The Old Playbook Still Owns Your Wallet: An Open Letter to Those Who Say "Stop Talking About Slavery"

When your survival is tied to illusions, to a game where only a few get to write the rulebook, and the rules can shift at any time…that is still slavery.

This conversation isn’t just for “people on the right”. It’s for people “on the left” too. This conversation is for some of my friends and family. And this includes you too, MAGA.

So many people think we bring up slavery to make people feel guilty about “your ancestors”. Maybe some folks do. But not me.

Why?

Because most of your ancestors were too poor to “own” enslaved people. A great many of them arrived in this country as indentured servants, struggling just to survive. And today, if we are being very honest, the average person avoiding this conversation doesn’t own much of anything now either. And that is by design. Because slavery wasn’t just about cruelty for the sake of it. It was an economic operating system. And that economic operating system never really went away. This is why some of us keep trying to talk about it.

And yet, the American conversation around slavery has been stuck. It’s either a painful subject to be avoided or a historical weight used for blame. And I have been in spaces where some are focused on making this conversation about guilt. I am a “biracial” Black woman. My grandmother grew up in Jim Crow. I understand the need for conciliation. But what if the framing of guilt and retribution is exactly where a powerful few want us to be stuck in the first place?

I want to talk about slavery, but this isn’t about guilt. I am not here to guilt you about your great-great-great grandpa. This is about a playbook.

And that playbook is still running on you. Right now.

The Economic Operating System

As mentioned above, slavery was never just an act of cruelty; it was a cleverly designed economic operating system. The purpose of this system was to use race as the primary interface to keep the bottom 99% — poor white people and enslaved people alike — divided and in competition. By giving poor white people a fragile sense of racial superiority, the system enlisted them to prop up and enforce their own economic cage.

The truth is, a handful of people ate the whole pie, and they used race as a powerful tool to make sure you never noticed how little pie you were actually getting. And that same playbook still owns your wallet and your vote today, even for most of you who think you see through the system. 

The Modern Chains: Work or Suffer Economics

We see the logic of this old system in our lives every day. Take the recent example from Nebraska, where a congressman at a town hall asked, “Do you think people who are 28 years old, who can work and refuse to work, should get free healthcare?”

The crowd pushed back on his stance and said yes, they do deserve free healthcare. He told them most people disagree in response. Even though his own constituents were directly telling him otherwise to his face. So who are the “most people” he was referring to that disagree?

This is a soft rerun of the same control mechanism. It’s an economy that ties your very survival to your labor, creating a simple choice: work or suffer economics. When your healthcare is a boss benefit instead of a human right, your body becomes collateral for someone else’s balance sheet.

The modern chains of slavery require no whips, only relentless financial pressure designed to keep you obedient and divided:

• Debt as Discipline: Predatory medical, student, and payday loan debt creates a state of permanent precarity that keeps you tied to your job, no matter how bad it is.

• Wage Suppression & Union Busting: These tactics ensure that a job is just a step ahead of homelessness, not a path to a stable life.

• The Criminalization of Poverty: Fines, fees, and cash bail systems make poverty itself a crime, ensuring that desperation is monetized by the powers that be.

• Algorithmic Gating: A network of unseen algorithmic scores now determines your access to housing, jobs, and credit, creating a digital caste system designed to enforce compliance.

  
  

The Unspoken Role of Complicity

The most insidious part of this system is how it convinces you to defend it. The powerful use culture war debates — crumbs from the table — to distract you from the reality of your own economic precariousness. They make you fight your neighbor over abstract political grievances so you never notice the handful of people eating the whole pie.

So, when you tell someone to “stop talking about slavery,” you’re doing their PR for free.

We talk about slavery because it’s the original sin of this economic system. It’s the source code of the present. If you don’t debug the past, the exploit keeps running. This isn’t a fight of “Left vs. Right”; it’s about the bottom being undemocratically exploited by the top. If you’re angry about “woke history” but completely fine with a system in which your family can go bankrupt from a medical emergency, congratulations: the playbook is still working on you.

Perhaps your ancestors weren’t slaves in the body. But a lot of them were slaves of the mind and the wallet. And if you’re still defending a system that would let you die for missing a shift, you are too.

The Neurological Wedge

Why is this playbook so damn effective on so many people? It works because it hijacks the brain. It targets the amygdala — the threat detection center — and uses racial and cultural difference to trigger a constant, low-grade fight-or-flight response. By keeping us in a constant state of fear and suspicion of each other, the system ensures our prefrontal cortex — the seat of reason, empathy, and long-term planning — never gets to take the wheel.

We are kept in a state of biological incoherence, perfectly primed to be manipulated. The “culture war” is not a debate of ideas; it is a sustained amygdala hijack on a mass scale, designed to prevent the cognitive coherence required for collective action.

It also exploits the ego. Some of you have built your identity on your stocks, your 800 credit score, and your job. You believe those things are who you are. But when the system shifts — when those in power change the rules of the game — there is no guarantee you get to keep any of it. Your survival is still tied to constructs and Mario coins, and the rules can change at any minute. A job loss, an economic crash, a quiet policy tweak — and poof — your Mario coins vanish into smoke.

And then you’re left asking how to survive.

When your survival is tied to illusions, to a game where only a few get to write the rulebook, and the rules can shift at any time…that is still slavery. 

A Path to Freedom

The solution is not more compliance. It is collective refusal to play a rigged game. What breaks the spell and makes this new future possible is not a new law, but a new foundation:

• Universal Healthcare: To decouple survival from payroll, ensuring a sick body is not a liability to be monetized and exploited.

• Stronger Labor Protections: To ensure that a job provides a living wage, and that a collective of workers has more power than a single boss. That is true democracy. It is voice, choice, and shared power. The system we have now is hierarchy, extraction, and consolidation of power in the hands of a few.

• Ending Predatory Financial Systems: To dismantle the cages of debt, fines, and fees that criminalize desperation and keep the working class in a state of permanent fear and locked out of advancement.

• The Coherence of Collective Unity: To stop the wedge politics that make you hate the person in the exact same boat as you, so that we can finally see the true division in the system.

  
  

We can honor the truth of our shared, tragic history by building a new, more just future. For everyone. But we can’t fix what we refuse to name. So yes, we’re going to keep talking about slavery.

Not to guilt-trip you, but to free you.