Phil Vischer's Dishonest "Race in America"

Race as Conflict or Ethnicity as a Biblical Category

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. If you are an evangelical elite living in the United States of America and your name is not John MacArthur, you have most likely been doing an awful lot of virtue signaling about how much you care and are deeply concerned with the plight of black Americans living in this country because of forces outside of their control like police brutality and systemic oppression and discrimination and housing, education, etc.

You've used words like redlining and slavery and Jim Crow and maybe even Holocaust to describe the current state of affairs in the United States. You've signaled your support for Black Lives Matter, maybe even marching with them, but you've been silent on their anti-Christian positions and beliefs.

You've also been silent on what's happening throughout the world as far as Christian persecution, like in places like Nigeria where it's happening at very high rates right now. And guess what? Those people are black.

But you haven't said much. You haven't said much about the skyrocketing homicide rates in areas where the police have backed off because of, well, the protests that you're helping fan the flames for. Those are black people as well.

You've also been silent, relatively speaking, on abortion and the plight of black babies in this country because of a system set up by someone who wanted specifically to annihilate them. Haven't said much about that.

But what you have talked about are cures for the problem of systemic oppression that involve taking down symbols of the nation's past and figures, creating multi-ethnic spaces within churches. In other words, doing what the Lord Jesus Christ said he would do in building his church.

And instead of just seeking people who are unsaved and don't know Christ and sharing the gospel with them, specifically trying to attract people of a certain caliber, a certain minority status into your church to make it a place of quote-unquote reconciliation.

Perhaps you've even talked about political solutions to this problem, like reparations and other socialized mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth to correct the problems of inequities from generations past.

You've taken it upon yourself to bear the responsibility of quote-unquote white people and Christians who lived even hundreds of years ago and somehow, in your mind, contributed to the current state of affairs.

The one thing I really wish you would do, but you haven't, is talked about what the Bible says about this kind of a situation and what kind of remedies we can glean from biblical principles. Instead, you've forwarded the same kind of talking points and the same myth that the New Left critique has been giving for, well, since the 1960s, really.

You've been partnering with radicals, Marxists, in order to disband and eliminate the hegemony which exists in this country without really having much to replace it. You stir up anger among especially young people who are my age and younger in the church about how bad the church has been and how bad Americans have been while failing to offer biblical solutions.

Well, consistent with the New Evangelical tradition of partnering with evil and trying to find wisdom among the Marxists, Phil Vischer, the creator of the popular children's television program Veggie Tales, enters the scene.

Now, you'd think he'd know better because just a little over a year ago, this was a headline at Fox News, Veggie Tales is racist and dangerous for children, California student claims. That's right. Phil Vischer was the target of cancellation.

But this doesn't seem to faze him. Instead, he accepts the New Left systemic racism critique and even takes responsibility for it because of the fact that he is white, which, if you think about it, is consistent with critical race theory.

Now, Phil Vischer is a master at weaving a narrative. I mean, he's a producer. He created Veggie Tales. He can connect with you emotionally. He can connect facts in a sequence to create a really tight narrative.

And he does so brilliantly in this video. But the problem is he's either not a very good researcher or didn't do good research for this particular video because the picture he paints is distorted. He draws lines between facts which do not correlate with one another, at least in a one on one relationship.

He also attributes causes and motivations to certain state of affairs without considering other contributing factors. In fact, factors you'd think a Christian specifically should notice and talk about and address.

And then at the end of the video, he doesn't even have a solution for any of the problems he brings up. He just says we're supposed to care. So he put all this work into this video just so we could care, which I guess that could give you a sense of moral superiority, but it doesn't feed or help anyone.

And so I actually think the Bible gives us principles that can actually address the situation. I mean, at the very least, you can pray, Mr. Vischer, but it actually gives us principles for what we can do, not just in the political scene either, but of course in the political scene as well.

And so I want to point out the glaring oversights in his historical analysis. I'm going to walk through this video piece by piece. And then at the end, I'm going to offer some biblical alternatives to the lamentation of Phil Vischer, which really doesn't get you anywhere.

And so let's start at the beginning. We need to talk about race.

Why are people protesting? Why are people angry? Slavery ended 150 years ago. The civil rights movement was 60 years ago. Racial discrimination is illegal now. Heck, we even had a black president.

So why are people still upset? Okay, this is really important. He made a switch in a few seconds from let's have a conversation about race to let's have a conversation about why people are angry. And that's because there's an assumption that any discussion about race is going to be about conflict along racial lines.

