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LeRoi Jones’ Slave Ship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2021
Extract
Some time ago, some Europeans, libertarian individualists in the post-Medieval manner, robbed this continent from the natives. In the system of robbery they then set up, 80 percent or more of their children are now the daily victims, laboring for subsistence wages which in dollars are sometimes quite magnificent. Symbol-permutators & machine-operators, servicing, in a tight network of functions, a scientific machine which generates war materials & status symbols but in the main just its own growth, they crazily fancy themselves rough & ready free enterprisers out for themselves & their little families. They are employees. They eat shit. Their lives mean nothing. The machine binds them in enmity to themselves, one another, & nature.
A civil war which a century ago sealed these Euro-Americans into their present slavery also initiated the dispersal among them of an Afro-American population, the descendants of savages imported as chattel-slaves. At the bottom of the heap, they have maintained their primitive (communitarian & naturalist) life-stance to this day.
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- Copyright © 1970 The Drama Review
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