238: Of Greed and Glory: The Master-Slave Dynamic Pervades America

Dear White Women

You know when you have a conversation that provides you with a framework of a problem – one you may not have even known existed – and it opens your eyes in a whole new way?

Yeah, today is one of those conversations.

Because it helps look at questions like this: Do we really know what freedom is? How about liberty? And if we don’t know what those concepts mean, how do we know if we’ve lost them? And what role does the carceral system have in all of this?

This might seem like a lot, but in a year in which we’re questioning everything - democracy and America, to name a few - if we don’t know what those concepts mean, how can we imagine a world full of them?

That’s one of the questions that today’s guest asks - and answers - through her new book, Of Greed and Glory, which takes a look at her brother’s incarceration in Angola and uses that as a jumping-off point to ask some larger questions that, in all honesty, we need to be asking ourselves if we really want to be engaged in this fight.

After you listen to this episode, please tell several friends about it, and look to support people doing this work in your community. As always, we’d love to hear what resonates with you - please do reach out and let us know.

What to listen for:

• How incarcerating an individual is actually incarcerating a family

• Does America even want to be a democracy anymore?

• The master-slave dynamic – including how that shows up in patriarchy, and yes, why we believe women understand the significance of this conversation. Hello, Dear White Women podcast…

• How American enterprises are built on the same model as the slave plantation slate. Corporate America, we’re looking at you.

• What we can do to start changing the system

About the author:

DEBORAH G. PLANT is an African American and Africana Studies Independent Scholar, Writer, and Literary Critic specializing in the life and works of Zora Neale Hurston. She is the editor of the New York Times bestseller Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston and the author of Alice Walker: A Woman for Our Times, a philosophical biography. She is also the editor of The Inside Light: New Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, and the author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit and Every Tub Must Sit On Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston. She holds MA and Ph. D. degrees in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and traveled to Benin as a Fulbright-Hays fellow. Plant played an instrumental role in founding the University of South Florida’s Department of Africana Studies, where she chaired the department for five years. She presently resides in Florida.

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