates.” Under these circumstances and to maintain order, it was necessary for all whites to cooperate and, if necessary, use violence to enforce the law.

(Taken from Chapter Three 'The Bewildered Herd', After the massacre, Rebeka's reflects on her work at Project Code-X...) We were rounded up like frightened animals, who didn’t know what their fate was going to be. I was comforted a little by having Michael’s company. It afforded me some protection from the pandemonium of grief and raw emotion that was all around me. I was able to hide my face from it, and perhaps hide my guilt too. Was I really to blame for all of this? Project Code-X wasn’t just written on my hands, it was carved into my heart and flowing through my veins. It was my life’s work, my ambition, my achievement, the pinnacle of my career. I had given my life to it and it had taken my life from me. In truth, I was no more than its slave. Project Code-X wasn’t just a secret Government project; it was a living and breathing entity. It was a life-force, a parasite, an animal, a wild beast that fed on human lives. It drank human blood and fed on human flesh. It sucked you in and spat you out – all in the name of science.

For African Americans, war commenced not in 1861, but in 1661, when the Virginia Colony began passing America's first black codes, the charter documents of a slave society that rendered blacks a permanent servile class and whites a mass aristocracy. They were also a declaration of war.

Enslaving interests generated these slave codes. Racist ideas were produced to preserve the enslaving interests.20 William

vagrancy was coded as a black crime, one punishable by incarceration and forced labor, sometimes on the very plantations that previously had thrived on slave labor.

For by what manner of right did Xerxes march against Greece, or his father against Scythia? Or take the countless other cases of the sort that one might mention. Why, surely these men follow nature—the nature of right—in acting thus; yes, on my soul, and follow the law of nature[nomos phuseos]—though not that, I dare say, which is made by us; we mold the best and strongest amongst us, taking them from their infancy like young lions, and utterly enthrall them by our spells and witchcraft, telling them the while that they must have but their equal share, and that this is what is fair and just. But, I fancy, when some man [aner] arises with enough nature [hikanen phusin], he shakes off all that we have taught him, bursts his bonds, and breaks free; he tramples underfoot our codes and juggleries, our charms and “laws,” which are all against nature; our slave rises in revolt and shows himself [epanastas anephane] our master, and there shines [exelampse] out the full light of the right by nature  [tes phuseos dikaion].

If we go back to the origins of Western civilization, to Greek or Roman times, we find that membership of Homo sapiens was not sufficient to guarantee that one's life would be protected. There was no respect for the lives of slaves or other ‘barbarians’; and even among the Greeks and Romans themselves, infants had no automatic right to life. Greeks and Romans killed deformed or weak infants by exposing them to the elements on a hilltop. Plato and Aristotle thought that the state should enforce the killing of deformed infants. The celebrated legislative codes said to have been drawn up by Lycurgus and Solon contained similar provisions. In this period, it was thought better to end a life that had begun inauspiciously than to attempt to prolong that life, with all the problems it might bring.

The most obvious explanation for explaining black-white inequality, especially historically, is racism and discrimination. African Americans first arrived in the United States in large numbers in colonial times via the slave trade and were heavily concentrated in southern states, such as South Carolina and Mississippi, where they often worked on plantations. They had few rights and could be bought and sold at will, meaning that families were frequently broken up at the discretion of their owners. Each state had its slave code that regulated the relationship between the slave and owner. The South Carolina slave code, for example, stated, among many provisions, that no slave should be taught to write and that slaves were forbidden to leave the owner’s property unless accompanied by a white person or by permission. Masters who killed their slaves without justification were subject to a fine, but all types of punishments (including those leading to the death of slaves) for infractions were allowed.

But here is a Collective Ghost of more than household Scale,— the Wrongs committed Daily against the Slaves, petty and grave ones alike, going unrecorded, charm’d invisible to history, invisible yet possessing Mass, and Velocity, able not only to rattle Chains but to break them as well. The precariousness to Life here, the need to keep the Ghost propitiated, Day to Day, via the Company’s merciless Priesthoods and many-Volum’d Codes, brings all but the hardiest souls sooner or later to consider the Primary Questions more or less undiluted. Slaves here commit suicide at a frightening Rate,— but so do the Whites, for no reason, or for a Reason ubiquitous and unaddress’d, which may bear Acquaintance but a Moment at a Time.

In addition, social status for slaves transferred from mother to child rather than from father to child, so regardless of your father’s status, you would be a slave if your mother was enslaved. Those changes in social codes ensured eighteenth-century planters of Virginia a steady supply of workers.