And this is why whenever someone says to you, well, you're just not afraid to have a conversation about race, you should probably respond with, I would be more than happy to have a conversation about race.

Let's get our Bibles out. Let's talk about what race is, or people groups are, ethnicity is, sociolinguistic groups are from a biblical perspective. If you buy into this idea that any conversation about race is necessarily a conversation about conflict, you're already in systemic oppression land.

And so they want to get the conversation started in that direction from the beginning and define any discussion about race as that's what it is. It's a discussion about conflict or reconciliation, which is also related.

To conflict somehow. We're going to go through history and we're going to look at some data, and we're going to go quickly so this video doesn't get too long. So hang on. These are two households in America.

One is black, the other is white. Today, the average black household has 60 of the income of the average white household, but only one tenth of the household wealth. Why does that matter? Well, household wealth helps send kids to school, helps launch small businesses, stabilizes loss of income, and helps families survive catastrophic events like divorce or unemployment.

What's amazing about this number is that there are lots of extremely wealthy African Americans. Movie stars, pop stars, 75 of the NBA, 70 of the NFL, Oprah, Tyler Perry, Ben Carson, Morgan Freeman, and there are a lot of extremely poor white families.

Think of Appalachia and other parts of rural America. But even when we factor all that in, the average black household still has only one tenth the wealth of the average white household. How did that happen?

Now that's a.

Fair question, but probably a better question is why is it that after the civil rights gains of the 1960s, black unemployment went up, homicide rates went up, the black family started breaking down more.

I mean, maybe some of these things can be factors that were significant in contributing to the disparities that Phil Vischer is talking about, but he never brings them up in the whole video, and I'm going to talk a little more about that later on.

But it's still a fair question, but just because there's a disparity doesn't mean injustice is necessarily going on. First-born people tend to do better than their siblings. People in geographic areas like the suburbs tend to do better than those in rural and urban areas.

In fact, Asians tend to do better than white people. Now, did I say Asian? Yeah, I did. And let me show you some charts on that, because I think this is a good comparison to make, because they also faced discrimination and barriers when they came here, just like every immigrant group did.

In fact, some people, I've heard this said that the barriers they faced were worse than the barriers that existed for African Americans, and I don't know how you quantify that, but they were certainly pretty bad.

Now, here's a chart showing the median household income by race in 2016. You'll notice Asians are at the top, much more than white people. They're making more money. Now, the white people category there, this includes more than just Americans of European descent, which is what I put in the title there, because we are accustomed to thinking white just means that, but this could also mean Jewish people who identify as white, who actually are very wealthy.

So the Asian population is even making more income than the whole entire white population. Here's Americans of Asian descent. Median income is rising faster than any other ethnic demographics. This doesn't mean that Asians are just doing better.

It means that their upward mobility is rising at a faster rate. They're doing better, and they have momentum in more than white people, Hispanic people, black people. They're increasing their income at a higher rate than other demographic groups.

Here's another chart for you. Educational attainment varies by race, ethnicity, and nativity. This is a study that was done in North Carolina in 2014, and what it shows is that Americans of Asian descent are more educated than other ethnic demographics.

Do you think maybe education level could have factored in? Yeah. Maybe that could be a contributing cause. I mean, in the Asian culture, there's a high premium placed on education, and so their performance financially may have something to do with that.

Here's a very interesting chart. This gets directly into what Phil Fisher was talking about. Average wealth. All right, so this isn't income. This is wealth. You can see that in the Asian population, it was rising, and by 2010 to 2013, it almost caught up with the white population, quote unquote, and according to the study, it actually now has surpassed in 2020 the white population, so Asians of American descent actually have more wealth.

They've achieved this than other ethnic demographics, and they came here much later, and they suffered discrimination. The Chinese working on the railroad when they first came was basically slave labor.

Japanese people were put in internment camps, for goodness sake, and this shows you some of the books that are written about this on anti-Asian racism. In fact, just recently during the COVID crisis, I mean, that was a really hot topic, and evangelicals were talking about it.

There's a whole statement crafted on it that big evangelical leaders signed about anti-Asian racism, but yet when you look at the population and what they've done in the United States, they've overcome these barriers, and they've actually surpassed, quote unquote, white people.

Now, I did not find as much information on this, but what I did find was very interesting. Americans of Jewish descent in 2005 had a net worth of $443 ,000 compared to the average American household, which is $99 ,500.

That's incredible, and it's more incredible when you think of the fact that Jewish people also more often than not got to the United States later than Europeans, and many of them were fleeing persecution from Eastern Bloc countries, Russia, Germany.

