By Musa T. Bey

America didn’t abolish slavery—it rebranded it.

It traded chains for cages, auctions for courtrooms, plantations for prisons. It changed the language but not the logic. Today, racism is no longer just a burning cross on a lawn—it’s a banker denying a loan, a cop pulling a trigger, a landlord raising the rent, or a school pipeline leading straight to a cellblock. The forms have shifted. The essence remains.

This is not just history—it’s the architecture of the present.

From Slave Ships to Systems

The founding of the United States was never a democratic experiment—it was a settler colonial conquest built on racial capitalism. From the moment enslaved Africans were dragged onto these shores in 1619, America began constructing an economy, a legal structure, and a national identity rooted in anti-Blackness.

The enslaved were not only laborers—they were capital. Collateral. Commodities traded, mortgaged, and insured. And when emancipation came, it wasn’t out of moral reckoning—it was a strategic shift. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime. That one clause built the framework for what we now call mass incarceration.

Slavery didn’t end. It evolved.

The Myth of Progress and the Machinery of Control

America loves to pretend it “got better.” The Civil Rights Movement is now sanitized in textbooks and sold as proof of progress. But this selective storytelling ignores the machinery that kept grinding on.

Redlining. Police terrorism. COINTELPRO. Segregated schools. Predatory lending. Voter suppression. These weren’t accidents. They were policy. They were profit-driven. And they were rebranded under the guise of “law and order,” “meritocracy,” “personal responsibility,” and “national security.”

Today, Black communities are still disproportionately locked out of homeownership, quality education, and healthcare. We’re still the first fired, the last hired, and the most incarcerated. The plantation became the prison. The overseer became the officer. The slave patrol became the sheriff’s department.

And now, the algorithm joins the ranks—coding discrimination into facial recognition software, predictive policing tools, and hiring systems. Oppression has gone digital.

The New Jim Code

The rebranding of racism is most dangerous when it looks like neutrality.

Colorblind policies conceal targeted impacts. “Tough on crime” hides its anti-Black roots. “School choice” decimates Black public education. “Urban renewal” becomes gentrification. “Welfare reform” becomes starvation. “Stand your ground” becomes a license to kill Black people.

This is what sociologist Ruha Benjamin calls the New Jim Code—the fusion of technological innovation with systemic racism. It creates the illusion of fairness while reproducing centuries of exclusion.

The media plays its part, too. Black pain is monetized. Black resistance is criminalized. Black excellence is tokenized. The system now sells our suffering back to us as entertainment, while silencing the political truths behind our rage.

Cultural Repackaging, Political Erasure

Even resistance gets rebranded.

Radical figures like Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, or Assata Shakur are stripped of their revolutionary politics and turned into t-shirt icons. Juneteenth is declared a holiday by the same government funding police militarization. Corporate America slaps Black Lives Matter slogans on products made in sweatshops while donating to politicians who uphold structural racism.

What we’re witnessing is the marketing of justice without the material redistribution of power. This is the rebranding of struggle into spectacle. It’s safe for consumption—but dangerous in practice.

The Legacy We Live In

We live in the afterlife of slavery. It haunts our housing policies. It shapes our labor markets. It informs our policing practices. It infects our health outcomes. The racial wealth gap isn’t a glitch—it’s a design. Centuries of forced labor, theft, and exclusion cannot be undone with symbolism.

America still owes. Not just in dollars, but in dismantling the very systems that were built to keep Black people subjugated.

This is not just about the past—it’s about the continuity of violence. The fact that Black bodies are still disposable, Black neighborhoods still overpoliced, Black futures still foreclosed. And yet, we are told to move on. To forget. To forgive.

But healing requires truth. And truth requires struggle.

Liberation Is the Unbranding of Empire

To break the rebranding, we must tell the whole story—and live its consequences. We must expose the continuity between slave patrols and SWAT raids. Between auction blocks and private prisons. Between sharecropping and wage theft. Between the lynching tree and the no-knock warrant.

We must organize not for reform, but for transformation.

That means abolition—not just of prisons and police, but of racial capitalism itself. It means reparations—not just checks, but land, education, housing, and the return of power to the people. It means reclaiming our memories, rebuilding our communities, and refusing to be rebranded as anything less than fully human.

It means remembering that freedom was never given—it was taken. And it must be taken again.

We are the legacy. We are the resistance. And we are the future.

The system rebrands. But the people remember.