Paul’s primary means of subverting the Greco-Roman household code was the same as Jesus’s method. Jesus taught that any leader among the disciples had to become everyone’s slave (Matt. 20:27; Mark 10:44).

Yemen is one of the few countries to implement traditional Sunni shari’a law and a limited liability company scam at the same time. Owning slaves is legal—the fiction is that the owner has an option hedged on the indentured laborer’s future output, with interest payments that grow faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them off—and companies are legal entities. If Amber sells herself into slavery to this company, she will become a slave and the company will be legally liable for her actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal instrument—about ninety percent of it, in fact—is a set of self-modifying corporate mechanisms coded in a variety of jurisdictions that permit Turing-complete company constitutions, and which act as an ownership shell for the slavery contract. At the far end of the corporate shell game is a trust fund of which Amber is the prime beneficiary and shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she’ll acquire total control over all the companies in the network and can dissolve her slave contract; until then, the trust fund (which she essentially owns) oversees the company that owns her (and keeps it safe from hostile takeover bids). Oh, and the company network is primed by an extraordinary general meeting that instructed it to move the trust’s assets to Paris immediately. A one-way airline ticket is enclosed

Negro Code in 1685 authorised marriage between the white and the slave who had children by him, the ceremony freeing herself and her children. The Code gave the free Mulattoes and the free Negroes equal rights with the whites. But as the white population grew larger, white San Domingo discarded the convention, and enslaved or sold their numerous children like any king in the African jungle. All efforts to prevent concubinage failed, and the Mulatto children multiplied, to be freed or to remain slaves at the caprice of their fathers.

By 1636, civil authorities on the island decreed a rule that became common in chattel systems throughout the hemisphere: slaves would remain in bondage for life. In 1661, with the island now amid a full-blown sugar boom, the authorities formulated a fuller set of laws governing the lives of slaves, a Black code that one historian has called “one of the most influential pieces of legislation passed by a colonial legislature.” Antigua, Jamaica, South Carolina, and, “indirectly,” Georgia adopted it in its entirety, while the laws of many other English colonies were modeled after it. The law described Africans as a “heathenish, brutish and uncertaine, dangerous kinde of people,” and gave their white owners near total control over their lives. The right of trial by jury guaranteed for whites was excluded for slaves, whom their owners could punish at will, facing no consequences even for murder, so long as they could cite a cause. Other rules barred Black slaves from skilled occupations, thus helping to reify race as a largely impermeable membrane dividing whites and Blacks in the New World. With steps like these, tiny Barbados became an enormously powerful driver of history, not only through the prodigious wealth it would generate, a wealth hitherto “unknown in other parts of colonial America,” but by its legal and social example as well. The island colony stood out as a pioneer in the development of chattel slavery and in the construction of the plantation machine, as the originator of codes like these, and later as a crucial source of early migration, both Black and white, to the Carolinas, Virginia, and later Jamaica. Here was the seed crystal of the English plantation system in the New World, or in the words of one historian, its “cultural hearth.

[S]lavery had been in place in the New World since 1502. By 1641, Governor Winthrop, a devout Puritan, helped the colony produce a code of laws making slavery legal that lasted 140 years. Though the Puritans sought religious freedom, it was just for themselves. They saw themselves as God's special people and their Bible as sanctioning bondage.

The custom of chopping hands of death enemies was a local custom and was introduced in the Congo by the Arabs from the Muslim sharia law to punish thieves. The first penal code introduced by Leopold II in 1888, strictly forbids this cruel practice. The report of "The Inquiry Commission" of 1905 is absolutely clear in this respect. Though this report was extremely severe in denouncing such crimes, King Leopold II did not hesitate to have it published - in extenso - in the "Journal Officiel de l'Etat Indépendant du Congo" and issued no less than 24 royal decrees to put an end to all those malpractices.

THE REASON WHY all this has to be stated here is simply that women, who could state it much better, have almost unanimously refrained from discussing such matters at all. One finds, indeed, a sort of general conspiracy, infinitely alert and jealous, against the publication of the esoteric wisdom of the sex, and even against the acknowledgment that any such body of erudition exists at all. Men, having more vanity and less discretion, are a good deal less cautious. There is, in fact, a whole literature of masculine babbling, ranging from Machiavelli's appalling confession of political theory to the egoistic confidences of such men as Nietzsche, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Casanova, Max Stirner, Benvenuto Cellini, Napoleon Bonaparte and Lord Chesterfield. But it is very rarely that a Marie Bashkirtsev or Margot Asquith lets down the veils which conceal the acroamatic doctrine of the other sex. It is transmitted from mother to daughter, so to speak, behind the door. One observes its practical workings, but hears little about its principles. The causes of this secrecy are obvious. Women, in the last analysis, can prevail against men in the great struggle for power and security only by keeping them disarmed, and, in the main, unwarned. In a pitched battle, with the devil taking the hindmost, their physical and economic inferiority would inevitably bring them to disaster. Thus they have to apply their peculiar talents warily, and with due regard to the danger of arousing the foe. He must be attacked without any formal challenge, and even without any suspicion of challenge. This strategy lies at the heart of what Nietzsche called the slave morality--in brief, a morality based upon a concealment of egoistic purpose, a code of ethics having for its foremost character a bold denial of its actual aim.

