From the Plantation to the Penitentiary: America's racist penal system is slavery by another name
/When the unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot by a police officer in Ferguson violent protests broke out. Alarming pictures of police violence, siege-like militarism and a stand-off that recalls the Sixties Civil Rights era have since been beamed across the globe. However, for those who have been aware of the barometer of American civil rights struggles, this is unsurprising. What is surprising is that it hasn’t bubbled up before. Even under its first black president, America is a mostly segregated society. I grew up in New Jersey in the Eighties and Nineties, and people for the most part had either white friends or black friends. High-school lunch tables were codified by colour. The America I knew had a massive race problem and as an Iranian, neither white nor black, I experienced enough racism to know I couldn’t change it from within. So I left America in 1996, tired of the inequalities, particularly around race and social justice, and certain that a life as a free-thinking filmmaker wasn’t possible, certainly not when you had to wed yourself to a corporation in order to have health care.
This year, now a UK Citizen, I am returning to America to film a documentary which will look at the issue of race in America through the prism of the prison system. I have already visited one in Louisiana where I saw mostly black men picking cotton in fields - they were paid up to 13 cents per hour - while the predominantly white guards, armed and on horseback, watched over. Sound familiar? Unknown to most, slavery is still legal in the US: under the 13th Amendment it was outlawed “except as a punishment for crime”.
My film, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary, looks at the privatised prison system as a sanitised slave system. And in it, I ask whether America is heading towards another race war. It is not, as some have said, fanciful agit pop. What we have seen in Missouri over the past couple of weeks shows what is bubbling close to the surface. Eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, along with Eric Garner, Ezell Ford and John Crawford III all men who have been killed by the police, is another victim of the race wars in America. [MORE]
