US Authoritarianism

Wealth is the result of being a good person so that makes sense!

Well, you wouldn't be rich if God didn't want you to be, ergo the Rich are Good. 'Murica.

The whitewashed story: My buddy's great-grandmother was a native "servant". There's evidence that his great aunt was the product of her "boss" "having an affair" with her. This would have been just after the great depression.

His grandfather's father was also a native servant who died mysteriously right before my buddy's grandfather was born. Seven years later, while working for the same people, he got a little sister and his mom died mysteriously right after. So they lived with my buddy's great great grandmother while his grandfather worked this guy's land and couldn't get education. When great great grandmother died, grandfather was 12 or 13. He took his little sister to Texas to work in the oil fields and take care of her.

He came and spoke to our class in 4th grade during a native American module in history class and told part of the story. I didn't get to hear the rest until we were well into our teens. As an adult we started putting shit together and my buddy took a bunch of trips to Alabama to try to get everything else. He got the story corroborated by some older folks that were related to them and that's where he found out some of the stories about his great aunt.

(but don’t call it that because slavery is illegal now)

"Fun" fact: the 13th Amendment didn't actually make slavery illegal. What it said was that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude... shall exist" but it didn't actually create any penalties for people engaging in it.

There were a bunch of people in the late 19th and early 20th century who got criminally prosecuted for the crime of "debt peonage," but got off because they claimed the alleged "peon" didn't actually owe them a debt and that they were just straight-up enslaving them instead. That was a defense! That worked!!!

Source: https://youtu.be/j4kI2h3iotA?t=3218

By 1952 (the time of OP's document) it was indeed, finally, properly illegal. But it had only become so a mere ten years earlier, and then only because the US government was worried about Japanese propagandists pointing out that the US was treating its minorities as brutally as the Japanese were treating the people in the territories it conquered (see later in the same video, starting at 1:06:26).

So yeah, the point is that in many cases between 1865 and 1942, the lesson was: do call it slavery because then it becomes OK!

Was a huge problem in Canada too, when we weren't murdering them.