After Reconstruction ended, and when the federal troops who had stayed behind to protect newly freed black slaves went home, Democrats came back into power in the South. They quickly reestablished white supremacy across the region with measures like black codes --- laws that restricted the ability of blacks to own property and start businesses. They imposed poll taxes and literacy tests used to subvert black citizens' voting rights. These laws were enforced by terror, much of it instigated by the KKK, which was founded by Democrat Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Do I have a soul?” Was he a sack of meat controlled by a biological computer that evolved over millions of years? Or could he make choice? Was he happy, or was it just chemicals? Did he love his wife and children or was he just a slave to serotonin and dopamine? Was anything he experienced really experienced? Or was it all just reacting to stimuli with pre-coded responses? This is a question often asked by humans. Some find their answer, and some don´t. Some choose to live as slaves to their chemicals, adopting nihilism. They are weak, they are the ones who are too scared to see goodness in the world, too scared to accept that they are a product of their own choices, good or bad.

Reconstruction era, “Black codes” replaced slave codes. Like their predecessors, the Black codes controlled the movements of formerly enslaved Black people, severely restricted liberty in employment and conduct, and continued to empower state police forces and the white population at large to enforce them.

To seal the unity (and racial loyalty), Virginia’s White lawmakers seized and sold all property owned by “any slave,” the “profit thereof applied to the use of the poor of the said parish.” The story would be told many times in American history: Black property legally or illegally seized; the resulting Black destitution blamed on Black inferiority; the past discrimination ignored when the blame was assigned. Virginia’s 1705 code mandated that planters provide freed White servants with fifty acres of land. The resulting White prosperity was then attributed to White superiority

Right in the middle of a Stevie Wonder concert, right in the middle of this musical trance, this electronic night with thousands in the stadium, a night worthy of Metropolis with the thousands of cerebro-motor slaves gyrating to the rhythm of synthesizers and all the lighter flames serving as a luminous ovation - a new ritual worthy of the catacombs - I feel a total coldness, complete indifference to this faked music, without the slightest melodic phrase, music of a pitiless technicity. Everything is both visceral and coded at the same time. A strictly regulated release, a cold ceremonial, very far in human terms from its own musical savagery, which is merely that of technology. Only the visual impact remains, the spectacle of the crowd and its phYSical idolatry, particularly as the idol is blind and directs the whole thing with his dead eyes, exiled from the world and its tumult, but absorbing it all like an animal. The same air of sacredness as with Borges. The same translucidity of the blind, who enjoy the benefits of the silence of light and therefore of blackmail by lucidity. But modern idolatry is not easily accepted; the bodies stay clenched. Technicity wins out over frenzy in the new metropolitan nights. Growing old is not the approach of a biological term. It is the ever lengthening spiral which distances you from the physical and intellectual openness of your youth. Eventually, the spiral becomes so long that all chance of return is lost. The parabola becomes eccentric, and the peak of one's life-curve gets lost in space. Simultaneously the echo of pleasures in time becomes shorter. One ceases to find pleasure in pleasure. Things live on in nostalgia, and their echo becomes that of a previous life. This is the second mirror phase, and the beginning of the third age.

In the end, proslavery legislators batted away every single antislavery measure, and ended up pushing through an even more harrowing slave code than the one that had been in place. Proslavery legislators repressed the very captives they said were docile, and restricted the education of the very people they argued could not be educated. Racist ideas, clearly, did not generate these slave codes. Enslaving interests generated these slave codes. Racist ideas were produced to preserve the enslaving interests.

