Throughout the nation’s history, various forms of indentured servitude, debt bondage, and outright enslavement have powered the U.S. economy and enriched its owner class, building an empire on the backs of enslaved Black and Brown captives as well as poor and working-class immigrants from across Asia, Africa, Europe, and elsewhere. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, when slavery was de jure abolished, the forced labor system of choice shifted from chattel slavery to penal labor, and shockingly little has changed since. It may have been more visible in the early twentieth century, when
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