“3/24/2008, 6:34pm EST”
Slavery continues to flourish in many forms →
According to Benjamin Skinner’s research, there are more human slaves today than at any other time, despite no “official” sanctioning of the practice anywhere in the world. Often children, they are generally (ab)used as sexual objects or domestic laborers.
The number of non-human captives dwarfs the total human population — 10 billion of them are confined, tortured, and slaughtered each year in America alone.
Terrible — and deeply connected — facts, both of them. But one is far more routinely and directly contributed to by the average person, and therefore also far more routinely and directly actionable.
In addition to providing a look at what happens behind the banners of stated institutional positions in a globalized world, it will be interesting to see how Skinner uses notions of human-ness to present this issue. Will it be laced with an ultimately exclusionary “universal human rights” discourse — that is, excluding all the non-human beings that deserve consideration? Or will it make connections across an exploitative global economy and challenge a framework that, on its own, can never bring about true universal equality?
Never leave home without it.