But first Paul explains the strange double life that results for those who—like his own former self—are living “under the law,” delighting in it as God’s law, but finding that it accuses them: We know, you see, that the law is spiritual. I, however, am made of flesh, sold as a slave under Sin’s authority. I don’t understand what I do. I don’t do what I want, you see, but I do what I hate. So if I do what I don’t want to do, I am agreeing that the law is good. But now it is no longer I that do it; it’s Sin, living within me. I know, you see, that no good thing lives in me, that is, in my human flesh. For I can will the good, but I can’t perform it. For I don’t do the good thing I want to do, but I end up doing the evil thing I don’t want to do. So if I do what I don’t want to do, it’s no longer “I” doing it; it’s Sin, living inside me. (7:14–20) Doubtless, this passage has multiple resonances in the experience of anyone who has ever tried to keep any serious moral code. Doubtless too it is framed in such a way as to resonate with the non-Jewish moralistic tradition. But the main purpose of the passage does not lie in either of those areas. Paul is not attempting to describe either the normal Christian life or the normal pre-Christian life. He is not saying of any particular stage of spiritual experience, “This is what it feels like at the time,” true though that might be. He is highlighting the outworking of the divine purpose in the deeply ambiguous nature of Israel under the Torah. Israel rightly embraced the law as the divinely given covenant charter, but found that all the law could do was to show “Sin” up and actually cause it to swell to its full extent. It may at first glance seem astonishing. But Paul is affirming that this was what God had intended all along when giving the law to a people who, as Israel’s own scriptures testified repeatedly, were themselves rebellious, idolatrous, and sinful.

But Grant, despite all brutal evidence to the contrary, was convinced that white Southerners had adjusted well to losing the Civil War. If African Americans resisted and complained bitterly about the Black Codes, this meant only that the Freedmen’s Bureau was “encouraging unrealistic expectations among the former slaves.” Grant did not attribute the turmoil in the South to the incredible levels of violence unleashed on the newly freed or to the barbaric Black Codes to which they were now subject; General Howard’s staff, he felt, must be the source of the problem. Bureau and federal oversight were, in Grant’s mind, “unnecessary, even harmful.”59

But unceasing innovation is a vital part of jazz for several reasons, not all of them strictly musical. Since its inception, jazz has been a statement by its principally black players of their lives and social situation in this country. It is descended from the coded field songs of the slaves, which acted as catharsis for their pain and indignity. When Louis Armstrong became the first great jazz soloist, his music spoke for all those blacks who, like Louis, had moved north with fresh hopes as well as new disappointment. Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Lester Young announced a changing, more prideful attitude among blacks of the Thirties. Likewise, the music of the great jazz musicians of the bop revolution, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell, spoke for the new militance of those young blacks who had fought in World War II and expected America to be a new country after defeating the forces of bigotry and fascism.

Ironically, a Slave Power–less Congress confirmed a long-held truism about the code of honor: it did indeed force men to watch their words.

If I forget, — May joy pledge this weak heart to sorrow! If I forget, — May my soul's coloured summer borrow The hueless tones of storm and rain, Of ruth and terror, shame and pain, — If I forget! Though you forget, — There is no binding code for beauty; Though you forget, — Love was your charm, but not your duty; And life's worst breeze must never bring A ruffle to your silken wing, — Though you forget. If I forget, — The salt creek may forget the ocean; If I forget, — The heart whence flows my heart's bright motion, May I sink meanlier than the worst, Abandoned, outcast, crushed, accurst, — If I forget! Though you forget, — No word of mine shall mar your pleasure; Though you forget, — You filled my barren life with treasure, You may withdraw the gift you gave, You still are lord, I still am slave, — Though you forget.

I had to remind myself I was in a food shop. Even in New York, once famous for its rudeness, now stuck in a condition of permanent impatience, I had never seen anything like it. There, a retailer, however jaded, still pretends to honor the shopkeeper’s code that a customer is always right. Dario followed a much blunter, take no prisoners philosophy, that actually the customer is a dick.

For African Americans, war commenced not in 1861, but in 1661, when the Virginia Colony began passing America’s first black codes, the charter documents of a slave society that rendered blacks a permanent servile class and whites a mass aristocracy. They were also a declaration of war.

The myths Americans tell themselves about the past--that it is distant, that people did bad things out of ignorance rather than malice, that the good guys won in the end--encourage a false faith in the present. They allow us to believe our norms are fixed and that the forward march of progress may sometimes be delayed but never reversed. Bad times will get better, because they always have. But the past is close. The slave codes of 1703 are close. The past is filled with people who carried out evil acts with foresight and determination, supported by the complicity of their peers. It contains progress, but just as many reactionary entrenchments of old power. White supremacy became the norm in America because white men who felt threatened wrote laws to foster it, then codified the violence necessary to maintain it. They can maintain it with the same intention today, if we allow it.

