Author: Meagan Flynn / Source: Washington Post
Rapping aside, Kanye West did what Kanye West does best on Sunday afternoon: He thoroughly confused and outraged much of the Internet after commenting cryptically on a highly sensitive topic without explaining himself.
The matter in question this time: the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery.
West was fresh off an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” — which didn’t air the Trump-praising speech that West made at the end of the show while wearing a red MAGA hat. On Sunday, he hopped on Twitter to spread his MAGA support again, posting a tweet that showed him sporting the red hat. In it, he called for the abolition of the 13th Amendment.
Needless to say, the context was confusing.
“This represents good and America becoming whole again,” he wrote. “We will no longer outsource to other countries. We will provide jobs for all who are free from prisons as we abolish the 13th amendment. Message sent with love.”
Outrage
West clarified: He just meant we should amend the amendment, not abolish it. “The 13th Amendment is slavery in disguise . . . meaning it never ended . . . We are the solution that heals.”
So let us ask this possibly dicey question: What, exactly, was Kanye trying to say?
There is a fair chance he was referring to what’s called the 13th Amendment’s “exception clause,” as many speculated on Twitter. It’s the part of the amendment that literally allowed slavery and involuntary servitude to continue across the country, on plantations and within the barbed-wire fences of prisons. Scholars and prisoners’ advocates argue that its impact is still felt today through prison labor.
Here’s the full wording of the amendment:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (emphasis ours).
The amendment was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, designed to extend constitutional rights to African Americans and former slaves, including citizenship and equal protection under the law in the 14th and voting rights in the 15th. (The 14th Amendment recently celebrated its 150th anniversary, but it was muted, in part because it took more than a century of oppression of blacks before it had any serious impact, scholars say.)
The 13th Amendment was proposed in part because of well-founded fears that the Supreme Court might nullify Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
But the exception clause of the 13th Amendment was a “convenient sleight of hand,” said Dennis R. Childs, an associate professor at the University of California at San Diego and author of “Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration From the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary.”
Prisoners have been protesting this clause for decades. In August, prisoners in 17 states launched a three-week strike to protest being forced to work for meager wages in contemptible conditions — all of which they traced to the 13th Amendment’s exception clause. Last year, advocates for prisoners launched a…
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