On November 25, 1865, Mississippi created the first of the Black Codes. Designed to recreate slavery in all but name, this signified the white South’s massive resistance to the freeing of their labor force and the lengths to which it would go to tie workers to a place under white control. [...] The plantation elite’s top goal immediately upon emancipation was to corral black labor, whose core goal was to avoid the plantation labor system, preferably replacing it with small farms they owned. The Black Codes intended to prevent this. Building upon the slave codes regulating black behavior, and especially black movement, before the war, the Black Codes was the South’s statement to the North that the end of the war did not mean the end of white supremacy. Blacks would have to show a written contract of employment at the start of each year, ensuring they were laboring for a white employer. At the core of the Mississippi code and copied around the South was the vagrancy provision. “Vagrancy” was a term long used in the United States to crack down on workers not doing what employers or the police wanted them to do. In this case, it meant not working for a white person.
The plantation elite’s top goal immediately upon emancipation was to corral black labor, whose core goal was to avoid the plantation labor system, preferably replacing it with small farms they owned. The Black Codes intended to prevent this. Building upon the slave codes regulating black behavior, and especially black movement, before the war, the Black Codes was the South’s statement to the North that the end of the war did not mean the end of white supremacy. Blacks would have to show a written contract of employment at the start of each year, ensuring they were laboring for a white employer. At the core of the Mississippi code and copied around the South was the vagrancy provision. “Vagrancy” was a term long used in the United States to crack down on workers not doing what employers or the police wanted them to do. In this case, it meant not working for a white person.
President Obama also had words. He appeared on national television and urged protestors to remain peaceful, while on a split screen, Ferguson was awash in blue and red and smoke and a militarized police department displaying their force. Obama told us we need to peacefully accept this grand jury decision. We accept so much already. I suppose he thought it wouldn’t cost us much to accept this one thing more. The president looked exhausted, defeated. He didn’t even sound like the man we have come to know. Perhaps he couldn’t muster the energy to pretend that this system can be fixed. He would know better than most.
The president looked exhausted, defeated. He didn’t even sound like the man we have come to know. Perhaps he couldn’t muster the energy to pretend that this system can be fixed. He would know better than most.
If a report by Page Six is to be believed, the perceived insidiousness of Bill Cosby has been given a new layer. A source tells Richard Johnson that Cosby, desperate to kill a National Enquirer story about his alleged "swinging with Sammy Davis Jr. and some showgirls in Las Vegas," gave the tabloid information on his daughter Erinn's drug problems.
Earlier this month the Unicode Consortium, the company that enables emoji to appear across different devices, released a draft report that includes a proposal for diversifying their emoji provision. While most emoji fans have been celebrating the news, others have reservations. Bernie Hogan, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, recognises that current provisions are inadequate but fears that diversification will lead to a new set of problems. “When emoji become personally representative, they become politicised,” he told me.