Halloween and Human Rights

I read somewhere several years ago that much of the cocoa we eat in delicious chocolatey treats comes from forced labor. Of course, this information convicted me for the time it took me to read the article, and then I promptly forgot about it. Recently, however, I read a blog posting on Rage Against the Minivan that reminded me of the link between Hersheys, Nestle, Mars, American Cadbury and child slavery. In the post, Kristen Howerton linked a BBC documentary on the chocolate trade.

I suggest you watch all 5 segments, since they're only about 10 minutes each. I was so galled by this documentary that I did a little experiment with my Christian Thought class. I had already bought my Halloween candy for my students this year. After reading Howerton's blog posting and watching the documentary, I felt ridiculous for mentally whining about paying $12 for 3 bags of chocolate when in actuality, I paid LESS than I should have since the chocolate companies get free slave labor. Ouch. So I handed out the bags of M&Ms to my students, and after they bit into savoring the chocolatey goodness (at 8am...gross) I said, "Congratulations. You all just participated in the modern day slave trade." Their faces dropped in disbelief. We then watched the documentary, and they, like me, were disgusted by the corporate and human greed that leads to child slave labor. 


There are more slaves today than at any other point in history. The current estimate for modern-day slaves stands somewhere between 12 million to 27 million. The most prominent forms of slave labor are forms of bonded labor, where someone pledges themselves against a loan that "miraculously" never gets paid off, and slaves trafficked for the sex trade.  While slaves are today a lower percentage of the human population than during the 19th century, before Western countries abolished the slave trade and chattel slavery (picture cotton plantations in Georgia),  modern slaves are ridiculously cheap, therefore fueling the illicit trade. You see, slavery is illegal in all countries, with Mauritania being the last to officially outlaw slavery in 1981. However, the high levels of government corruption in many poor countries allows the slave trade and the use of slave labor to persist and often thrive. To read more on the human sex slave trade, read Half the Sky, one of my favorite books. 


Kevin Bales, President of Free the Slaves, states the following about how "market economics" continue the tide of forced labor:

"In the United States before the Civil War, the average slave cost the equivalent of about fifty thousand dollars. I'm not sure what the average price of a slave is today, but it can't be more than fifty or sixty dollars.

Such low prices influence how the slaves are treated. Slave owners used to maintain long relationships with their slaves, but slaveholders no longer have any reason to do so. If you pay just a hundred dollars for someone, that person is disposable, as far as you are concerned...

And while the price of slaves has gone down, the return on the slaveholder's investment has skyrocketed. In the antebellum South, slaves brought an average return of about 5 percent. Now bonded agricultural laborers in India generate more than a 50 percent profit per year for their slaveholders, and a return of 800 percent is not at all uncommon for holders of sex slaves."

So where do we as consumers fit into this? We have the power of the purse. If we curb our demand of Hersheys, or Mars, or Kraft chocolates, and demand these companies pursue cocoa sources from fair labor only, and that the US government regulate these companies to ensure they follow fair trade sourcing, we can impact the lives of children forced into slavery all the way in Ghana. Write your congressman, buy fair trade chocolate with the official seal (same goes for coffee, by the way), and do your part as a consumer. You can even join the #nohersheyshalloween movement and sign a petition to get Hersheys, the largest offender for child labor cocoa, to pay attention to its consumers or lose profit. To read about ethical candy options for trick or treating, click here. 


In the meantime, look for this symbol and buy fair trade. 
Is it more expensive? Yes. Personally, I'm OK paying a little bit more knowing that I'm not contributing to human rights violations around the world. Not to guilt you or anything...

I'm Racist

True confession. I don't want to be. I try so hard not to be. But I'm bombarded with racism in our society, and I find it creeping from my subconscious when I least expect it. Many people I know, especially many white people, get annoyed with me when I claim that most people are racist. "I'm not racist," they say. "I don't see color," others assure. I'm here to tell you that if you were raised in a western culture, and you are white, more than likely you're racist, even if you try so hard not to be. It's because in our culture, especially in the South, we find ourselves "surprised" if we meet a highly educated black person, or a wealthy African American who doesn't play sports or work in entertainment. Can you imagine being negatively pegged your entire life based on your phenotype? To be expected to never finish high school, let along college? To be expected to end up in prison, or living in the projects with illegitimate kids? To be poor your entire life? I can't, because I'm white. I have always been expected to go to college, get married, have children only after being married, have steady income and savings, parent my children responsibly, be cultured and well-traveled. These expectations were set in place from the time I was socialized, and, I would argue, heavily impacted my motivations, goals, and methods of "fitting the norm." So what does that say for the flip side of this picture, those who are expected to fail? How does that impact entire generations?

I know these are sensitive issues, and I think many white people don't want to face them because they think "slavery ended after the civil war. It's been over a century. Get over it." But our culture still grants primacy to those with "white" skin. Maybe, as a white person, I'm not supposed to talk about this? But I read a blog posting by a black professor tonight, and it convicted me so deeply. I started thinking through how many times I hear people say with such surprise, "oh, you study slavery and the history of racism?" Or "your summer reading for your US history kids was on black men in Reconstruction? Your black students will really appreciate that." I literally want to ask, "And why wouldn't my non-black students appreciate it too?" I get nauseaus when I hear people say of slavery in the south , "But the slaves liked being taken care of. They didn't want freedom." Or when people claim that "affirmative action" is racist against whites. Skin color is SO powerful, but we think that racism is no longer a game-changer in our society. I ask you, then, have you read the new laws against immigration in Arizona? Alabama? Georgia? If those aren't about racism, I don't know what is. Hispanics aren't "white" and therefore aren't acceptable. Spew at me all you want about them "not paying taxes" and "being here illegally," but I will shoot right back that the answer is not racially profiling them and intimidating them into pulling their children out of school and fearing going to the grocery store for being arrested. The answer is finding a peaceable, respectable way to naturalize them. 


Here's the excerpt from that blog, the words that got my whole rant started. Click here to read the whole posting. It's pretty powerful, for me at least. 

"...I don’t want to talk about race because it gives weight to a fiction that was created to oppress. It has no basis in biology and is a social construction in this country that was engineered to maintain access to free labor. The fiction created by race distorts the reality in which we live.

Plus, as a black person, I am called on often to speak for my “race.” I can never give an opinion without it being assumed to be that of a multitude. So when a white person asks me my opinion about an issue that can be related to race, I suspect that there is going to be a moment later when that white person is going to say, “Well, I have a black friend, Steve, who says…” And that will be the black authority on the subject.

Black people can’t talk to white people about race anymore. There’s really nothing left to say. There are libraries full of books, interviews, essays, lectures, and symposia. If people want to learn about their own country and its history, it is not incumbent on black people to talk to them about it. It is not our responsibility to educate them about it. Plus whenever white people want to talk about race, they never want to talk about themselves. There needs to be discussion among people who think of themselves as white. They need to unpack that language, that history, that social position and see what it really offers them, and what it takes away from them. As James Baldwin said, “As long as you think that you are white, there is no hope for you.”

When you went to Africa, you said “you were the minority for the first time in your life.” That’s not true. You have been the only adult in a room full of children, the only man in a room full of women, the only non-incarcerated person in a jail. In America if you were a minority at a hip-hop concert in Compton, you would still have the privilege that accrues unbidden to persons designated as white, with all of the political, social, and economic access that comes with it."

Something to thing about. I know I will.  To read more on racism in our society, read here a former post I wrote on racism.