They have a history of oppression in Europe and the Muslim world, going back to even Egypt and their enslavement there, and when they arrived in the United States, they were primarily coming to urban areas, living in ghettos, and this is what they had to show for it.

It's truly an incredible American story about the land of opportunity and about how they were able to flee to the United States and do well for themselves. In fact, Forbes puts out every year their top richest Americans.

I think it's top 40, and in 2018, five of the top ten were Jewish people, and I'm not sure because I'm not familiar with the ethnicities of those who are on the current list, but I think I saw three of these guys at least on that top ten.

So, I mean, very much over-performing if we're trying to look at them in contrast to other ethnicities in the United States, and yet there's books. There are a lot of books on anti-Semitism in America.

In fact, I grew up in an area in the Catskill Mountain region, or near there I should say, in New York, in which I was very familiar with this because the Catskill Mountains were actually referred to, they used to be referred to as the quote-unquote Jewish Alps because Jewish people would go to the Catskills instead of the White Mountains or the Green Mountains where discrimination prevented them from going there.

In fact, there's a resort I know of, it's where Hillary Clinton went after she lost the election, in the Catskill Mountains that used to have a sign, No Jews Allowed, and that was very common for even, you know, a hundred years ago.

And so for Jewish people to get in these urban areas and then to do well for themselves like that is a American story. Now here's another factor that I probably could have looked into more, but the data that I did find was very interesting because it shows that if there's a discrimination taking place against people in this country who are black because of the color of their skin, then it's not happening, at the same rate at least, among people that are black who are foreign born.

Let me show you what I mean. Nielsen said in a poll, a study I should say that they did, median household income for foreign born blacks is 30 higher than U .S. born blacks. Here's a study that was done by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 2015 and it shows, and this is very sad, U .S. black people had a net worth of $8, $8.

And Caribbean people who also happened to be black, who moved to Boston, had a net worth of $12 ,000. Now this is fascinating to me. The Caribbean born black people are doing better than Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other Hispanics as you can see from that chart.

Now of course there's a lot of rich white people, the quote unquote white people who are Jewish, people of European descent in Boston, and I mean they had $247 ,500 net worth. People have been there, their families have been there, etc.

But you can see that Caribbean people who also have the same skin color, probably even darker in some cases than many U .S. black people, they're doing better financially. And I'm assuming I would probably find upward mobility as well if we were able to track this over time.

So what makes sense of that is why would white supremacist quote unquote or systemic racism discriminate more against people from the United States who are black? That doesn't actually follow or make sense.

There's got to be some kind of another factor or complicated numbers of factors involved to make sense of that. I'm saying it's not all simplistic. Now of course we could also talk about religious groups.

We could, I mean there's so many ways you can cut this pie, but you could talk about how Jewish people do significantly better than other religious groups financially speaking. Hindu people are second.

You know where Southern Baptists are? They're way, way, way down on the list. Go towards the bottom of the list. That's where you'll find the Southern Baptists. So it's very interesting. Are we supposed to say that Hindu and Episcopalians and Presbyterians and Atheists and Agnostics and Orthodox and especially Jewish people, that they're being favored by the system and the system is racist against Southern Baptists?

Of some kind of bigotry? Not necessarily. There may be other factors that are involved in this.

Well here we go. What happened after we freed the slaves? After the Civil War ended? Nine states enacted vagrancy laws making it a crime to not have a job. The law was applied only to black men. Eight of those states then allowed prisoners, the black men who'd just been arrested for not having a job, to be hired out to plantation owners with little or no pay going to the prisoners themselves.

So that's right. Men who had been freed from the plantations found themselves right.

Back on the plantations. I want you to see at the outset what Phil Bisher's doing and notice it throughout the rest of the narrative. What he's doing is he's weaving a story in which white people have oppressed black people and that is the only contributing factor to the current state of affairs for black people in the United States of America.

So it's a victimization narrative. Forces outside of the control of black people have oppressed them and that's why they are in the situation they're in now according to Phil Bisher and it's our fault if we're white.

Now he starts it interestingly in the slavery and chain gang scenario. Instead of going back farther he could talk about Africans who had set up slave markets before Europeans even got there and tribal warfare but if he did that he would have to acknowledge some kind of complicity that existed in Africans.

So it would actually kind of threaten the narrative he's trying to weave and so he doesn't do that. He makes his starting point right when the civil war is ending and to me that is significant because I was thinking about my own family and not that it's an apples to apples comparison because it's not and if someone wanted to take me out of context and say that I'm making that argument I'm not saying it's apples to apples.

