Opinion
The gross irony of Harriet Tubman’s place on the twenty dollar bill
By Jake Meserve Blount ’17
April 28, 2016
Tags opinion
On Wed. April 20, Secretary Jacob J. Lew of the United States Treasury announced that Harriet Tubman, an ex-slave who returned to the South and guided over 100 other slaves to freedom, will be joining former president Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. Many were pleased by the news, seeing Tubman’s inclusion as a welcome step toward fair and equal representation for women and black historical figures. Noble though the motivations behind it may have been, the decision to place Tubman on our currency demonstrates profound ignorance of the racial oppression upon which American prosperity is dependent.
In his book Slavery By Another Name, journalist Douglas A. Blackmon describes what is often called “neo-slavery,” a practice that began shortly after the end of the American Civil War. Numerous racially targeted and selectively enforced laws were passed across the South in order to fill prisons with black people, who would then be forced to perform physical labor without pay. Neo-slavery persists today; every able-bodied person incarcerated in a federal prison is required by law to work. According to the NAACP, black people are incarcerated at six times the rate of white people, and constitute nearly half of the incarcerated population despite making up only 12.2 percent of the total United States population. According to information published on the Prison Policy Initiative’s website, people are paid far less for their labor in jail than on the outside; the maximum federal wage being $1.15 and the average state wage being $0.93. Patronized by companies like McDonald’s, Walmart and even Starbucks, prison industrial labor has a minimum annual value of two billion dollars.
Harriet Tubman spent her life attempting to mitigate a genocide inflicted upon black people by the American dollar. It seems a poor remembrance, then, to emblazon her image on that same money, money whose value was built upon and sustained by slave labor, and which even today fuels and is fueled by the denigration and dehumanization of black and brown people around the globe. It seems positively blasphemous to place her on the opposite side of the bill from Andrew Jackson, a slave owner who committed genocide against the Native American tribes of the Southeast. With Tubman’s body now unavailable for purchase, the Treasury Department has elected instead to burglarize her legacy and profane her likeness in an attempt to purge the bloodstains from our banknotes. Harriet Tubman sought to free black people from slavery, not to absolve American capitalism of its countless atrocities.
Tubman’s goal was abolition. She laid her life on the line to achieve it, as both a conductor on the Underground Railroad and a Union spy during the Civil War. She died, however, before the fulfillment of her mission, which is yet incomplete; slavery has not been erased, but merely transformed. Its legacy persists in the prison industrial complex, in housing discrimination and in racial achievement and wage gaps. We should honor Harriet Tubman’s legacy by working to eradicate the remnants of slavery, not using her face to mask them.