Hammurabi’s Code asserts that Babylonian social order is rooted in universal and eternal principles of justice, dictated by the gods. The principle of hierarchy is of paramount importance. According to the code, people are divided into two genders and three classes: superior people, commoners and slaves. Members of each gender and class have different values. The life of a female commoner is worth thirty silver shekels and that of a slave-woman twenty silver shekels, whereas the eye of a male commoner is worth sixty silver shekels.

In her groundbreaking article, "The Haustafeln (Household Codes) in Afro-American Biblical Interpretation," Martin asks a provocative question: "How can black male preachers and theologians use a liberated hermeneutic while preaching and theologizing about slaves, but a literalist hermeneutic with reference to women?" I would like to ask the same question of white preachers and theologians.

August 16, Johnson issued an order that allowed southern whites to recapture land confiscated from them during the war—a move that made him heroic to whites while dealing a crushing blow to black hopes. It forced freedmen to abandon the forty-acre plots they had started to work, turning the men into powerless sharecroppers, bound to land owned by whites. Within weeks, a white delegation from the former Confederacy rushed to the White House to express “sincere respect” for Johnson’s desire “to sustain Southern rights in the Union.”88 By the end of 1865, so-called Black Codes began to forge a new caste system in the South, a segregated world where freed slaves worked as indentured servants, subject to arrest if they left jobs before their annual contracts expired. It was a cruel new form of bondage, establishing the foundations of the Jim Crow system that later ruled southern race relations. In South Carolina, blacks were confined by law to their plantations, forced to work from sunup to sundown. In Florida, blacks who showed “disrespect” to their bosses or rode in public conveyances reserved for whites could be whipped and pilloried. In Mississippi, it became a criminal offense for blacks to hunt or fish, heightening their dependence upon white employers. Thus, within six months of the end of the Civil War, there arose a broadly based retreat from many of the ideals that had motivated the northern war effort, reestablishing the status quo ante and white supremacy in the old Confederacy. During

Pri. Master Disk, Pri. Slave Disk, Sec. Master, Sec. Slave.” Programmed here is a virtual hierarchy organizing my computer’s software operations … I often wondered why the programmers chose such signifiers that hark back to our nation’s ignominious past … And even though I resisted the presumption of a racial affront or intentionality in such a peculiar deployment of the slave and master coupling, its choice as a signifier of the computer’s operations nonetheless struck me.

In fact, Zinn’s radicalism was not a good fit for Spelman College, where he must have stood out like a sore thumb. Spelman was a conservative Christian school that had been founded in 1881 by eleven ex-slaves who met in Friendship Baptist Church, wanting to read the Bible.34 It became Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary and then, in 1924, Spelman College. Karen Vanlandingham in her 1985 master’s thesis, “In Pursuit of a Changing Dream: Spelman College Students and the Civil Rights Movement, 1955–1962,” explains that the “religious tradition inherent in Spelman’s founding endured as a part of the school’s educational philosophy.” The 1958–1959 college catalogue asserted, “Spelman College is emphatically Christian. The attitude toward life exemplified by the life and teachings of Jesus is the ideal which governs the institution.”35 College life there included mandatory daily chapel attendance and adherence to a strict curfew and dress code. Howard Zinn, however, felt it was his mission and his right to change the college. In the August 6, 1960, Nation, he observed: “ ‘You can always tell a Spelman girl,’ ” alumni and friends of the college have boasted for years. The ‘Spelman girl’ walked gracefully, talked properly, went to church every Sunday, poured tea elegantly and, in general, had all the attributes of the product of a fine finishing school. If intellect and talent and social consciousness happened to develop also, they were, to an alarming extent, by-products.”36 Zinn set out to transform the “finishing school” into a “school for protest.

On the plantations the slave owners would take their slaves’ drums away because they didn’t want them communicating with other slaves. They were afraid that the drum was some kind of magic signal system, a primal, coded language, which it was. And is. When the drums were taken away, other instruments were taken up—fifes and fiddles and the rest, and they were used for celebration and lamentation both, and a new kind of song sprung up, a work song, to document the labor in the fields, to pass the time, to pass on the content of the time, so that people would know what had happened.

There stood one, in physical proportion and stature commanding and exact—in intellect richly endowed—in natural eloquence a prodigy—in soul manifestly "created but a little lower than the angels"—yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave,—trembling for his safety, hardly daring to believe that on the American soil, a single white person could be found who would befriend him at all hazards, for the love of God and humanity! Capable of high attainments as an intellectual and moral being—needing nothing but a comparatively small amount of cultivation to make him an ornament to society and a blessing to his race—by the law of the land, by the voice of the people, by the terms of the slave code, he was only a piece of property, a beast of burden, a chattel personal, nevertheless!