What I'm saying though is that most people can if they look back in their history find some persecution against members of their family. They stand in a tradition of some kind that has at one point or another gotten the short end of the stick and so in my family I think of some of those who came here because they were persecuted by the Church of England.

They were pilgrims who came here. If I go back farther than that I have reformers in my family. I'm a direct descendant of John Knox and other reformers who were persecuted. I can see on my southern side those who came here as indentured servants in Virginia and lived in poverty through the civil war.

They were burned out of their homes by Sherman's army and then we get to really the 20th century before my grandparents finally make it into the lower middle class. My parents finally have bachelor's degrees.

I mean there was poverty before then and so I could try to focus on these things and really weave a narrative that these things were just really barriers that were outside of the control of people in my family and I could start to take on a victim mentality.

That wouldn't do me any good though and I don't see that being emphasized in scripture anymore. I mean I can only deal with the things that are in my control and this is where I think God's sovereignty comes into being and this is the story of Joseph we usually use regarding this.

Someone who really was a victim who rose because of God's grace upon him but God does have a plan and I don't accept this narrative that replaces God's sovereignty with white privilege or it really looks at white privilege as this deterministic element that punishes those who don't have it.

Now are there things like privilege for white people? Were there things like that in this country? Absolutely there were. Does it explain everything we see today? No it doesn't. Is it helpful to understand those things?

Yeah I think it definitely is. But should it be used as a wedge to divide people against one another? No because remember Phil Fisher started this whole thing with this is just a discussion about race.

Well no it's not a discussion about race. It's a discussion about how bad white people are for oppressing these black victims and that's it. Not taking anything else into consideration. That's the story that he's weaving for you.

Now let's get into some of the specifics. I'm going to be pulling some information from these two secondary sources. There's some others but these are the two main ones. Philip Lee's Southern Reconstruction and the Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Van Woodward.

If you'd like to look these up for further study I do recommend it. I'll also be some secondary sources to you just to understand what Phil Fisher is talking about and then see how he is using the narrative to fit his purpose.

The way in which the Civil War and Reconstruction were handled has implications that even affect us today. There's no doubt about that. One of the tragedies is how former slaves and even poor whites in the South had to live in unbearable conditions for years.

Poverty for generations. By some estimates I've heard about a million former slaves died after the war. So these are the worst kinds of conditions to be freed into if you're going to free slaves. Robert Summers was an Englishman, so not Northern or Southern, an Englishman who traveled the Southern states in 1870 to 71 and he recorded his experiences in the book Southern States and on page 153 he talks about how black people after the Confederate surrender were disorderly.

His words not mine. Then he says many of them would not settle down to labor but roamed about with arms in their hands and hunger in their bellies and the governing power with the usual blind determination of a victorious party was thinking only all the while of every device of suffrage and reconstruction by which the freedmen might be strengthened and made under Northern dictation the ruling power in the country.

In other words he's saying that people from the North had come down to take advantage of the situation and some of them wanted to get freed blacks on their side to rule the former Confederate states. He continues he says agitators of the loosest fiber came down among the towns and plantations and organizing a union league held midnight meetings where these black people were in the woods and went about uttering sentiments which were destructive.

A real terror reigned for a time among white people. Now of course that's not the full picture because situations like this ranged according to what region you were in and that's one of the things that I think modern students of American history get wrong an awful lot is they assume that the modern state of today with top-down solutions for everything that apply across the board was always in existence and that's just not the case at all and reconstruction that period is a really good example of that because there are a lot of differences between regions but this is the kind of thing what Summers describes that gave rise to organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and they were trying to fill what they consider to be a vacuum in law and order etc in certain regions and so it was it was a terrible situation and one that I wish could have been avoided.

I think we all wish that but this is part of our history this did take place and so one of the reactions to this kind of thing was also black codes and which included in some cases vagrancy laws. Stephen Woodward in The Strange Career of Jim Crow on page 23 says that the provisional legislatures established by President Johnson so he succeeded President Lincoln in 1865 adopted the notorious black codes.

Philip Lee says in Southern Reconstruction on page 41 that these codes itemized discriminatory rights of conduct for freedmen. They were however also adopted ostensibly to impel the many ex-slaves who had mistaken freedom for vagrancy to seek employment.

