Historians Check Kanye West's 13th Amendment

Kanye West has once again put himself in the hot water with his views on American history. But if his look at the past can be disconcerting, his recent statements open a window to a real historical and political debate.

The rapper – who now bears the name Ye shortened scene – has tended to simplify things to the minimum when he tweeted about the history of the race in America. As historians have already told TIME, his tweets about slavery were a neglected choice, and his tweets suggesting that African Americans should be Republicans because President Lincoln had been misunderstood in the way whose party politics had been realigned on the issue of civil rights. after the end of the civil war

On Sunday, West's tweets – shared with a photo of him wearing a Make America Great Again baseball cap in a luxurious airplane cabin – once again turned to 19th-century history. He first called for the abolition of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. In a follow-up tweet, he repeated his statement by calling for amendments to the amendment, a position he clarified in an appearance on TMZ Live Monday afternoon, saying that he's poorly expressed when he used the word "abolish".

West's tweets seem downright paradoxical, the 13th amendment, ratified on December 6, 1865, abolishing slavery in the United States. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime of which the party must have been duly condemned, must exist in the United States or in any place subject to their jurisdiction," reads the statement. book. With the 14 and 15, it is part of the group of "reconstruction amendments" which helped to determine the functioning of the United States after the end of the civil war.

The abolition of the 13th Amendment would eliminate the constitutional guarantees against slavery, which provoked a brutal reaction to the first tweet of of his celebrity colleagues. But West is not the first to consider the amendment as problematic.

The main source of contention with the 13th Amendment is a well-known loophole that suggests that it is legal to enslave convicts.

Get your history in one place: subscribe to the TIME History Weekly Newsletter

Such a clause excluding convicted criminals is a "customary exception" going back to English common law, says Manisha Sinha, author of The cause of the slave: a history of abolition. But the version of this idea given by the 13th Amendment has often historically been applied in such a way as to undermine the stated purpose of the amendment. State and local authorities, especially the Southern whites in the years following the war, "tried to get around the amendment" by locking blacks on "fabricated charges" and [using] their work for free, "she told TIME in an email. Through a system known as leasing, convicts would be leased to plantation owners for forced labor, such as rebuilding infrastructure destroyed during the civil war.

In other words, this flaw has proven to be a way to keep the unpaid work system alive. Or, as West told TMZ on Monday, quoting one of his friends, "to make the free man a slave, just condemn him for a crime."

This was not what the authors of the amendment wanted, adds Daryl Scott, a professor of history at Howard University. After all, the authors of the 13th Amendment were men of the Union, not slave owners, and this constitutional change was a way of codifying the thing for which they had just waged a devastating war. "They were not all abolitionists, but when they won the war, they knew that slavery was over," he says. "They were not trying to restore the institution."

The historians who spoke to TIME say that the wording, although it may have seemed trivial to those who inscribed it in the Constitution, was abused. Many state and local legislatures in the south have used this loophole to allow labor exploitation and reinforce racist social structures. And while the system itself is not "expansive" in terms of the number of people involved, Scott says, the threat was hanging over society.

"Different laws have been established specifically to condemn African Americans for offenses as minor as to loiter, [or] do not have proof of employment. These laws were abolished during the reconstruction, but they were then recreated in different forms in the Jim Crow era, "says Chad Williams, professor of history and African and African-American studies. at Brandeis University. The lease conviction system finally ended around the 1920s. Partly because of the construction of new prisons, prisoners who could have been sent to work were increasingly incarcerated – and their numbers began to increase, in the north as well as in the south. "You see this explosion of the prison population actually occurring in the mid-1960s, right in the middle of the Johnson administration – one of the great ironies on which Elizabeth Hinton writes," Williams adds. "[An] The increased focus on law and order begins with LBJ, which invests more federal resources in policing activities to address issues of urban unrest, racial riots, increased government oversight of black communities federal.

Some experts and lawyers – especially in recent years, in the 2016 documentary by Ava DuVernay 13th and research by Michelle Alexander, author of the 2010 book The new Jim Crow – thus argued that the loophole had laid the foundation for mass incarceration and the disproportionate imprisonment of African Americans and Latinos that still poses a problem today. Some have argued that preventing convicted criminals from participating in society, for example by depriving them of their rights and making it more difficult for them to find housing and employment , is a form of modern slavery. In fact, the strike at the national prison that took place in August and September was aimed in part at putting an end to what the organizers called "modern-day slavery," consisting of forcing prisoners to work for a minimal salary, if any.

Scholars like Williams and Scott say it will take more than the controversial clause in the 13th loophole amendment to deal with Kanye West's issues.

"There are ongoing debates among historians on whether the 13th Amendment was the cause of mass incarceration or whether it would have occurred independently," Williams said. For example, "If this loophole were eliminated today, would we see less police black communities?" Would there be fewer differences in the way African-Americans are sentenced for various crimes compared to whites convicted of the same serious crimes? I think these things would continue to exist. The correction of the 13th Amendment loophole will address one of the aspects of a larger criminalization system that actually affects all aspects of American society and is a much bigger problem than the 13th one. amendment ".

"Mass incarceration is a problem of the late 20th century and we act as if it was born with emancipation," says Scott. "If you start tinkering with the 13th Amendment, you could end up without one."