What is it? Not the suggestion in some quarters that the descendants of African slaves are owed some sort of monetary compensation. That a monetary compensation would be appropriate suggests that the essence of slavery was that the workers and artisans didn't get paid during a period of time when the vast majority of enterprise (by women, children, indentured immigrants and native peoples) wasn't carried out for a money payment. So, that's an unrealistic suggestion, on its face, especially since the ability of the population to sustain itself and increase over time would seem to attest to the fact that the absence of material comforts and even basic health care, similar to what was generally available, was not a problem. And leads to the conclusion that the essence of slavery was that people who had been ripped from their native lands and transported across a vast sea were then deprived of liberty--their own and that of subsequent generations.
While taking slaves in warfare may have been endemic in much of the Old World, the colonists of the New World introduced a new wrinkle by extending the slave status to the progeny of their original captives. In the hundred years after New Amsterdam witnessed the arrival of 11 Africans to help lay the foundations for what would eventually become New York City, slavery was made legal and the rights of slaves to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness denied, as a matter of law. So, if some people consider calls for upholding the rule of law, their intent might be met with skepticism in some quarters. Indeed, the Constitution, as originally adopted, counted slaves as no more than 3/5 of a person for purposes of assigning representation in the Congress.
So, in a sense, you could conclude that slavery set a precedent for the rationale that, regardless of the assertion that "all men are created equal...and endowed with inalienable rights," the rights of some people, who weren't even aliens, could be denied in the law and upheld by the use of legitimate force. Evidently, one legacy of slavery is that the origin of human rights is still muddled, in part because the misnamed Bill of Rights leads some people to conclude that human rights are few in number, limited to those enumerated there.
On the other hand, the so-called "right to life" community takes another, even more restrictive tack. Instead of accepting that the "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" ("the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety" in the Virginia Declaration), as asserted in the Declaration of Independence is the foundation of our government, the right to life seems to stop them cold and they never get to "liberty" and "the pursuit of happiness," never mind health and the general welfare.
The question is why? Why the implied deprivation of the necessities of life from people who have done nothing to deserve being cast out? Why should we be content with a third of a loaf, so to speak? One answer, I suggest, is that there's that legal precedent in the institution of slavery which effectively conditioned survival on the surrender of individual liberty. Or, it could be argued that having secured their liberty from the subservient condition into which they were born, the freedmen set a precedent for the argument that all men, being born in the bonds of sin, subservience is their default condition and freedom must be earned by submitting to the rule of law.
Oddly enough, this perception was brought home to me by the revelations in the CIA torture manuals, providing precise instructions on how the captives in Guantanamo were punished for asserting their human rights, as I addressed in a previous post. The point I want to make now is that while torture may well be considered a lesser-included punishment in a society that provides legal justification for public executions, execution is in retribution for some adjudicated criminal offense to the community. (That the victim of crime is not made whole is another matter). That it is right (as the Bush Department of Justice ruled) for an innocent person to be assaulted without provocation can only find precedent in the slavery and segregation eras. That the behavior is being directed at people whose complexion is lighter or darker than the historical targets of such behavior is really irrelevant, though their essential innocence and bad treatment on the basis of suspicion is likely to be particularly upsetting to those with a keen awareness of the historical precedents for such behavior.
I don't actually think, although the CIA captives are clearly just the tip of an iceberg of increasingly repressive behavior on the part of law enforcement agencies at every level, that their torture is a harbinger of what's in store for the rest of the nation. Indeed, the perpetrators of these atrocities seem to have been constrained by the perception that the reversion to an earlier period of a routine of physical coercion to supplement a general deprivation of the necessities of life might not be successful. Why else conduct this experiment on foreign soil? After all, there's a sheriff in Maricopa County, Arizona, Joe Arpaio,
"The crime suppressions (aren't) just for these illegals, it supplements our state laws," ... "It's an overall fight against (illegal) immigration. It all intertwines"
who's setting records in the deprivation arena. But, even there it's uncertain that this resurrection of the old regime is going to fly. Though the categorization of some people as legal and others as illegal has to be considered another legacy of slavery. Violating a person's inherent human right to travel wherever his two feet can take him by shutting him out of the country is hardly an improvement over bringing him here against his will. But then, the essentially exclusive nature of legal segregation seems not to have been fully appreciated either and probably accounts for the rationalization that voluntary segregation behind the electronic curtain of a gated community is consistent with a commitment to individual rights, especially if the right to private property, like the right to life, can serve as a substitute that's deserved, instead of being an entitlement.
What's the benefit of redefining rights as deserts rather than entitlements? Well, for one thing, if the necessities of life have to be earned, then their deprivation doesn't even have to be explained. If it's assumed that every person must deserve being fed, then the starving populations are easy to dismiss. Though their right to life is absolute, it's clear that the destitute haven't earned the right to go on living. Tant pis.
It's a rationale that's equally applicable to the provision of adequate medical care. If the victims of deprivation die sooner rather than later, that's just too bad. Like the torturers on Guantanamo, the agents of deprivation on the mainland don't mean for their victims to die. It's just too bad, if they do. That's because, I suspect, deprivation may be habit-forming, base behavior arising out of some animal instinct, like kicking the dog when the car won't start. Which would seem to be consistent with the historical judgment that, with a few exceptions like Thomas Jefferson, our early organizers of industrial agriculture on the plantations weren't able to achieve much by their own labor.
While the North American landmass has historically been able to support a significant number of freeloaders, when their behavior becomes coercive, the general public becomes resistant. That we've once again arrived at such a point probably explains the anger across the board. Perhaps kicking Democrats is a lot like kicking the family dog--relatively safe.