I remember when I was reading Up From Slavery Booker T Washington even talks about this not in his family but in a group he had come across that they had been freed and then they just they really weren't working they just thought that they didn't have to work anymore and so this was a problem in some areas and Philip Lee also says on pages 43 through 44 that these codes were based partially upon the vagrancy laws of northern and southern states and upon the regulations of the Freedmen's Bureau as well as statutes in the West Indies governing free blacks and he even talks about how Abraham Lincoln in some ways had approved of this kind of thing in a sense and so so that's the situation that existed at the time.

Now I couldn't find anything that said that these laws specifically only applied to blacks but I'm sure that was probably the intention based on some of the sources that I've been reading mostly because of the unique situation of being enslaved and having a job to do in that and then not having that anymore and being in a war-torn economy in which you didn't have that as an option but there really weren't a whole lot of other options and so they were trying to prevent idle hands being the devil's playground but there really just weren't any good options.

Now Phil Bisher wants to make out that this is a re-institution of slavery, vagrancy laws and then leasing prisoners out and he's actually jumping kind of like 20 years to do that because there were the black codes which were actually struck down immediately during reconstruction and then it was about 20 years later when you started seeing the actual Jim Crow laws appear which were actually based on northern laws that had already been in existence and so this was a period of time initially during these black codes when these black codes were set up when you had a population that was freed but they weren't citizens of the United States yet and so this was the provisional like here's who you are in our region according to state by state really and some states didn't even adopt those but the states that did and so those were struck down and then in that intermittent period there's an interesting thing that takes place.

Stephen Woodward states on page 33 through 34 of The Strange Career of Jim Crow that there was a study by Charles E. Wines called Race Relations in Virginia and it found that the state had the most distinguishing factor in the complexity of social relations between the races was that of inconsistency.

From 1870 to 1900 there was no generally accepted code of racial mores during those three decades according to the study at no time was it in the general demand of the white population that black people be disenfranchised and white supremacy be made a law of the land until 1900 when a law requiring the separation of races on railroad cars was adopted by a majority of one vote.

The black people sat where they pleased and among the white passengers on perhaps the majority of the state's railroads there were exceptions but they became fewer and fewer towards the end of the period.

The same was true of the streetcars and other public accommodations and places of entertainment. The black patron often met with the rebuff and sometimes eviction but not always for occasionally black people met no segregation when he entered restaurants, bars, waiting rooms, theaters, and other public places of amusement.

There were risks but no firm policy of exclusion and this led many black people to keep trying for acceptance just as it led at least some whites to accept them. And there's many other similar quotations that I could read you and again the point is that there isn't one particular narrative.

This is what Phil Vischer keeps pushing that white people black people cross the board that's it no complexity to it and the reality is that after reconstruction governments were done away and the redeemer governments came into place they called them which were mainly led by landed aristocrats people who were former slave owners a lot of them there was actually a trajectory in many instances towards more harmony.

You would have thought if you lived in certain regions back then that some barriers were social barriers were coming down. That all changed though and here's where it changed. As freedmen and poor whites started competing for substantive employment and the populist movement gained influence poor whites voted for anti-planter and anti-black candidates.

This is during a recession essentially. It is no coincidence that the first seven southern states to require segregated rail cars adopted their statutes in the years 1887 to 1891. So these are the Jim Crow laws and look how many years after the end of the war this is.

When the pre-populist farmers alliance started to gain strength. So this is when these laws start coming into place. Historian C. Van Woodward concludes the barriers of racial discrimination mounted in direct ratio with the tide of political democracy among whites.

In fact an increase in Jim Crow laws is almost an accurate index of the decline of the redeemers and the triumph of white democratic movements. So there was an economic concern. Another thing that you'll realize though the more study you do is how during this time leading up to the progressive era southern and northern understanding of race was actually converging and the south had resisted this for a while.

But if you look at a lot of sources in the 19th century you'll find words like white, western, christian all kind of being used interchangeably when talking about civilizations. I know that's offensive today that's just what you'll find.

In fact the term race you'll even see that term used of genders. I mean it just meant people and so when people talked about a white race or a European race, western race being superior to an African race, Mongolian race, etc.

Oftentimes what they were talking about was civilization differences. You see this even with like Lottie Moon. You see this like even Robert E. Lee talks about this kind of thing. I mean some of this thinking even went into the 20th century where people weren't necessarily talking about scientific racism they were talking about civilizational differences.

You go back far enough you'll see terms like barbarian or savages being used sometimes especially about like Native Americans. It wasn't necessarily always saying that they are genetically inferior. It was saying their civilization is not advanced.

It needs Christianity. It needs education. I mean Jonathan Edwards talks about Native Americans kind of in this way that you know they're capable but they just don't have they don't they weren't raised in the same way we were and so we need to give them what God has given to us.

We need to try to to help them along kind of thing. And of course these are terribly racist things in today's modern conception but one of the problems with like critical race theory is they will take civilizationism and scientific racism and they just put them in one pot and say that they're all the same thing.

Well they're not actually and towards the end of the 19th century in the beginning of the 20th century more and more people started taking those civilization differences and saying well that's just because of their race and assuming genetic determinism.

These are Darwinian ideas essentially that we're talking about and of course Phil Vischer doesn't really talk about this but this is around the time that these Jim Crow laws are adopted and then they have teeth in them a lot of them and so this to try to make it it's just slavery and then Jim Crow which I hear a lot of people make that jump it's not just the legacy of slavery you're missing another piece of the puzzle when you just make that jump.

In fact slavery one of the legacies of slavery was black people and white people living together raising each other taking care of each other in many cases and I mean there's there's a number of books I can recommend to you on this primary source researched books.

Doesn't mean it was across the board in all places it just means though that there was a general living together of being in close quarters together and so segregation is not something that was natural for the south that's why partially why these laws came into effect.

They had to keep people separate because people just naturally wouldn't do that and of course sharecropping is happening. White people, black people both living in poverty sharecropping together for for years to come that happened in rural areas a lot of these Jim Crow laws were in cities they were in urban areas that that they had any teeth if they had teeth at all you get out to rural areas it didn't always function that way.

So it's a complicated picture and that's kind of my point is that to say that just all white people this is what white did to black people that is that is a way overly simplistic explanation. Now let's talk about this reinstituting slavery under convict leasing which apparently is a one-to-one comparison.

Michelle Alexander author of the new Jim Crow says that and then so does based on her work Bill Vischer. What led to this because it was a really bad thing but again it was it was a problem that had to do with conditions at the time.

Carl Schertz writes a report to President Grant in 1865 and says hey vagrancy is a real problem among slaves who have just been freed they're not doing anything is what he's trying to communicate to President Grant his words not mine and and what takes place is in the state of Louisiana especially you can find this story in Southern Reconstruction on page 141.

The union general there Benjamin Butler allowed union loyal planters in adjacent parishes to hire ex-slave the salary workers so he's he's rewarding in a sense just those who were loyal to the union and Major General Nathaniel Banks takes over for him in 1862 and he extends the practice throughout the entire state.

So it was in New Orleans under Butler Banks extends it to the whole state and the it was terrible ex-slaves were induced into years of contract with planters. They didn't really have a lot of laws. Federal marshals would round up vagrant blacks and it functioned like the slave patrols.

So historian Lawrence Powell writes that the entire apparatus was really a system of vagrancy laws that left black people with the choice of working on the plantations or laboring in the public works so really bad situation.

Now this was during the war itself that this gets established in Louisiana. So what takes place afterward why what happens and why does this system sort of expand. Well you can find this in C. C. Van Woodward Origins of the New South a different book page 212.

He says among the institutions of the old order that strained to meet the needs of the new none proved more hopelessly inadequate than the old penitentiaries. The state was suddenly called upon to take over the plantations penal functions as at a time when the crime was enormously increasing the strain was too great.

One after another of the states adopted the expedient of leasing the convicts to private corporations or individuals in Louisiana. The convict lease system had an antebellum origin. In other southern states it was introduced by provisional or military governments and retained by the carpetbaggers and redeemers.

And so of course we just read about what happened in Louisiana. So this system gets set up and it's financial it's because they're overwhelmed by the conditions in the prison system. They don't have a good option of what to do and and so this is what they they set up and it's not just black people and that's one of the things that I think is missed here.

This is this affected whites and blacks. Of course those who have been enslaved that now they're free and they don't have places to go. It's going to affect them more. But it affected both and this has become part of southern lore the the chain gang you know that that you even hear songs.

You know Johnny Cash singing about the chain gang and stuff. Well this is where this kind of thing kind of started.

Additional laws prohibited mischief and insulting gestures which allowed more black men to be arrested and created a huge market for convict leasing. Working conditions for these leased convicts could be worse than slavery because the plantation owner leasing the black prisoner had no long-term interest in his well-being.

So Phil Vischer is probably right that the.

Conditions on a prison farm would be worse than the conditions of slavery and that would be for whites and for blacks who wound up there. He does talk about this concept of mischief which is actually it's malicious mischief.